You've just gone out for a meal with a friend. You take a picture of your receipt with your phone. Within moments, all pertinent information is extracted and sent to Splitwise, the expense-sharing service you use. This is the dream I had recently when manually ingesting a large number of receipts. Being a programmer, naturally I spent more time realizing this dream than it would have taken me to manually digitize every receipt I will ever receive.

This is the story of a recent failure of mine. Nobody was hurt an nothing was broken, but it was humiliating and a big waste of my time.

Anyone who has calibrated a delta 3D printer with the manual method knows how tedious it can be. After setting up a bed probe on my printer, a process I discuss in my previous two blog posts, I wanted to automate this calibration by commanding my printer through Python. I wasted my time.