The DIY 3D Printing community, while rapidly growing, is still pretty young. In the pursuit of a good quality print one of he most important factors is getting your first layer to stick to the build platform. The common solution used by the community is to put blue painters tape onto the build platform. What the tape does is provide a texture that the plastic can stick to which can also be removed without too much effort. My problem with this tape solution is that it adds extra work to the printing process as well as creates a dependency on tape. Out of curiosity I tried to figure out some settings which would allow me to print directly onto the glass. You can see some of my results below the cut.

Ok, so maybe not so pretty, but here are a sampling of the things I've made so far with my Ultimaker.

This is a fan duct which is slightly improved over the stock one that came with the printer.

This container can be used to sort some of the odds and ends found in my room. And it's modular, so I can just print out more bins as needed.

This is a replacement extruder gear in case I need a spare (or want to build another printer).

Surprisingly I found that this bowl can hold water. And print quality should only increase from here.

More pictures are still to come. Still playing around with settings and getting things to print to glass consistently.

Exciting developments at home: Skunks!
We recently found a family of 6 skunks living in our back yard. Sadly the local pest control doesn't deal with that sort of thing (not sure what they deal with as they didn't help with squirrels or a groundhog either) which leaves it up to us to attempt to disrupt the funk of the skunks.

After reading a bit online one trick, out of many we're trying, is to shine floodlights on them during the night because they aren't fond of light. Getting some floodlights was pretty easy, but we weren't sure we wanted them in our backyard as a permanent fixture: