For projects where ordering parts is a necessity (like from HobbyKing), I should keep track of why I ordered each part and what its intended use will be.
I guess this should apply to most other projects. Keep track of progress, and just generally keep a log.

I notices that when milling a board who’s NC code was generated by Copper CAM, there is an offset between the drilled holes and the etching of the tracks.
Once I drill the holes, I’ll enter an offset of X-1 and then zero Mach3. That shifts the subsequent steps (etching, cutout) by 1mm to the left.
On closer examination, 1mm may be too much. I will try 0.8mm on the next board to see how it turns out.

UPDATE:

It turns out that my mill is not perfectly perpendicular to the board. The error comes out of the fact that the end of the tool for the engraver mill and the drill is much different and when a small rotation is added to the mill head a linear difference is observed.
I adjusted the head rotation and now both the milled and drill points line up perfectly.

To enable highlighting of surfaces when passing over them with the pointer,

Tools>Options Menu, Display>Navigation tab
“Preselect in geometry View”
and
“Prehighlight faces for preselection navigator”

I am finally going to do a cloud backup of my system for extra redundancy, and the CrashPlan system seems to be well regarded and recommended by many.

Easiest way to set this backup up is to run the client software from a windows machine. I have a Win7 VM running 24/7 anyway, so that is a perfect place to setup the CrashPlan software.

To get the CrashPlan software to read and backup a NAS drive, read the following links:

http://virtualj.net/20120126/use-crashplan-automatically-backup-network-drive-nas
http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=17672.0
http://www.midnightspark.com/blog/?p=116
http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/recipe/adopting_another_computer

They all talk about the same technique.

For creating books with images that go off the page, export the file from inDersign as PDF/X-1a:2001, and in the createspace environment select “Bleed ends after the edge of page”

Needing to do some text in CATIA, I came up with this:

http://www.engineering.com/CATIACommunity/CATIAForum/view/topic/postid/91/forumid/25/tpage/1.aspx

Unfortunately there is no straight forward way to do text withing the part modeler directly. Oh well, but this got the job done.

In designing some components I was interested to figure out what the limitations were of the printer, and figure out how it behaves when the printed part deviates from the cad model.

My first concern was how thin a wall the printer could print at different slice thicknesses, so I made a test part that integrated short pieces of different thickness wall sections. Read more…

I’ve noticed that the file transfer speeds from my workstation computer have been on the slow side. Today I started doing some file read/write in order to benchmark what is possible on my network and eventually try to maintain similar transfer rates between all computers. Read more…

I’ve had 3D printing on the brain for the past few weeks for some reason. I’ve been thinking about putting together a kit 3d printer to get started. I was thinking how I would like a relatively large work area (not the small limited 6″ or 8″ cubed that a lot of the cheaper printers provide.

Then last evening it came to me. The light bulb came on.
Use the milling machine as the printer! Just get a print head, and control it from the existing software (Mach3). The work area is huge, and the cost should be quite reasonable since I only need the extruding head. Between a good quality plastruder, and a temperature control board, it should be about $250 ($170 for the plastruder, stepper motor driver and $60 or so for the temp control board)

Feed speeds of a makerbot are around 40mm/s (2400mm/min). Currently I can do about 1000mm/min on my milling machine (which is 1/2 of the makerbot speeds) but with a ballscrew upgrade I should be able to do about 5000mm/min feed speeds (83mm/sec).
I have read about some kit 3D printers (like the Ultimaker) that can do 200-300 mm/sec feeds (12,000-18,000mm/min). I know my mill will never go that fast.

Resources:

Mach3 as 3dprinter software (here)

Good info on whats required in order to use Mach3 as the river software (here)

Looking into finding cheaper services to print my Kinetik Festival photo books I came across CreateSpace.
I think at this point of my self publishing career, this service dots all the is and crosses all the t’s for me. There are some issues with ownership of the ISBN numbers they assign, (read here), but for the most part it looks very promising.
With book printing prices as low as I’ve yet seen, an enormous distribution network (as it’s part of Amazon), and (from what I’ve read) decent quality printing, I don’t know why I would NOT go with them at least for the next photo book. I can always decide to move to a different service with future books.
I am even considering re-doing the K4 photo book into a new edition so I can print it with CreateSpace as the Blurb.com software I used limits you to using only their service to print the books.

Everything is printed on demand, shipped to the customer, and I get the royalties. Easy.

Talk about inDesign templates (here)