Shdwdrgn
@Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz
- Comment on Just Finished Lower Decks 1 week ago:
Man what are the odds??? I just finished the last episode today too! I’ve been dragging along on this last season because, ya know, last season and all, but it did certainly end with quite a bang.
- Comment on Miniature Hard Drives 1 week ago:
Haha yeah storage capacity just keeps going up fast. Now that you mention it, I do recall the performance on these drives was supposed to be just absolute crap, but it was a massive innovation before chip storage came out. And some day the next big thing will be released and we’ll wonder how we put up with SSD drives.
- Comment on The Cybertruck Appears to Be More Deadly Than the Infamous Ford Pinto, According to a New Analysis 1 week ago:
Yeah I’ve seen some bits about that, they were looking into how Musk was interfering with the Ukraine war I think?
- Comment on Miniature Hard Drives 1 week ago:
I have one of the original IBM Microdrives, the 340MB version, sitting here on my desk. Hmm I wonder if I can find anything with a PCMCIA slot to test if this still works?
- Comment on The Cybertruck Appears to Be More Deadly Than the Infamous Ford Pinto, According to a New Analysis 1 week ago:
Let me simplify it for you… Musk has been targeting agencies that stood in the way of SpaceX. Did you hear he started targeting OSHA this week because of the spotlight on Musk’s intentional dismissal of safety regulations? Or that he is also targeting the consumer protection agency? Everything that protects regular citizens is being shut down as “wasteful”, and his only criteria is anything that costs him money or prevents him from exploiting workers.
- Comment on The Commodore Amiga was perfect 2 weeks ago:
Ah I miss the days when my Amiga was the height of technology. I actually still have my A1000 in the attic, along with the C64 and Sinclair ZX81 (hooray for 1K of ram!).
- Comment on The real reason OS/2 flopped shaped modern software 1 month ago:
I had so much hope for this, at the time it seemed to be so much better than Windows, but for me the lack of software was the real killer. I actually still have the install CD sitting here by my monitors. Eventually I switched over to linux because Windows continued failing to impress me after all those years.
- Comment on Many smaller drivers or fewer larger drives? 1 month ago:
More drives also equals larger power consumption so you would need a larger battery backup.
It also means more components prone to failure which increases your chance of losing data. More drives means more moving parts and electrical connections including data and power cables, backplanes, and generated heat that you need to cool down.
I’d be more concerned over how many failures you’re seeing that makes you think smaller drives would be the better option? I have historically used old drives from ebay or manufacturer refurbs, and even the worst of those have been reliable enough to only have to replace drives once every year or two. With RAID6 or raidz2 you should be plenty secure during a rebuild to prevent data loss. I wouldn’t consider using a lot of little drives unless it’s the only option I had or if someone gave them away for free.
- Comment on USB-C cable CT scan reveals sinister active electronics — O.MG cable contains a hidden antenna and another die embedded in the microcontroller 2 months ago:
Same here, I was wondering what was going on.
- Comment on "Your body, my choice:" Hate and harassment towards women spreads online 2 months ago:
Hard to say for sure. He’s on Facebook so I don’t have a way to see what he posts, but my wife still has an account there and said he’s in some of the same groups as her. She’s pretty aware of what he’s posting and they’ve actually had conversations in person about the whole immigration thing. The rest… yeah I just don’t know.
- Comment on "Your body, my choice:" Hate and harassment towards women spreads online 2 months ago:
This started on Wednesday, almost immediately after Trump’s victory was announced. By Friday it was already being reported in grade schools because asshole parents enjoy raising asshole sons, and Trump tells people that it’s ok to be the absolute worst human being they can be.
I have a friend who is a hard Republican. We generally don’t talk politics, but after this started last week he was posting things online being offensive towards women and POC (and the whole “illegals took my job and healthcare”) so I finally had to call him out. His response was basically that he wasn’t aware of any increased discrimination happening against women, therefore he didn’t believe it was happening. I’ve known the guy for 40 years but this may be the thing that breaks our friendship. He claims to be an advocate for people’s rights yet he is painfully unaware of the world around him.
- Comment on The Magic Keyboard and Mouse now use USB-C! 3 months ago:
Are you sure this is new? I’d swear all the M-series iMacs I’ve ordered for work over the last few years recharged the keyboard and mouse through USB-C
- Comment on Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court. 3 months ago:
Seems like a good opportunity to remind folks about the Kiwix project, which allows you to download local private copies of select information such as Wikipedia. It was originally created to provide offline access to content for countries that were otherwise blocked, but events like this have sparked some recent discussion about archiving older files to preserve history.
- Comment on T-Mobile, AT&T oppose unlocking rule, claim locked phones are good for users 3 months ago:
That’s a shame to hear, but yeah they’ve certainly changed since I signed on. Not that I expect any other to be better at this point.
- Comment on T-Mobile, AT&T oppose unlocking rule, claim locked phones are good for users 3 months ago:
It’s weird to see T-mobile taking this stance. I switched to them years ago because they were one of the few that supported unlocked phones, and even offered them for sale. Their policies might have changed on this, but I just bought an unlocked phone off Ebay this Summer and all I needed to do was pop my sim card into the new device. Hell I had to specifically install the visual voicemail app because there wasn’t any bloatware on the phone when I got it. So I guess I’m not following what their complaint is about?
- Comment on Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens 3 months ago:
Most of us can’t afford the sort of disk capacity they use, but it would be really cool if there were a project to give volunteers pieces of the archive so that information was spread out. Then volunteers could specify if they want to contribute a few gigabytes to multiple terabytes of drive space towards the project and the software could send out packets any time the content changes. Hmm this description sounds familiar but I can’t think of what else might be doing something similar – anyone know of anything like that that could be applied to the archive?
- Comment on Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens 3 months ago:
Discrediting someone usually has a goal of pushing customers to another source though. There is no other source of this information, so what would be the point?
- Comment on I'm a reasonably well educated human living on Earth. What's to stop me from replicating starship parts until I can make my own Starfleet? 4 months ago:
OK cool, now if only you had a ship to go get the asteroid so you could make a ship. My last point still stands though, if it were really that easy…
- Comment on I'm a reasonably well educated human living on Earth. What's to stop me from replicating starship parts until I can make my own Starfleet? 4 months ago:
Raw material, I would imagine. I don’t remember exactly how replicators work in the Star Trek universe, but they either rely on energy, a raw base material, or both. You can’t create something out of nothing so you would need a significant supply chain to produce your fleet.
If it were that easy, every rogue organization in the galaxy would have already done it before you.
- Comment on Could use some help. 4 months ago:
Sorry, just because you’re not capable enough to work with something that wasn’t completely fine-tuned for you at the factory doesn’t mean many of the rest of us have any problems with these machines. I do manual bed leveling and I can walk away from my printer for a year, turn it on, and pop out as good of print as the previous time it was used. How well does your “real” printer work after a year of neglect and with all the fancy gizmos turned off?
- Comment on Could use some help. 4 months ago:
Hmm I’m out of ideas then, sorry. Still wouldn’t hurt to do a single-layer test print (there are various models that put squares all around the bed) just to see how that’s looking. If the issue had been confined to one side or one corner it might have been a mechanical issue, but random areas makes it a lot harder to figure out.
If I remember right, jerk settings should be rather small, like single-digits, but I think calibrating your e-steps will go a lot further for cleaning up the prints.
One other step (and of course I cannot remember what this is called) is related to calibrating the filament ‘pressure’ along each path. It takes a bit of work to set up but the goal is to create a profile so you get a perfectly consistent amount of filament extruded through the entire length of a path, which compensates for excess amounts at the beginning and end of each path, or too little extrusion through the middle. You might even have to compile your own firmware to enable it if there’s not an option in Marlin to turn it on from the software (I was compiling my own anyway for a DIY direct-drive extruder), but it really does make a difference and it’s a set-and-forget thing that you only really need to do once.
- Comment on Could use some help. 4 months ago:
Creality bases are notoriously NOT flat although I’ve heard their quality has improved over the years. I have one of the 1st-gen Ender 3 Pro machines with a terrible dip in the aluminum base. One nice thing about a thicker bed material is that you can use discs of aluminum foil the shim the base. I started with a glass bed and 13 layers of foil to get the glass reasonably flat. I have since moved to 3mm G10 with a PEI sticker which is working pretty well (in case you want to try PEI again). I found some scrap G10 material on ebay and chopped it with a table saw, sanded all the edges, then got a PEI sheet that was 10mm wider than my bed to allow for some slop. Putting down the stickers is a lot easier if you have someone helping you. Then trim the overhang and you’re ready to go.
- Comment on Could use some help. 4 months ago:
Yeah that’s a pretty tight range for the bed leveling, shouldn’t be causing any issues then. OK another possibility here… the failing prints, are they on the left side, right side, one specific corner, or does it tend to move around between prints?
E-steps varies per extruder, not per manufacturer. What they recommend will get you close but there will always be some variance. On my printer Creality recommended a setting of 93 but my measurements put me up around 98, so quite a difference. Are you still using a bowden tube style extruder or did you upgrade to a direct drive? And is your filament spool mounted on top of the printer (if so, what guides have you added for the filament path), or did you move it off to the side?
Erg sorry, jerk is probably what you’re looking for here. It’s been awhile since I did much printing so I keep confusing the terms.
- Comment on Could use some help. 4 months ago:
Belt tension should be tight enough that you can strum it and hear a tone. It’s possible to tighten a belt TOO much, which causes extra stress on the motors. This would result in the motors being physically very hot. However if these were both printed at the same time, that wouldn’t be the issue here.
I wonder, how level is your bed? Yes yes, you have a bltouch and all that, but you still need to manually get your bed relatively level. Were these two prints next to each other or on opposite sides of the bed? How did the other prints in the same batch compare (like was there an obvious pattern of failure from one side to the other)? The bad print looks to me like the nozzle is too close, so it might be interesting to see what your first layer looks like in a test across the bed.
Even in the good print there’s some blobbing at the end of each path and the main surface should be the same height as the walls around the cutouts. Did you calibrate your E-steps? It kinda looks like you’re pushing out a little too much filament. depending on your slicer options, you may also check acceleration to slow down the head at the end of each path, which can help give the whole path a more uniform output.
One other consideration, although not as likely… Warm up the bed and check to see if all areas feel like they’re about the same temperature. If part of the heating element went bad then maybe you’re over-heating one part to compensate for a lack of heat on the rest of the bed. I only mention this because the bad print looks like it has a slant to it, but that could be an illusion of the photo.
- Comment on Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible 4 months ago:
How much privacy do you have when someone has your account password?
- Comment on Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible 4 months ago:
Gee are you implying that storing passwords in plaintext is a bad thing? /s
- Comment on If the Universe Is a Hologram, This Long-Forgotten Math Could Decode It 4 months ago:
I’ll have to check it out, thanks for the link!
Yeah this article is really long, and a lot of it is over my head (especially the math), but they have brought up several interesting points and provided a much easier-to-understand model of the holographic universe. I mentioned this theory in another post here a few months ago and was basically shut down with claims that this wasn’t even possible and the theory had been long-discounted, and yet here we are with modern work still plugging away at the concept. It makes me appreciate just how much hell all scientists go through when they posit theories that contradict other people’s personal beliefs.
- Submitted 4 months ago to science@mander.xyz | 3 comments
- Comment on Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability to Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton 4 months ago:
I’ve also read about the John Deere issue as a leading instigator of right-to-repair laws. They weren’t able to provide authorized local repair techs when a tractor breaks down, so farmers were stuck waiting 1-2 weeks for someone to show up while crops were rotting in the fields (think of how fast your fresh fruit rots in your kitchen and then imagine dozens of fields of that crop going to waste). And the biggest insult was when the repair tech drove into town for a $5 part that the farmer had already identified but couldn’t replace because of manufacturer lockouts.
- Comment on A ZX Spectrum in the Palm of Your Hand 4 months ago:
I still have my original ZX81 with the 16k RAM pack. Taught myself programming on that machine. Would be interesting to try and recover some of my tapes, except it’s been years since I’ve seen any tape recorders kicking around.