Hobbies

I have a varied and eclectic assortment of geeky hobbies.

3D Printing

I started out in 3D Printing with a Printrbot Maker 1405 back in 2015. The joy of building that from scratch, zip ties and everything, was such a joy that it sparked an addiction of sorts. In true RepRap fashion, I used the small 4″/100mm print area to expand and modify that printer into something truly unique.

My favorite printer I had was a home-built Kossel using delta kinematics. As much as I would have liked to use a more rigid linear bearing system the fun part was that the carriages were printed and sized to use rollers from Lowes that are typically used for rolling shower doors. I am never afraid of finding a solution that is both unique and cost effective.

My current printer is a Voron 2.4r2. This uses a new kinematic system for me of CoreXY. The build process was very rewarding and now I have a printer that the only limitation is my imagination! My kids also appreciate the constant stream of plastic goodies.

CO2 Laser Crafts

When 3D Printing isn’t enough, it’s time to move to more industrial machinery. I purchased an Omtech Polar 350 in the spring of 2023. While the idea of starting a side hustle of laser and 3D Printing has not quite taken off, the ability to make gifts for friend and family has been more than worth it.

Gallery ideas – GG Games stamp(s), Cruise door hanger, Cutting boards, coasters?

HAM Radio

Initially I wanted a HAM license to have permission to use higher power radios for quadcopters (yet another hobby). What I discovered was a whole world of projects and opportunities. Using my work commute as a study time, I used audio books to study for both the Technician and General exams. I passed both in one sitting in June of 2018. My callsign is KG3EKR as proudly shown on my car’s license plate.

Today I mainly use a handheld radio (Icom ID-51A) to check in on local repeaters and use the DStar network to talk to people all over the world using a Raspberry Pi “hotspot”. Originally I used PiStar with great success but have now migrated to WPSD for it’s more regular maintenance schedule.

I have acquired an Icom IC-705 for a more extended capability HF/VHF/UHF radio. While this radio only has a maximum of 10W using an external power supply I don’t let that limit my fun. I use a RadioWavz DX40 Antenna that I have hung around my house disguised as Christmas lights. With that modest set up I am able to talk to people across the United States, and using digital modes such as FT8 I can reach further to Canada, Mexico, the Bahamas, and sometimes even across the Atlantic to Spain and the UK!

Mini-Lab

At one time I had a 12U rackmount lab of old, decommissioned datacenter servers. Not very eco-friendly and way too much for what I typically do at home. While I also used to use vmWare ESXi for it’s free hypervisor, the acquisition by Broadcom left me high and dry. I now use Proxmox for further virtualization needs, such as hosting this website!

At home I have a main NAS running TrueNAS with about 40TB of storage. While this has many terabytes of storage I have diversified my lab to have separate machines in a cluster to avoid having all my eggs in one digital basket. My Proxmox cluster is made of 3 HP EliteDesk 400 G4 1L mini PCs. These all have Intel Core i7-8700 CPUs and ~16GB of RAM. They are joined by a Dell Optiplex Mini Tower which I use primarily for it’s half-height PCIe slot to run an Intel Arc A310 GPU which allows me to easily transcode all my media library for easy access to my friends and family.

Magic: The Gathering

I started playing back in the 90s when I was in elementary school. My first packs were 5th edition from the local K-Mart. I have come into and out of the game ever since. I played as I had allowance money to get packs, and wasn’t tempted by candy, up until Fifth Dawn (my first pre-release) and Kamigawa block. I left after that and got a job, graduated high school, went to college and finally met a friend who found out I had a small collection. He told me about a local game store that was opening and said we should bring our collections to build these new format EDH/Commander decks. That was the New Phyrexia pre-release. I still have the promotional card Sholdred in my collection that was given to me by the owner who became a good friend. I taught my girlfriend at the time how to play the game and we went to the Innstrad pre-release together. I kept playing up to the Dragon’s Maze pre-release which my wife at the time won and then had our first child the week after. I was off and on again until Shadows over Innistrad.

At that point life happened and had to sell off a lot of the value in my collection. I somehow kept the 70k bulk cards in boxes through that time. I had to make some hard decisions on what I wanted to keep for sentimental reasons. So I made a cube! I took my love of deck building and draft to a new level. A cube can be thought of as a custom expansion of Magic cards that have been crafted for synergies and strategies that are special to that cube. I started small with a 360 card cube and filled it with all my favorite cards based on balance of colors and power. I am now wanting to expand the cube up to 540 cards. I have already built a lot of memories together with my wife by playing together and I want to integrate those into my cube.

I have been a long time Magic player and collector. I have many thousands of cards that I have collected over the years that now I am in the process of cataloging and selling on Manapool. I used to sell on TCGPlayer but their politics and lack of customer support lead me to explore new options. While I have not been selling on Manapool for very long it has still been a wonderful experience so far.

In addition to my collecting and selling, I do enjoy playing with my family as well. We mainly play the Commander format, but as new sets come out we will play some Limited as well (mostly for the joy of cracking packs open). When expenses outweigh the enjoyment factor though, I have created my own cube to play and draft with my favorite cards from my history of playing. If you’d like to see the current list you can find that over at CubeCobra.

PC Gaming / Emulation

When I am needing to relax at the end of the day, I often find myself playing a video game with either my wife and/or kids. Being the digital hoarder that I am, I have amassed a giant collection of Games on Steam. I enjoy sharing these classics along with new finds with my family. If you want to see what I have been playing lately check out my Steam Profile.