Last week a friend gave me the Printrbot Plus he backed on Kickstarter! I suspect he gave up finding the time for it; the box label says it originally shipped on June 14 :-)

I'm super excited to have a 3D printer. Toby is too; he's eager for me to get done "fixing" it and start printing toys and parts we've found on Thingiverse. [He recently broke his femur and will be in a hip spica cast for a while. He's been doing a lot of Duplo at the table lately. Being able to extend his toy sets in interesting ways could be fun.]

Opening the box and pulling out myriad parts and pieces and fasteners, I was a bit overwhelmed myself. The official instruction page don't provide a very smooth start. (There are three different Printrbot models to sort through, none of the parts diagrams include big-picture context or step-by-step instructions, and the "Building the Printrbot LC and PLUS" videos I tried to start with were sort of confusing and lite on any actual assembly.) It seemed like the official stuff was all aimed at people who had already built other printer kits or who had been closely following the project from day one; I just had a huge box of parts and desperately wanted someone to please say which two pieces I should start with!

What really helped was an (in progress) series of unofficial Printrbot Plus–specific assembly videos by "Craig the Fabricator". The ones that have been uploaded so far got me off from a great start to a point where the official videos became easier to follow. I found a wiki with reasonably good step-by-step assembly instructions that has been indispensable as well.

I'm currently stuck waiting for Printrbot HQ to send some missing bearings for the z-axis as well as (hopefully) some replacement plastic parts for the extruder head that got cracked. When it's done, I'm hoping to get competent enough with it to have it be something of a community resource for Room to Think members and friends. In the meantime, I've got a replacement balloon to keep flying and plenty of work to keep up with.

Last week I launched an early preview of the data that's been rolling out over at Argyle Tiles. There's a good portion of the global coverage already in place, as well as a single-city sample of what I'll be able to provide in most US urban areas. You can check it out via the signup page.

I have been prioritizing client work over this speculative venture, but I've also been outsourcing some of the tiles work to make sure the ball keeps rolling even while I'm meeting my other commitments. The list currently looks something like this:

1. finish generating and clean up some global coverage issues (Finland spot, coastline resolution)
2. start adding basic coverage for the whole Continental US
3. beta launch: provide API keys and documentation for early customers
4. begin processing more popular high-resolution urban areas

I'd love to hear what you think, and would also be grateful for any more leads — if you know developers who could benefit from the service in its beta, please send them over.

It's the tenth Independence Day since 9/11.

Since then the government, the shadow government, the establishment and the suicide bombers have continued their fight against "democracy".

The rule of the people, by the people, for the people. Which people is in a constant state of turmoil, but it shall perish from the earth. So I must constantly defend against terrorism — against believing any mere people should have me afraid.

Freedom is a state of heart. Never forget.

In May, starting to acclimate as a freelancer, I started wondering how much client work and side projects I should consider. How many things should I be working on?

Well, most stoves have four burners. Here's what I set on in June:

1. Room to Think organization — the Tri-Cities coworking group I'm in recently incorporated as a non-profit with me on its first directors board. I may be biased, but we've already got a great start: friendly members continue to gather, and we landed a wonderful location overlooking a park on the Columbia River for our space. We have plenty more to figure out as we settle in, but so far so good and the community has been very supportive.
2. Inquirium client — it's an honor to work with this smart, hard-working crew — and getting to tackle an e-reading related app no less!
3. Meograph client — this has been one of the most chaotic, but also the most shipping-est, product developments I've worked on.
4. Argyle Tiles project — busy bubbling on the back burner, we have my speculative aerial and satellite tile hosting business.

ShutterStem and other personal data management apps are still lingering below (in the oven). There's a lot of infrastructure needed for most of my ideas there — not just technologic and financial, but also building with and for people who care. So it was really encouraging to participate in IndieWebCamp this past weekend, too.

For the record, here's a synopsis of some older projects and writing I started elsewhere. The first three at least are still pretty relevant:

• Making maps with WebGL — this demo still gets praise when "geo" people see it for the first time. I used GPU-accelerated cartographic projection and texturing to animate a shape-changing map.

• Using the REST interface as the JavaScript interface with Fermata — I've still been using and improving Fermata as my go-to AJAX/REST/HTTP library both for clientside (often bridging between CouchDB views and D3.js visualizations) and node.js (usually talking to other web APIs).

• Using a job management system to process geodata — although I'm not using this post's particular system, with Argyle Tiles underway I've been dealing with an even larger volume of geodata again.

• Unsafe at Certain Speeds: Dangers Designed into Django — tips and concerns architecting secure-by-design Django apps.

• Choosing a template language(s) — doesn't actually give you a comparison between current template engines, more of a high-level overview.