Unlocking the Landlocked Land within our Land

Our land as we bought it surrounds a small parcel with a house. A nice person lived there and we never worried about it. But she passed and we inevitably started wondering what may happen to this small parcel, it’s close to everything we built. The right people on it would be awesome, the wrong ones terrible. To make a long story short, we approached the family when it was polite to do so and inquired about it. They were just as nice and we soon agreed on terms. Their ancestors owned pretty much the whole hill, now subdivided into many many parcels with many houses. It’s nice to go the other way a little, and it’s nice to not worry about what may happen to this parcel. Not only that, but there are now no parcels close enough to us to bring any worry. We’re very lucky to live in a neighborhood with awesome people, and with more than enough buffer between them and us :).

We acquired the nice person’s house in the process, it is very run down and will most likely be demolished when the time comes (a mix of respect, resources, and knowing what to do with it). I heard rumors that it may be the oldest house in our village, and that it has an incredible stone foundation. we don’t feel like going in just yet, it needs a bit more time.

This adds 2 acres to our land, and we’re very glad to be done with the paperwork.

26,237 Pen Strokes

Little by little I’m increasing the complexity of what I can send to the plotter. As an image passes through the various programs I choose for a particular render, I push their limits and often run into bugs, memory limits and others. As much as possible, I dockerize each step so they are easier to summon and improve on their own. This also allows for pipelining.

I finally found a fast and reliable SVG->GCode converter. Inkscape’s is reliable but it’s extremely slow. I had to rewrite a part of it to be iterative rather than recursive so it could handle the size of the SVGs I am throwing at it.

Inkscape itself has a command line mode so some of the repetitive stuff I use it for are dockerized, for example to ungroup objects and break apart compound paths. It’s truly amazing.

I kind of want to publish all this but I have no idea if I violated any licenses frankensteining code from various sources. And I have much better things to do with my time than to find out. Things such as this wonderful plot: