Nine years ago, freemelt started. We had the idea to make the best research and development oriented electron beam powder bed fusion AM-system, and then see where time will take us. Close to fifty units of that system has been produced and time has taken us somewhere. Therefore, it is time to summarise the first three chapters of freemelt.

Chapter 1

I remember the bench I sat on when I first heard about freemelt and got the question if I were interested. I remember the sofa I sat in when I told my girlfriend (now wife) about it and asked her opinion. I remember the chair I sat in when the authorities explained that I have been sued, suspected to have stolen company secrets. I do not fully remember the armchair I sat in when I read the e-mail that the legal battle would end, but it was a comfortable chair in some friend’s apartment, and it was during a Canadian Halloween party.

Walk around to turn off all the lights in the home? Tedious.

Remembering to turn off all the lights in the home? Impossible.

For ages, I have had a script in Home Assistant simply called “TurnOffHome” that turns off most of the lights and ensures that things like the Moccamaster are turned off. It is triggered by a switch at the door that we press when we leave the house in the morning, and by switches next to the beds when we go to sleep. 

After many years of usage, the time has come to move on from Dropbox. A once frequently used service to collaborate with classmates, now mostly used to host stale files backups and memories from university. With a new Proton duo account set up and with the files migrated, the time had come for me and my wife to cancel our Dropbox plans for renewal. We clicked the same button in the user interface, but got two completely different experiences.

The truth is that i love the look and feel of latex documents but for general use it gets too much syntax around the writing. Especially for documents that are mostly text, no math and potentially some figures..

Markdown and Pandoc to the rescue! To make simple meeting notes and generally writing things down markdown has all the needed bells and whistles, headings, lists and links. The syntax for all these are simple to remember and flows nicely while writing. The document in itself is fully readable, even for persons more used with what-you-see-is what-you-get editors.

Without knowing much more than the basics of making an espresso myself, last winter gave me quite a few bad or at least not-so-good espressos, and certainly only one really good.

I found the good one in Copenhagen while doing some general tourist stuff, at a place that looked quite ordinary. No fancy barista vibes, just coffee, baked goods, sandwiches, and they even had ready-made oatmeal porridge. But the espresso, smooth, no bitter “bad” tastes—just fabulous. This contrasted with the next morning in Malmö, visiting a small-scale coffee roasting business. The place visually screams artisanal coffee and uniqueness, located in an old rustic building with exposed wooden beams. They sold their own roast of beans as well, but the espresso was meh at best.

To put a site up to host a small blog really is a small step, it seems. But listening to the desire to start writing seems to take the effort of a larger leap.

This is though the small step I take to write more, more of a type of text I never write these days, more of what I want to write and not more of what I need to write. A bit more of myself, condensed to text.