I 3d printed one of my favorite puzzles from my childhood. That being the Gordian Knot. You can read about it here: https://www.thinkfun.com/products/gordians-knot/

It is a sliding piece put-together puzzle with quite a lot of moves for its size. I 3d printed the pieces in Silk PLA (the same exact colors and spools that I used to make my Rombix puzzle).
The design work was done in OpenSCAD. The noscript is parameterizeed to compensate for the various defects that can occur during printing and that would make the pieces not slide together very well.

Those defects being Elephant's footing, a bad first layer, and corner bulging.

I achieved this by applying a fillet in the X and Y axes and a chamfer in the Z axis, so that any kind of buglging from going around a corner is rounded out and so that the top and bottom layers are tucked away from interfering with anything. I have the effects somewhat exaggerated in this puzzle partly for demonstration and partly for aesthetic reasons.

Unfortunately to achieve this desired effect I had to use the minkowski() function. This makes things EXTREMELY slow and it takes multiple minutes just to just to render one of these parts. I can't think of another way to get the desired effect. I'm reluctant to share the noscript because of just how bad this performance really is, it makes OpenSCAD completely hang and freeze upon just opening the file.

I have my openSCAD noscript set up to read in the shape data from an external file, and I can easily edit this file and have OpenSCAD output an STL of any arbitrary polyomino that I desire. I can use it to generate the STLs for any cubic sliding piece puzzle I want. I'll be using this in the future to print some other custom burr puzzles, so stay tuned.

Here are the STLs for the parts I printed

So a tree in my backyard started bearing fruit after many years of not doing anything interesting. I did a bit of research on it, and it turns out that it's a Cornelian Cherry tree, also sometimes called a dogwood tree. The fruits it produces are very bitter and sour and have a large seed in them, however they make very tasty jam.

I picked as many as I could the first day and I got about five pounds in total. There was also another start to the tree that was more blocked off by shade from my house. The berries on this side were much smaller and far more bitter. Unfortunately they will likely be going to waste for reasons I'll get into later.

One of my greatest shortcomings here was failing to document the process of turning it into jam. However, I followed this recipe here very exactly: https://www.bylena.com/recipe/1382/Cornelian-Cherry-Jam/

One of the steps in turning this stuff into jam involves manually removing the seeds after you have boiled them for a little bit. It's also why I won't be making a batch out of these smaller berries, because there would be more seeds, and they would be smaller and thus harder to remove by hand. This process was incredibly messy and tedius. When I make this stuff next year, I will develop a tool to aid in getting the pits out.

It's worth noting that they have a lot of natural pectin, so I ended up not having to add any while turning them into jam.

The stuff was extremely runny right up until they completely cooled down in the refridgerator. It turned into a very thick, firm consistency once it cooled down though.

Cornelian Cherry jam is absolutely delicious! it has an aromatic, kind of fruity/earthy taste to it while having that really sour kick that sour green apples have. I highly recommend this stuff.

I just got catfished by probably the most advanced chta/scammer bot I have ever seen. I did not fall for it though.
Here's what happened:
> An account joined a public telegram group that I am in.
> This account sat dormant in the group chat for a bit over a week before leaving.
> A bit afterwards, the account randomly DMed me. It asked for technical help with ordering 3d printed parts in Europe for some reason.
> Telegram has the ability to view all of the avatars one has used since the account began.
> I looked into this, as it's one of the more obvious giveaways for fake accounts. The account had around eight different pictures of the same very believable girl in the picture.
> I conversed with this account for about a week about various topics, exchanging between ten and twenty messages a day.
>This morning, the account shilled a crypto/ponzi/MLM scheme based out of Italy.
>Upon realising what had happened, I blocked the account and it had deleted all chat history quickly after.
> It now says the account is deleted.

let me get this straight, a scammer set up the following:
1. A botting system to make fake telegram accounts
2. A system similar to thispersondoesnotexist, but his AI face generation system was seedable. Meaning he could generate multiple selfies of the same fake person.
3. He noscripted a server to upload these fake selfies to a fake Telegram account so if someone viewed the account's profile, there was a history of believable selfies of a nonexistant girl.
4. He programmed these fake bot accounts to join public telegram groups and scrape the user lists in them
5. He used a system like chatGPT or something similar to make a chat bot and noscripted it to pretend to be a an egirl from a foreign country and eventually shill for a fake business.
6. Presumably, most or all of this process is automated and there are countless accounts all doing this
Stay safe out there guys, this is completely insane.