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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2024

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  • If you average out the low precision, high accuracy shots you will get a single point as your result. If that point is not already in the dead centre, then increasing accuracy is simply a matter of shifting that point closer to it. You can do that without increasing precision by moving the entire shot spread in that direction.

    I’ve found this analogy often confuses people because in the shooting world the terminology is a little different. There the high precision spread would be considered high accuracy, with it only being a matter of adjusting the sights to get it on centre. And nobody is winning a shooting competition by arguing that the average of their shot spread is in the centre.


  • I was watching live when Trump called in, and the astronauts were clearly trying to emphasize the benefits of diversity and co-operation, and I’m quite sure none of that sunk in. Trump was too busy mispronouncing names, not knowing the difference between the name of the mission and the name of the craft, big noting his own role in funding NASA (while his administration has been actively attacking NASA) and generally waffling on because he likes to listen to himself speak.

    The next call after that also had the NASA director comment something like “I’m sure this call won’t be as special as that last one” whereupon commander Wiseman burst out laughing so I’m pretty confident those involved in the mission are not in Trump’s camp. Which is to be expected, because their jobs require them to be humans with functioning brains.




  • I’ve been able to freely export .step files for anything I’ve made in Onshape. As another commenter said there are catches, like all your files are public if you’re using the free version and there are premium features that require payment. But it’s currently not locked down like it seemed Autodesk were preparing to do, where all your files live on their cloud only and can never be exported. For sure there is potential for the same enshittification with Onshape though, which is why I hope the freecad devs soldier on.

    Also if you’re worried about your files being public, just name them with codes indecipherable to anyone but you. It doesn’t seem like the public file repository actually gets searched that much in general, and with a meaningless code the odds of someone finding and stealing a specific design are probably near zero.


  • Time to give it another try I guess. I used Fusion almost exclusively until I switched to Linux (and have also used Solidworks in the past), and I found freecad 1.0 to be an exercise in frustration.

    I gave it a very solid shot, but after many hours messing with it and watching tutorials I decided to try Onshape instead. I was able to become comfortable and productive in Onshape in less than half the time it took me to lose my cool with freecad.

    The 1.1 update looks to be addressing some of the pain points, so they seem to be on the right track. I hope they keep that momentum going.




  • It’s curious seeing people equate warm lighting with old people and old homes. Maybe it’s just my region but everybody (especially boomers) switched to CFLs when those came out and then to the cheapest, nastiest cool LEDs with cornea-melting levels of blue light after that. Sometimes I feel like the only sane person when I’m walking around and seeing the insides of houses lit up the same color as you’d get from a $5 flashlight 15 years ago.

    I have 4000k in the kitchen and bathroom and 2700K or 3000K everywhere else. After reading this thread I’m considering finding some high CRI adjustables because I also find the 4000k lights pretty harsh at night.


  • The Ender was good when it worked, which it did really well for a year or two after I spent a lot of time and energy getting it sorted. But then things started to go downhill. In the hot end I had the heater cartridge, thermistor and cooling fan all fail separately but fairly close together. I had Z screw runout issues and had to replace the brass nut. The extruder housing cracked and had to be replaced with an aluminum one. Limit switches failed. V rollers failed. It suddenly developed adhesion issues with the glass bed and glue stick I’d been doing for years. Scuffing up the bed didn’t work, replacing it with a new glass bed didn’t work, scuffing the new glass bed didn’t work. I switched to a magnetic PEI bed, that worked but it conforms to the horrific banana shape of the Ender’s factory bed and I can only print on a single quadrant of it at a time because of the massive dips in between the screws.

    This is just the stuff I remember from years ago. I enjoyed tinkering and upgrading the Ender in the early days but I’m older now and have other stresses on my time. I just want something that works.


  • Thanks for the advice everyone. I’ve been researching the suggested printers, though options are somewhat limited in my area and pricing varies to US retail. I’d hoped the Ender 3 price tier had approached a more turn-key experience by now, but it seems pretty hit or miss with the Ender 3 V3 SE as far as I could tell. It looks like out of what’s available the Qidi Q1 Pro gets me what I want and is the best bang for buck in local pricing.




  • Fedora has a policy of not shipping with non-free/proprietary packages. So depending on what wifi adaptor you have the driver might not be present by default. It’s easily fixed by enabling non-free/third party repos after installation, but the annoying gotcha with wifi drivers is you might not have an alternative way to reach the internet to do that.




  • I enjoyed playing Andromeda, in fact I think gameplay-wise it’s the most fun of any mass effect. But story and character wise it was so mediocre that very shortly after finishing it I couldn’t tell you who anyone was or any of the things that happened.

    It might have been better off with a different spin-off name that made it clear it was in the same universe but wasn’t really Mass Effect, because it kinda misses the mark for what those games were about.