Author: John Biggs

How To Clean Out Clogged Makerbot And Other 3D Printer Nozzles

So the worst happened. Both my nozzles clogged on my Makerbot replicator – I think one of them got stuffed up with a sort of grey PLA that clogged them because I found a lot of it in the nozzle – but generally too much use and not enough maintenance really took its toll on the machine.

I thought I was sunk. I tried to run the filament through a few times to no avail and slowly but surely I figured I’d need to do something drastic.
Continue reading

I Switched Hosts And It Was Great

I’ve started using DigitalOcean to host my websites – I’ll be moving them over slowly – but it’s great to see how far hosting has come in the decade I’ve been messing with websites. I haven’t had a CLI into any of my servers in years and it’s a great feeling to pop into the server and mess around a little even though I’m horrible at Ubuntu these days.

It’s been 14 years since I started up my first Linux machine in Warsaw, Poland and now that platform rules the web. That I can boot a virtual machine in 60 seconds on DigitalOcean is amazing and that it stays up – with some hiccups – is great.

Special thanks to my buddy Tom Printy who saved me when I really messed things up.

An Older Interview With Ladyada

I was going through old Ladyada videos and found this gem from TC Disrupt in New York. Limor Fried and I talk about building a hardware company from scratch and throw a bunch of little toys into the audience, in that order.

Udoo Quad or Duo case for the Arduino/Raspberry Pi board – $25 Shipped

P1010026-2

I’ve been messing around with the Udoo recently and I noticed there weren’t any cases available. I just 3D printed my own (this one) but if you need one I’m happy to print them for $25 shipped, $40 for overseas orders. They take a little while to print, which makes them a bit more expensive than I’d like but let me know if you need one. I can print them in a few colors including black, green, and red. These print best in PLA and my machine has the occasional problem of letting the plastic bend up slightly at the corners, but it doesn’t effect the case structurally. If I have enough interest I may just injection-mold these.

I have models for the Udoo Dual and Udoo Quad and have had many happy customers.

You can Paypal me a john@bigwidelogic.com and I accept Bitcoin at address 19rttRSoPg3t6GSu9QUW9m9WWZoV1pJuNJ.

[sform]2[/sform]

Mytro Is Now Live

scaled.mytro-banner2

I’ve been working on my YA novel, Mytro, for a few years now and I’ve finally decided to bite the bullet: Mytro is now live on Indiegogo and ready to pre-order. The book is done – it just needs some polish and printing and I’m excited to share it with you. Still not convinced? Visit Mytro.info for more information or email me at john@biggs.cc with questions. It’s high time I tried crowd funding and I’m really excited to see where it leads. Thanks for being a fan and hope to see you on the pledge list!

I’m Proud To Be A Leigh Bureau Speaker

I’ve just been given the amazing opportunity to work with The Leigh Bureau, a speaker’s bureau that represents madmen like Bre Pettis and Zee Frank. They will represent me for speaking gigs and make things generally easier for me when it comes to flying around the world saying cool things to amazing people. It’s an honor to be on their speakers page and it means a lot that they took a chance on a slightly grumpy tech blogger. It also speaks to the reach of Web media that they picked me as one of their lesser luminaries.