Author: samhillier_qrhari

I wrote this email for the Soapstone 2 kickstarter. They’d collected a healthy sized email list from their last campaign. And wanted to reach out to the original backers to tell them all about the latest version of the product.

This is my first gear post.

I just read one from the blog tynan.com and liked the idea.

Here are all the products I think are useful and cool right now.

Prusa Mini+ 3D Printer

This is my 3rd 3D printer. It’s been reliable. The prints are good quality. It cost me about £465 after import tax.

My only nag about it is that the x-axis is easy to knock out of square. If you accidentally bang it you’ll probably need to re-align it. It’s big brother the MK3 is much less sensitive.

Canon 30D with 50mm lens

This is my first DSLR. I bought it 6 months ago and I love it. I paid £40 for the body and £40 for 50mm lens from mpb.com. This camera was released 2006! 16 years ago…

It takes amazing photos. I was worried the resolution would be awful. But it’s not an issue. I’ve even done a paid job with it.

One great thing is the raw files are only 8mb. A modern camera’s are usually 50mb.

One caveat. It takes compact flash cards. So you’ll need to buy a SD card to CF adapter like this. Up to 64GB will work fine.

My go-to manual settings are f5.6 /ISO200/ shutter 1/200. I adjust from there depending on light conditions.

6×4″ Thermal Label Printer

I had a bad experience at the post office one day.

So I bought this and now I never have to go there again. You can buy postage online (it’s cheaper and faster) and get it collected from your house.

The fun doesn’t stop at postage labels. I’ve been using this to print all kinds of cool stickers. The print quality is really good. And they use no ink so are way more reliable than normal inkjet printers.

I made my one AirPrint friendly over wifi. I used a raspberry pi. More details here…

Pro-rite massage tool

I have some terrible back pain recently. It lasted weeks and I was searching for ways to try and fix it. I’d found some info suggesting a tight psoas muscle could be an issue, and this tool is designed for stretching the psoas.

I can’t say for sure but I think it really helped. My back stopped spasming as much. And soon I was basically back to normal.

They are quite expensive to buy. So searched Thingiverse for one and found a great model. I 3D printed it (it took 20 hours) and got stretching. Link to model

Dualit Milk Steamer and Moka Pot combo

My dad introduced me to this one.

Most steam-wands on cheap espresso machines are terrible. But this stand alone unit works awesome. Paired with a stovetop moka pot, you’ve got a really decent

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