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Prawntech3D

What's Prawntech3D?

"Prawntech3D, RCX, I do stuff to do recycling with." Hey - I thought that was a pretty good intro. But now I realise it's not. 

Sections Updated 13/02/2023 please check for UPDATED 13/02/21023: in the sections if you're returning and want just the new stuff. 

But a few hundred characters isn't really enough space to convey *gestures around himself* all this.

A Word

.. about this page. As at 13/02/2023 this is a better draft of a suite of pages I realise I'm going to have to find time to sit and write out completely. I'll be doing that over the next few weeks and months and hopefully be finished really quickly. But as you'll read on the post "Paralysis" (infinite loop warning!) I'm doing far too much, far too often, about far too many things.

Expanded WhoAmI, ASL, shoe size, and all.

If you see prawntech3d, ptec3d, rcx.ptec3d, or ohaicorona in your URL bar, it's probably something I put up. If you look for just prawntech you'll get a company that does stuff related to prawns, sorry. 

If you see tedalog, tedamenu, tedadynes, bfzcb, or ptec3d in front of blogspot.com you'll be looking at six of the - hmmm, quite a few - blogs I write. If you stumble across grumps or ptec3d in substack, or grumpsy or ptec3d on ko-fi.com - also me. 

So why? Well it turns out I'd be Mid Century Modern if I was furniture, and a Dudeist Priest in the Church Of The Dudeist Latterday Boomers. I'm also a Patchy Polyglot, having grown up in Vienna, learning English (which I now consider my first language) French and Latin at the excellent school I started at when we moved to Bahrain in the early 60s, some Arabic, Italian, Greek, Pidgin English, and Police Motu. My German and all those other languages are patchy but I can usually get by in writing and some spoken.

I've always loved Gyro Gearloose of the Mickey Mouse comics and always wanted to get into technology or biology, instead of becoming a vet, I became a technician, an uncertificated engineering solutions person, and an IT person, with some homesteading and farming and metalsmithing, welding, and carpentry thrown. Had my first existential crisis meltdown aged six, and have worked at altitudes between 1m to 3500m above ground level most of my life and no, not aircrew.

Since the 70s I've handbuilt a computer, owned a whole range of mildly overpowered calculators with names like Sinclair, Commodore, Amstrad, XT, AT, 286, 386, and beyond. 

Also since the 70s I've become by stages aware of, then increasingly mildly interested by, mildly concerned by, wildly concerned by, and prodded into action by: waste, climate change, food politics, food fraud, tech fraud, ecovandalism, corporate malfeasance, government malfeasance, and so I came to trying to develop Solutions. (And recipes - I love my cooking, too!)

UPDATED 13/02/21023 Hence most of my blogs are about those topics, most of the physical techie things I do are targeted towards making personal and small scale  recycling possible, help make existing things easier cleaner better, offer some help and ideas for homesteading/home food growing, and try to improve our situation. And cook good meals.

Info All My Online Schtuff

There are a few places you can find my stuff I do online. Ted's News Stand is kind of a central place to start with, if you scroll you'll find lots of little niches I occupy in teh intarnets. There's also a live updated newsfeed of everything I'm posting about and it's live so you can see all activity there. 

(And yes, well spotted, Ted is my name if you want to avoid the epithet "Mr Prawn.")

I have nearly a dozen blogs, mainly because a blog that tries to cover too many issues will be too fragmented for most people to find enjoyable, with no shape to the blog, no focus. Six out of a dozen is unfortunately my stretch limit on being able to post several times a month so I've mainly confined myself to a core group. 

But I still also have to topic-stack a little bit bit because a blog should also have one post a week, and that's a bit hard because I can either dribble rubbish - or do a proper job researching, and that takes time. So I've settled for roughly one post per blog per month for the moment, and even that's a bit difficult given everything I'm doi- . . . trying to do. 

So blog topics are (roughly) divided thusly:

  • 3D Printing, Plastics, Recycling, CNC, - anything to do with making:
  • Another thing that bothered me in the past and stil gripes me now is "cyber ethics" which was to me the whole "if you upload yourself then which one is YOU?" debate and so forth. I've since added the ethics of self-driving, and ZFF (Zero Fossil Fuels) cars and clean renewable sustainable energy - 
    • and that occurs mostly on TEdADYNES and also on Grumpy Old Guy where I also gripe about politics in bursts, and renewable energy more often.
  • COVID scared the shit out of me (as it did for so many) so I started -
    • O Hai Corona and that's now become a place to keep up with COVID but also with stupid governments that are putting corporate overlords above the populace, and some bitching about food politics and wealth enslavement but -
    • you can find more of that as well as food fraud and food tampering on The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook if that's your cuppa tea.
  • Cooking's another thing I like so I have - 
    • TEdAMENU Tuckertime where you can find recipes I've riffed off various worldwide cuisines. Also some general food / cooking  / food tech articles
  • On the topic of videos, I don't really "produce" videos as much as point shoot upload because it's another skillset I have to master and I'm so time-squeezed but:
    • On Youtube I have a channel and
    • on Odysee as well and 
    • I may or may not post to my Twitch channel, if there's no link here yet then there's nothing there to see on Twitch yet.
  • To be honest, I'm horribly over-committed with just those things - but of course that never stopped a caffeine-fuelled old fart before, here's the things I physically do:
    • Part-time carer for my wife when she's not in top form
    • Main cook, laundry person, vege garden maker and keeper, shared cleaner, general gardener, and admirer of the beautiful crafts the wife makes when she feels well and isn't hauling her chunk of the chores. 
    • Also the main handyman and yardman but we do have two people who come a) do the lawns and help out on handyman chores and b) do the weeding and ornamental garden keeping and also help me with the vegetable garden when there's big projects on.
  • Now we come to the stuff I love to do but get too little time for:
    • 3D printing, obviously. I'm about to upgrade my trusty Ender3 Pro and hoping I get enough footage to make a coherent video of that, so I can print further parts etc for the 
    • tabletop CNC machine I'm having a go at designing and building from the ground up, and then
    • the bits I hope to make using those two tools, to make small scale / cottage industry scale recycling machines / devices so anyone can get a hold of the plans and make their own and then maybe make some money to just recycle because it's the right thing to do
    • and somewhere in there I'm really hoping I can learn CAD/CAM and video production and maybe make some money to help out with all these plans. 

I'm always looking for collaborators to help in this: people who feel they could write for any of the blogs and remain roughly on-topic, or who could in other ways contribute Making, expertise, publicity, ideas, or even just financially. 

I'm as mentioned Mid Century Modern Latterday Boomer in my latter 60s now, retired with some disability and on a pension and all the above is done by me, on that pension, and with pretty much only the income of me spending some more time 

  • doing surveys online for the occasional few bucks to buy parts and materials with 
    UPDATED 13/02/21023 the one survey site I've relied on for income seems to have either shut their site, or just shut it to me because I was costing them about $120pa 
    UPDATED 13/02/21023 also as of mow it costs me between $360pa (online fees only) up to $1200pa (with included parts/materials) to keep the most basic projects and the most basic online presence going. Donations have contributed a tad under $60 in the whole year, meaning I'm spending a sizeable chunk of my pension on this and it's becoming unsustainable since we're experienced rapid inflation and a predicted recession locally.

Between us my wife and I have three cats that I built a catproof entire block for but have now had to downsize that because the landlord subdivided the block. 

Anyway - the cats are George, whose mother Missy was a farm-shed cat who was rescued by some kind-hearted person from whom we got George - and then she told us Missy was on her way to the pound once George was gone so we took her too - and got them both sterilised and vaccinated and then in 2021 Missy went to live with the sister-in-law because they got on so well, it was COVID lockdown, and SiL was alone 200km away. The arrangement has stuck, both now living their best lives.

We got two more tuxedo kittens in early 2018 who are now beautiful boys, Pickle and Archie, also both fixed and vaxed. As mentioned, we built a huge cat proof yard so we could enjoy being outdoors together, then the house sold and the new landlord divided the block (but made a beautiful if very much smaller front and back yard) and my raised garden beds had to be moved and fitted into garden which has only 4% of the original land area and has to also be our main living yard and food garden as well. 

That's taken over two years now to gradually make working and of course has taken literally several man-months of work from myself and the various people we had to help us. The result has been worth it though - the cats can come and go as they please from the house to front and back yards that are once again cat proof, we have about 6sqm of raised garden beds and about 8sqm of ornamentals around the front yard, a splash pool and washing lines in the back yard, and food crops growing well in rotations in the raised beds. 

I'm slowly getting back into more blogging and maker type projects but I'm minded of a much younger Youtuber who just at the end of 2022 put up a video acknowledging that he has more projects than he feels he can finish in his lifetime - and he hasn't turned 40 yet. I'm just going to say that 66 is in the past for me, and I have projects galore I'm trying to do. One of us has a slighly steeper path ahead of them, is all I'm sayin'. I could always use some help. Are you able to? 

Will You Help?

I blog because I like to share. Things you can read about on my suite of blogs (which I'm currently the sole person creating, researching, writing, and publicising) range over topics like cyber-ethics (AI, sustainable energy, EVs) and 3D printing and recycling plastics and other waste streams, general tech and personal ramblings, environmental and ethical issues, rants about sustainable and eco-friendly tech and bad actors on those scenes, COVID news and opinion, even a recipe blog that has less chit-chat and more recipe...

There are a few others but they're not really my main topics. 

On top of that I design and make the odd machines and things to help with recycling, my vegetable garden and soon-to-be-reinstated mini aquaponics system, and more. It's a lot to do. I can only barely manage it, because I'm retired on a disability pension. I've included a link below to chat with me on Mastodon (which is a Twitter alternative without the bitter after-taste) if you think you'd like to write the odd article on one or more of the blogs and help out, or if you have an idea you'd like me to investigate and follow up.

Lastly, if you'd like to help me defray the costs of domain names, server hosting, or parts and materials for the show projects, you could donate the price of a cup of coffee - or even make that a monthly donation - by going to my Ko-Fi page, and you could also Paypal Direct. It's not much for someone working, but for me it's the difference between paying a haircut or a domain name renewal, between a punnet of seedlings or paying my server hosting for that month. 


Chat with me on Mastodon >>

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