As on day 02, I tried to make a soma cube, this time milling it out of aluminium on a milling machine.

I picked up some aluminium from a local supplier, and headed to Hive13, the local hackerspace, to use their milling machine.

After about 7 hours, despite hard work, I had almost finished cutting the blanks, and that was it. Milling is no joke, especially for a beginner!

And had to call it a night, both because I was tired and because the weekly meeting was starting. I was feeling pretty rough after this one -- three, nearly four failed projects in a row is not a great start to a hackathon.

I tested with one tile. Now I made signs for my whole garden.

To start, I covered each marble tile in painter’s tape.

Then, I used double-stick tape to attach labels.

I cut out the words using an x-acto knife, and removed the paper and cut-out portion.

I spray painted them. I chose a higher-contrast color because of my one-tile test.

I peeled off the tape, and voilà:

Lessons learned:

• Doing a test tile was a good idea
• It takes almost as much time to peel out the letters as cut it. I was thinking of using a laser cutter to speed things up, but it could at most halve the manual labor.
• You should switch x-acto blades more often than you think.
• I should have spent even more time on an easy-to-cut font. The “a”, “e”, and “r” are too hard in this font.

I did a survey of the cost of buying hard drives (of all sorts), CDs, DVDs, Blue-rays, and tape media (for tape drives).

Here are the 2020-01 results: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2020-01.sc.txt
2019-07: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2019-07.sc.txt
2018-10: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2018-10.sc.txt
2018-06: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2017-06.sc.txt
2018-01: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2017-01.sc.txt

Changes this year

• I excluded Seagate drives (except where they’re the only drives in class)
• Amazon’s search got much worse, and they started having listings for refurbished drives
• Corrected paper archival density, added photographic film
• Added SSDs (both 2.5″ and M.2 formats)
• Prices did not go up or down significantly in the last 6 months.

Some conclusions that are useful to know

• The cheapest option is tape media, but tape reader/writers for LTO 6, 7, and 8 are very expensive.
• The second-cheapest option is to buy external hard drives, and then open the cases and take out the hard drives. This gives you reliable drives with no warrantee.
• Blu-ray and DVD are more expensive than buying hard drives