Since the last issue, I've been dealing with a month of problems without finding solutions.  An unexpected trip to Denver made it so that I did not have much time to work on anything outside of my day to day responsibilities.  I'll now fill you in on the issues...

Like many in southeastern PA, I'm dealing with the absolute shock of inflation when it comes to recent PPL electric bills.  This has made it clear, that I need to find a solution to minimize the cost of my indoor gardening setup.  While the lights and electronics contribute some to this, it's especially important to figure out a more efficient way to heat my mycology space.  I've got ideas and have bought equipment, just haven't had a chance to get started building yet.

In other "gardening related problems" news... The groundhogs are back!  I wish this was Punxsutawney and they only got one day in my yard.  If you've ever experienced one of these, let alone multiple, you know that they can decimate things faster than you can repair the damage.  I feel like I've tried just about every thing (legal) under the sun to combat them, but if you have any suggestions, I'm all ears.

Finally, my 3D printer has also gone defunct.  This is actually a recurrent problem.  I've never been able to figure out exactly what the root cause is.  For some reason, every now and then, my printer gets into a state where the OctoPrint server can no longer connect to it.  I haven't been able to identify what sequence of events leads to this and it's been occurring every few months since I started using OctoPrint.  The immediate fix is easy, but a PITA... in the past, reflashing the firmware of the 3D printer fixes the problem.  I've been dragging my feet on doing this because I decided that it would be great to use the latest version of the Marlin Firmware to do this.  There are tons of enhancements that I would love to take advantage of.  The problem?  My frankenstein printer isn't one that Marlin supports directly.  Because of this, I need to make some code modifications and (likely) go through a series of debug cycles to get everything working with my printer.  Since this issue has been occurring across multiple versions of OctoPrint, I'm hoping that updating the firmware that I'm using might actually lead to a long term solution.

Even though this month didn't allow me to work on some solutions, I did have some time while on the plane to and from Denver to do some writing.  I had a discussion last month where I was trying to describe my workout plan and diet.  In doing this, I really just created confusion.  To someone who's not immersed in what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, it just seems overly complex for no reason.  I really thought about this and ended up writing a blog post on my pursuit of metabolic flexibility.  This at least explains the 'why' of what I'm doing and it also touches on some of the details as well.  Check it out and send me your feedback!

Here's to dedicating some time to ferment some solutions.  At least the weather warming should allow me to delay addressing the electric issue for a bit.  Anyone out there a Marlin firmware expert?  Or have a specific desire for something they want to see in a future version?  I'm planning on committing changes back to the repo so I won't need to go through this again!

J

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