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

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  • Many years ago, I attended a Windows XP launch event. The Microsoft presenter had the perfect line to describe how MS views this:
    “Why should you upgrade to Windows XP? Because we’re going to stop supporting Windows 98!”

    This was said completely unironically and with the expectation that people would just do what MS wanted them to do. That attitude hasn’t changed in the years since. Win 10 is going to be left behind. You will either upgrade or be vulnerable. Also, MS doesn’t care about the home users, they care about the businesses and the money to be had. And businesses will upgrade. They will invariably wait to the last minute and then scramble to get it done. But, whether because they actually give a shit about security or they have to comply with security frameworks (SOX, HIPAA, etc.), they will upgrade. Sure, they will insist on GPOs to disable 90% of the Ads and tracking shit, but they will upgrade.








  • Ya, my printer leaves a lot to be desired and I had a heck of a time getting even one to print cleanly. So, I didn’t want to have one fail and ruin the batch. I did print the last two I needed together, over night. Was running out of time and just went for it.
    Each one was about 4.5 hours printing and 10-20 minutes of cleanup. These required a lot of supports. I did 24 in total.
    But, they were a hit at the party, so it was worth it.



  • While it’s true that “It depends on your business needs”, most often I’ve seen backup schemes which work on a minimum of a daily backup of most data. For example, on a larger, busier system, it might have a full backup done over the weekend when the system isn’t as busy and therefore has a lower business impact. Then daily differential backups are done each night. For smaller systems, it might just be a full backup of critical data every night.

    For highly active, critical SQL databases, I’ve also seen this extended where the a full backup was done of the database weekly, with differential backups done nightly and transaction log backups done every 15 minutes. This obviously had full transactional logging turned on for the critical databases.

    As a concrete example, on my home “server” (desktop with delusions of grandeur), the main data partition is running on ZFS with snapshots taken every 15 minutes, hourly, daily, weekly and monthly. The 15 min. snapshots are kept for an hour. Hourly snapshots are kept for 24 hours. Daily snapshots are kept for 31 days. Weekly snapshots are kept for 8 weeks. Monthly snapshots are kept for 12 months. There’s a bit of overlap in the daily and weekly schedules, as those are most likely to cover my arse from an “oops” factor.

    The downside of the snapshot setup is that it doesn’t provide disaster recovery. And, I’ll admit, for my home stuff I haven’t gotten around to sorting this out. Ideally, I should be taking a weekly backup, compressing and encrypting it and pushing it to a cloud service somewhere. Laziness has meant that hasn’t been done yet.



  • Overall this looks like under-extrusion, I’d try a few things:

    1. Check the flow rate in your slicer. Make sure it didn’t get bumped down by accident.
    2. Check the filament diameter in the slicer. This getting set wrong can cause all kinds of headaches.
    3. Slow down the print. The extuder may not be able to push plastic fast enough to keep up with what you are trying to do.
    4. Raise the tool temperature. The plastic may not be melted enough to flow well.
    5. Check for a clogged nozzle. Try doing a cold pull to clear the nozzle. Google “cold pull” for good instructions on how to do one.
    6. Watch for the extruder slipping while printing. If the extruder has worn, it’s teeth may not be engaging the filament well and not pushing it as expected.
    7. Try different filament. Maybe you have a bad batch and it’s just giving you problems.
    8. Replace the nozzle. They do wear out and start causing funny problems.

  • History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
    What we are seeing is very similar to what it must have been like for folks seeing machines take over and greatly simplify labor intensive tasks during the Industrial Revolution. Textile mills moved from hundreds of laborers making cloth on hand driven looms to machines churning out fabrics at a blistering pace. The short term effect was a major problem for those laborers who were displaced with a long term effect of creating a more efficient economy, with cheaper products for everyone and most people benefiting from a higher standard of living.

    This sort of disruption happened again as computers took off. The Digital Revolution displaced many office workers. Many manual processes were replaced with digital sensors, switches and machines. For example, it was no longer necessary to have huge floors in an office building where typists manually copied documents. Again, a large number of workers suffered a major short term impact, but the long term outcome has been a net positive for society.

    And things got disrupted again with the rise of the internet. Having lived through this one personally, the echoes of it are quite clear. The Internet disrupted a lot of existing systems. The rise of internet commerce was the death knell of brick and mortar businesses. The Internet was going to replace everything from banking to schooling. And ya, it caused a lot of job loss at all the stores it drove out of business. And it did drive stores out of business and continues to do so.

    I suspect that, in 50 years or so, we’ll look back at this time as the beginning of the “AI Revolution”, and see it as an overall net positive. That isn’t to say that there won’t be people negatively impacted by the change. Writers and artists are very obvious casualties. Many other workers will find their jobs affected by AI as well. However, it’s also worth noting that we are nowhere near strong, general purpose AI. And what AI is likely to become, for now, is a tool to increase the productivity of professionals. It will mean that fewer people are needed to perform a task. But, there will still be a need for people to oversee the and direct the AI. The Industrial Revolution wasn’t the end of the world, neither was the Digital Revolution or the Internet Revolution. The AI Revolution won’t be the end of the world either.




  • I have a box of 8mm round x 3mm thick neodymium magnets and a box of 8mm round x 1mm thick neodymium magnets. Originally, I got the 3mm thick ones for a print I got of thingiverse and then the 1mm thick ones for some stuff I waned to do. Overall, I use the 1mm thick ones more. But the 3mm ones are nice when I want a solid connection. That they are 8mm in diameter is probably less important than just having standard sizes I can design around. So, I’d say have some standard magnets you can design around. The exact sizes are probably less important; but, knowing you have them, you can plan for them.