Wow. What a schmozzle. Well not completely, but this month has been tricky.
Create
The hardest part of each monthly project is wrestling logistics. Getting components shipped to Cairns on time has been the biggest bottleneck. I had a bad experience with a local distributor this month and it put a solid week delay into the pipeline. This had some disastrous knock on effects, and I’m still waiting on a few components to get shipped in. It looks like that original week delay has blown out to two. It won’t be till the middle of May before I even have all the components to finish this months project. In many ways a monastic engineering experience would be vastly easier in Shenzhen, China. Need some electronic component? Just skip on down to the giant market and pick up what you need.
I still managed to complete the first half of the project. A planted aquarium featuring a 3D printed filter. Anna Gerber inspired me into my first tilt at symbiotic aquaponics in years. It is the healthiest ecosystem I have managed to create (all my earlier aquaponics systems failed quickly). Fish and plants are doing well this time around. But the microcontroller powered pizzazz? Soon.
One luxury of the monastic engineering experience is having the mental headspace to organise my life. For the first time in over a decade I’m starting to feel on top of things. I know where things are! Anyway while waiting on shipping I delved off into a little side project. A notebook that brings together twenty years of old scribbles. It has four main sections:
- Doodles of a bored mind.
- Bad Graphic Design.
- Unfinished game ideas.
- Crazy concepts.
Writing went well this month. I got some really cool feedback, this helped formalise some vague concepts I have been kicking around my head. This month the articles covered:
- Seeeduino Cloud Review
- An Open Love Letter to Van Neistat
- How to configure an Android Development environment with docker containers
- Original Reference Material
Read
I was so pumped for this month I picked a tricky book. One that would usually take me a long time to read. Only about a quarter of the way through and it keeps putting me to sleep. May. That is the month I finish that book.
Excercise
When I started out on the monastic engineering exerience I never thought that I would have a month where exercise would be the stand out activity. I really look forward to my runs. Running three times a week, and now aim for one ‘long run’ a week. 67.2km. Trying to take a photo each run.
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