This week saw freezing cold temperatures across the Midwest, but sadly, I didn’t get to use that as an excuse not to go to work, since it didn’t get nearly so cold here in Boston. On the plus side, I didn’t have to deal with windchills of up to 50 degrees below zero, so I think I’m much happier in my current state. (I can’t even imagine what our leaky 1850s house would have been like under those conditions.)

Thumbnails from 3 videos: 'Calabrian Shrimp & Orzo', Dunster House Drone Flight, and a 3d printed excavator

New videos this week:

Cooking

I put out my second cooking video this week, showing the process of cooking Calabrian Shrimp and Orzo!

I’ve continued cooking regularly: I’ve now cooked 8 Blue Apron meals, two every week since I started, without fail! I’m making sure to get them done in time, before the next crate arrives.

After these upcoming two meals though, I’m going to be trying a new experiment: I’m going to actually buy food for myself. From my blog post this week, Shopping for Myself: Buying Blue Apron at the Grocery Store:

The week of February 11th, rather than continuing with another Blue Apron meal, I will change it up: I will buy my own food, from a grocery store, and cook with that instead. While I’m at it, I’m going to make things interesting: I’m going to buy the same food as my first week of Blue Apron – Spiced Chicken with Spicy Orange Slaw and Spicy Beef Gnocchi – and compare the price as well.

This is the start of doing something more than just surviving on Blue Apron, which should be an interesting experiment!

Drones

I’ve got a bunch of drone footage sitting around that I haven’t done anything with, so I’m going back through some of it to see if there’s anything interesting I can piece together. I put out a quick video of an overflight of Dunster House at Harvard University.

Gadgets

This week has been a gadgetry focused week for me. While I don’t have any final products to share yet, I’ve been working on finding a way to demonstrate some of the basic techniques that make 3d printing interesting designs possible – bridges and overhangs.

The core thing I want to talk about is how these tools work together to allow for building the Little Digger, my favorite 3d model. Thanks to the design being shared on Tinkercad, I’ve been able to print a version of the model which splits the print-in-place model with a separated model with 7 pieces so that I can demonstrate this.

Screenshot of CAD model showing all pieces of an excavator model printed separately.

I’ve now printed these pieces, so I think I have all the pieces (literally) in place to continue working on that project!

In the meantime, I’ve put together a small teaser showing off the model, with a time lapse of the print, and what I’ll cover.

If you’d like to keep up with my gadgetry in blog form rather than on YouTube, you can follow the Chris Produces Gadgets blog, though I expect it will simply be a mirror of everything on the YouTube channel for a while yet. :)

Everything Else

This week was my first week back in German class. Rather than a twice-weekly 1.5 hour class as in the past, I’m now taking a once-weekly three hour class. Thankfully, I was able to stay with the same teacher, and kept 4 of my previous classmates as well. This week, we studied travel vocaubulary and seperable verbs; I’m going to try to do a weekly blog update to give myself a bit of a reminder of what we’re working on, so you can feel free to follow via that blog if you’re interested!

In politics, I wrote some thoughts on how we use changes in tax policy in the long term to eliminate the existence of billionaires. This one isn’t really well edited, but since it’s an ongoing topic of conversation, I wrote some words down anyway!

I hope everyone has a great week, and you’ll hear from me again next Sunday!

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