• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • As far as the rest of it, it seems to be happening with every filament I slice in Prusa slicer.

    This just reminded me of an issue I was facing recently. I also use Prusa Slicer and was having a hell of a time with my prints. It turned out to be the “Arc Fitting” setting.
    In Print Settings - Advanced - Slicing look for the *Arc Fitting setting. When I had it set to “Enabled: G2/3IJ” it just completely borked my prints. Just weird problems all over the place. As soon as I set that to “Disabled”, it cleaned up my prints considerably. Not sure exactly what I’m giving up there, but I do know I’m getting much better prints.


  • If you haven’t yet, try a cold pull and see if that helps. I personally just do a cold pull every time I change filaments. Maybe it helps, maybe it’s overkill, but I rarely have issues around clogs.

    Other things to think about:

    1. Does this happen with other filaments? Maybe your current filament is wet and needs drying. Maybe you just got a bad batch.
    2. Does slowing down the print speed for infill make a difference? Perhaps this filament is just flowing differently and you need to change the printing temperature, flow rate, or just slow down.
    3. How old is your nozzle? They do wear out and a worn out nozzle can manifest as all kinds of wonky problems.




  • It is now functionally impossible to detect anything about the traffic or the Wi-Fi router without some serious or illegal methods.

    You should really spend some time learning about WiFi signals. Tracking down rogue Access Points is a pretty common thing and having the SSID turned off does fuck all to prevent it. On the easy end, many enterprise wireless network controllers have rogue AP detection built right in and will show you a map of the location of the rogue AP. Harder, but still entirely possible, is running around with a setup just detecting the signal and triangulating it.




  • Re-read what I wrote, but hop down off your high horse first, it’s obvious you weren’t able to read it clearly from up there. I’m neither promoting nor defending piracy. Quite the contrary, I’m praising the legitimate services (and Steam in particular) for understanding that competition with piracy isn’t all about money, it’s often about the quality of service. Funny enough, your own comments are actually a point in favor of this:

    You ever wonder why these companies don’t operate in countries that don’t have strict piracy laws and can’t shut down sites with court orders? Because it’s still easier to pirate than face criminal charges.

    Yet somehow, with a lot of time, money and effort put into shutting down piracy, the pirates were able to provide a better service. Seriously, step back from the whole “napster bad” for a moment and think about the dissonance of the situation. Large companies, pulling in millions of dollars a year, with no need to worry about law enforcement or monied interests coming after them, somehow failed to create anything resembling a functional digital marketplace. They were stuck in the physical distribution paradigm and fought tooth and nail to avoid digital distribution. At the same time, a few kids, with little money, and law enforcement trying to shut them down created a pretty good user experience. Sure, some of that is not having to worry about licensing. But, a large part of it is understanding what the users want and giving it to them.

    It wasn’t until Apple came along and basically created “Napster, but legitimate” that music piracy really fell off. Netflix pulled off something similar with video (though that is rebuilding some rough edges at the moment) and Steam did it for games. Sure, piracy still exists, and it will always be a problem. But, a lot of piracy can be tamped down by having a good service available.


  • One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. – Gabe Newell, 2011

    Time and again, digital distribution platforms have proved this. Apple Music became a dominant music distribution platform at the height of Napster, LimeWire and other peer to peer sharing apps. They did it, because it was easier to just buy the tracks/albums you wanted than to dig through trackers and websites which may or may not actually have what you want. Netflix became the de-facto source for streaming movies at a time when BitTorrent was common and well known. Again, they made it easy and convenient, while not charging an arm and a leg. Steam also faced competition from BitTorrent piracy. But again, Steam made buying, downloading and running games easier than the pirates. And people are willing to pay for that convenience and not dealing with the crap which floats around the high seas.

    And, so long as Steam continues to treat it’s customers right, those customers will keep coming back. And that’s the problem with Pitchford’s whole premise. Developers will go where the customers are. Sure, you’ll get the odd case of a publisher/developer doing an exclusivity deal. But even then, it’s probably limited, because the customers are on Steam. If another storefront wants to draw customers, they need to start with treating customers well. They will still face headwinds, as Steam has a large “first mover” advantage. But, success is going to start with making customers want to come back.



  • A few from my list:

    • Darknet Diaries - Interviews with interesting people around hacking and cybersecurity. This includes a lot of the actual criminals themselves and you get to hear their motivations and how they did what they did. Really neat for understanding the minds of folks who do bad things.
    • FiveThirtyEight Politics - This one is good for staying abreast of US politics, polling. While the political bias of the hosts is pretty obvious, this is less punditry and more about the numbers.
    • Risky Business with Nate Silver Maria Konnikova - A neat podcast covering risk, poker and politics. Just a good listen for thinking about risk and probabilities in life.
    • The Lawfare Podcast - Lawyers talking about the law, and how it shapes and is shaped by whats in the news. Great for getting a legalistic view of the world.


  • Honor is a social construct which is used to promote “pro-social” behavior. It can be useful in the absence of or in concert with other systems of social control (e.g. laws, religion). Of course, “pro-social” is very much a construct of what the creating society considers to be positive. This can include acting in ways which we, in our current social constructs, would consider “anti-social”. Honor ends up getting idolized in media because it often includes an element of self-discipline and self-sacrifice and is usually associated with warrior cultures. Though, it also tends to be conservative and resist changing as social mores change. This has led to some famous consequences as honor based systems tried to cling to social constructs which were no longer tenable. For example, the Satsuma Rebellion saw the existing feudal class seek to maintain it’s grip on power in then face of a changing society.

    Ultimately, any system of honor would need to be taught to new adherents. It’s no different from a religion or legal system in that regard. No one comes out of the womb fully indoctrinated to a system of honor. So no, it isn’t really self-explanatory. Like any social construct, you would need to define the system and how it interacts with the society in which is was created. Otherwise, it’s just naming a system for social control and hoping no one notices that it’s a hollow shell.


  • Have you considered just beige boxing a server yourself? My home server is a mini-ITX board from Asus running a Core i5, 32GB of RAM and a stack of SATA HDDs all stuffed in a smaller case. Nothing fancy, just hardware picked to fulfill my needs.

    Limiting yourself to bespoke systems means limiting yourself to what someone else wanted to build. The main downside to building it yourself is ensuring hardware comparability with the OS/software you want to run. If you are willing to take that on, you can tailor your server to just what you want.


  • Software is not political, it’s just code executing on a machine and doesn’t care what you believe.
    There is a lot of politics surrounding software.

    Politics is the tool we use, as a society, to decide how we’re going to run said society. There will be areas of politics where different factions will adopt different attitudes about different bits of software. So, some software will be politicized. But, the software itself is only political in so far as we are having political discussions around it, the software itself doesn’t care.


  • Pretty standard stuff here:

    • UBlock Origin
    • No Script - Yes, I run both UBO and NoScript, they have slightly different use cases
    • Dark Reader
    • FireFox Multi-Account Containers
    • Redirector - Great for automagically changing links
    • KeePassXC-Browser - For password manager integration
    • Rested - For monkeying with REST APIs
    • User-Agent Switcher and Manager - Why yes, I am the browser you are looking for
    • Video DownloadHelper - Because sometimes, you need stuff available offline
       
      In terms of actually recommending extensions to others. I’d recommend most of the above, excepting NoScript. If you are using UBO, then the use case for NoScript is a very narrow one where you want selective whitelisting of javascript while visiting a site. UBO’s blacklisting approach works for most cases and UBO’s whitelisting feature is lacking the granularity of NoScript.


  • I run OctoPrint in a docker container on my home server. They have an official docker image available. And they also have a docker-compose.yaml file available.

    I’m quite happy with the setup. The server is more stable (for me) than a small board computer. I have the whole setup on a UPS. Management is dead simple. The only caveat is that the server and printer need to be fairly close to each other for the USB connection. In my setup that was already a given, they sit less than a foot apart because of where I wanted them.

    I have wanted to try out Klipper , and may well do that in docker as well, but my printer is a proprietary nightmare and Klipper isn’t currently an option.