2025 was the year of making a (small) dent in my universe

Below is a version of the above video, so read or watch, whatever you prefer.

I am not really one for inspirational quotes. I don't particularly like them. I don't particularly find them inspiring, but I really do like this one from Steve Jobs:

“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things, that other people can use. […]And however you learn that, once you learn it, you'll want to change life and make it better because it's kind of messed up in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.”

I just love this idea that the world is not the way it has always been, it isn't inevitable, things weren't always like this. And it wasn't "great men" who made it this way, it was just people who did something, made some decisions, tried something, and here we are. And so because they were able to change things, you can change things. That doesn't necessarily mean doing things at the scale of like the iPhone, it means even micro-scale things in your own life that you just want to make better, you can do that. And there's so many ways in the modern world to do that.

I've been talking for a lot of 2025 about coding and getting into the development world, and I know you guys do not care about that because my YouTube stats indicate nobody in my audience cares about development, so if I want a video to bomb, I'll talk about coding, but it has really let me improve parts of my life that I really wanted to improve. I wanted an easier way to make subtitles quickly and easily from my Mac, iPad, and iPhone. There wasn't a good solution out there, so I made a good solution for myself. I wanted to be able to dictate blog posts into my iPhone, there wasn't a great solution that I could find, so I made my own called Quick Notes.

There's a bunch of the different apps I've made this year, there's a bunch of personal tools I've made, and it's really helped me create a computer and computing life that just works better for me personally. I think that's really empowering. But it's also the physical world. And that brings us to the thing I wanted to talk about today, which is my new 3D printer.

I got the Bambu Lab A1 mini, which is their very entry-level 3D printer. This blog post is not sponsored. I bought it from Best Buy on a Black Friday sale. It was $199, which gets it into the impulse buy territory for this sort of thing. Like I've always been interested in 3D printers, but I was never able to justify the thousands of dollars they used to cost, even the hundreds of dollars they cost now, but at $199, yeah, I'll give it a shot.

I am really enraptured with this product right now. I may do another longer-form video on this, but I just wanted to kind of talk about it with this idea of being able to change the world around you, and I think 3D printing really lets me do that.

A couple of the things I've been able to make so far in just the week that I've had it are a little slot under my desk where I can put my laptop so it doesn't have to sit on my desk. I just reclaimed a lot of desk space. So I'm able to put that under there. That's been really nice. I had been shopping on Amazon for a while trying to find something that would do this for me and none of the solutions were good and they were expensive. And for the cost of like 50¢ of filament, I was able to create a solution that worked perfectly for me. It's so awesome.

I made a little mount for my iPhone on my desk. I made a Steam Deck mount. I, what else did I make? I'm working on the Gridfinity solution. I have a lot of way to go here. There's a lot to print to fill up some of my junk drawers and kind of clean those up, but I'm working on that. I'm making a battery holder to hold my batteries because those are always a freaking mess. I'm working on all these little things. Building these little things that'll just make my life a little easier.

And I love that. I love that when I see an inconvenience in my home, in my physical space, if there's something I could print, just a little piece that would work to make this better, I am so here for it. I'm so excited to be able to make that sort of thing. And yeah, I'm just really excited to have this in my life. I don't know if the sale is still going on. If it is, check it out, I'll put a link to their website in the description, but yeah, I am really excited about this.

If you've used a 3D printer, would love to know in the comments what you're doing with it, or if this honeymoon phase ends. But yeah, for this price, getting into it and just kind of testing the waters, I think is really exciting.

So, yeah, that's it. Very short video today. Just wanted to kind of talk about this concept and just an excuse to talk about this because the 3D printer and the coding and stuff, this is all added up to just a year of me feeling like I'm kind of tweaking the world around me to my needs, which I think is really cool.