I’m getting interested in 3D printing. A few days ago, I visited a friend who’s had a printer for a few years and got some information from him (he also printed some coin cell holders for me, which save a lot of space in my battery drawer).

Today, I took advantage of the free 3D printing at the Los Gatos Library (only one print per family per month) to print an iPad holder from Thingiverse. Francisco at the library actually did the printing, but he let me remove the finished product from the printer. :-)

Here’s the very beginning of the process:

Two hours later, the print was finished!

And here it is in action.

It’s pretty similar to the Kanex iPhone holder I’d gotten at a Macworld many years ago – just a bit bigger so it will hold the iPad securely.

I can think of a lot of gadgets I’d like to be able to print – I just have to find a place to put the printer. Or I guess I could print them at the library, one per month.

I’m taking Matt Kloskowski‘s “Fresh Start” course to help me kick off 2024. The first assignment sounded simple – go through my 2023 photos and pick out my “best 20”. I decided to take a shortcut and only looked at photos I’d marked for inclusion in this blog, whether or not I’d actually posted them.

That narrowed the field to 1100 of the 4100 I still had in my Lightroom library. It was easy to pick out 100 which made me smile, brought back a memory, or made me want to share them more widely, but picking the “best 20” took two more passes, and I’m not sure I’d pick the same 20 fifteen minutes from now.

I decided to try a new tool for this project, NextGen Gallery, which let me create a gallery with thumbnails; click on a photo to see a larger image. I’m not sure that this is ideal (for one thing, there’s no way to get to the blog post which originally contained the image), but it looks nice!

And on we go!