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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • The best upgrade I made for the Ender 3 for adhesion was a PEI coated build plate. I don’t know the specs of the V2, but the brand I went with was “Wham Bam Systems” mine didn’t have a magnetic bed so I had to purchase the kit with the magnetic plate, and stainless steel PEI coated build surface. It was nice being able to pull off the plate and pop prints off of it. Be careful printing PETG on PEI it can fuse to the PEI

    If the V2 has some sort of leveling system make sure it’s working correctly or the PEI sheet isn’t really going to help. Mine did not. I had so many failures where the print head crashed into the sheet and gouged it. The Z end stop wasn’t the best. I added a BLTouch probe and flashed the firmware and it got much better.


  • Creality is good because they brought an entry level 3d printer to market for an affordable price, and people like me got into the hobby because of that. The price point shows in the parts they use to assemble it. I’ve clocked countless hours learning how to correct failures, and upgrade the cheap parts for better, more reliable parts, add features, modify and flash firmware.

    Five and a half years ago I bought that ender 3 pro. I think it was around $250 USD. I probably spent over $300 more upgrading it and replacing parts. In retrospect I shouldn’t have cheaped out, but that’s the conclusion I came to. I no longer want to waste time fixing the printer. If I walk away and don’t print anything for weeks/months at a time I’d like to have confidence when I fire it up it’s going to work.

    I ordered a Prusa MK4S about a month ago which was the top-end hobbyist printer back then, and I am blown away by the difference. Prusa may not be the top at the moment, but the quality and support is there.

    I recommend that unless you have the free time, you’re willing to tinker, and are not easily frustrated, you should look into a higher quality brand.




  • Couch co-op is rare these days, but I would like to see more co-op in general. I used to have game nights on Friday night with friends on discord, but we just ran out of good games to play. Limiting factor being how many people can play at the same time. Most of the co-op games we have right now seem to be designed to make you miserable. You’re gonna fail, but how long can you last? I just want to have some fun with 2-6 friends without getting discouraged. One of the best ones we played was “Golf With Your Friends”. I don’t even like golf, but we all could play, no one had to sit out, and we had a blast until it got boring.




  • Ethernet speeds historically were measured in 10/100. In my past life I worked for an a small rural isp. And part of my learning I was taught that cat5 was 8 strands of wire, or 4 twisted pairs. I got very familiar with crimping patch cables. If one strand were cut a network card would negotiate down to its lowest speed and still work at 10mbps. Operating on 4 wire or two pairs. It’s possible with those numbers you had a bad connection, or a broken strand in the cable and it auto negotiated down to 10mbps. To this day I still crimp my own cables, and I own a cheap cable tester to make sure the crimps and cables are good.


  • I’ve had very bad luck with raspberry Pi’s and SDCards. They just don’t seem to last very long. I swapped to usb storage and things got somewhat better. I just had a usb drive die after 3 to 4 years of use. When I was still using SD it seemed like multiple times a year. Heat. Power loss, you can only punch holes in silicon so many times before it wears out. Whatever the reason.

    My approach for this is configuration backup not the entire os. I think this approach is better for when it’s time to upgrade the os or migrate to a new system.

    For my basic Pi running WireGuard and DNS, I keep an archive of documentation on steps to reconfigure the system after a total loss. Static configs are backed up once, and If there are critical configuration items that change then I back those up weekly. I’ve got two systems (media related servers, not Pi’s) that I keep ansible playbooks to configure 90% of the system from scratch so it’s as hands off as it can be.




  • The Democrats are out of time, and they could rush to nominate her as their candidate in August. It’s likely they will find the best polling candidate, and I hope they look for someone outside the Biden/Harris administration. Someone without the baggage of the last four years and complicit in hiding the condition of the current president.

    Personally I hope they ask Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to lead. (If she will accept) Of all the possible nominees I’ve read about she has the most experience.




  • Synology Diskstation DS1522+ $699.00

    Synology Diskstation DS1621+ $899.99

    Some of those apps are available through the community package center. If not then you can run a docker environment or a virtual machine on the DS and run whatever you want. It’s got a lot more horsepower than a single board computer, but I still recommend separation of duties and let the NAS be a NAS. Put your services on a server or separate virtual environment.

    This is my DS16xx+ and expansion bay


  • I do the same thing. I use all as my home page so I can see new and interesting stuff.

    I tend to block most 'ism and 'ism-adjacent communities, Foreign language communities, political communities, NSFW/Fetish, and a few highly specific tech/app/language communities that mostly only post version updates.

    Bots. lots of bots. If your community is 90% bot posts/repost aggregation and I see 5-10 posts consecutively in ‘all’ because your bot just vomited up it’s entire load in a 120 second span then I’ll probably block it.

    • 8 Keywords (Voyager app feature)
    • 186 Users.
    • 964 Communities.
    • 38 Instances.

  • People today tend to fixate on the things that are out of their control. Perhaps it’s because we have lost our coping mechanisms. Perhaps it’s because they never learned any. We live in the most technologically advanced point in time we have ever known. Few of us need to go out and till the earth to grow our own food. The majority of us don’t have to physically work as hard as previous generations. Adults and our children find their enjoyment and existential dread by watching tiny screens filled with useless entertainment. Maybe things are fine. We just make shitty choices about what to do with our time, and what we give our attention to.




  • I suspect marketing bullshittery. I’ve bought “sugar in the raw” a few years ago to try, and it reminded me of back in In high school chemistry II in which I did an experiment where I took a brand name sugar and a lower budget brand sugar and examined it under a microscope. The budget brand sugars’ crystal structure was larger but hollow. Weighing the two by volume showed less mass for the budget brand. Putting the same volume of the two in a mortar and grinding with a pestle yielded less volume for the budget brand which means for the same volume you’re getting less sugar.

    I believe that “sugar in the raw” does the same thing to give you less for more price, but compounds it’s marketing by telling you it’s unprocessed and more natural. Maybe that’s true but you’re certainly getting less product for the price. One would think less processing would cost less. The only difference from the experiment was that you were paying less for less. Kind of interesting how business ethics have changed over the years.