• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • My friends are currently throwing a tantrum because I won’t “just enable Secure Boot and run Windows” to play Battlefield 6 with them. But I’ve never felt that I must play a specific game, so the few ones who are incompatible (usually due to bad anti-cheats) have been easy to ignore. There are plenty of good games I can play on Linux.





  • Paper levelling is not an exact method, you might need to manually adjust the Z offset depending on how the first layer looks. It’s also something you generally don’t need to do if you have a probe like crtouch, as it will be used to ensure that the nozzle is at a consistent distance from the bed everywhere, and the Z offset will decide how big that distance should be. Just be careful when adjusting the Z offset so you don’t end up ramming the nozzle into the bed, make small adjustments. If you put a lamp behind the printer you can visually check if the nozzle touches the bed, e.g. if you manually move the nozzle to 0.2mm height after adjusting Z offset, can be good to do a manual check before starting a full print.

    Unfortunately your photos are too blurry to give feedback, but if you want to you could try this: Print only the first layer for something simple and stop the print. Get a couple of strong lamps and put them next to your printer. Move the camera as close to the print as it can focus, could be around 20cm for a phone camera. Steady the camera against something solid, for example a stack of books.

    If you want to keep trying to level on your own, perhaps this infographic could help. SuperSlicer has a built in calibration wizard which might also be useful.

    And some general questions which might help troubleshooting your issue:

    • What kind of glue did you use? AFAIK it should have high PVA content, otherwise it might not do much.
    • How fast are you printing? Both first layer and rest of print. Printing too fast can lead to warping.
    • What nozzle size? Larger nozzles requires can require even slower speeds to avoid exceeding the hotend’s melting capacity.
    • Have you modified flow rate multiplier (slicer setting) or e-steps (printer firmware setting)?

  • Products targeted towards businesses have always been unreasonably more expensive than those targeted towards consumers. It sucks for us AI hobbyists that Nvidia are stingy with VRAM on consumer cards, but I don’t find it surprising.

    Personally I only have a single RTX 3090, but I know a lot of people online who are stacking multiple consumer cards to run AI. Buying used 3090s and putting them in a mining rig is probably still the best value for money if you need a large amount of VRAM.

    How much VRAM do you actually need btw?




  • It’s not just you, there’s a financial incentive to write “reviews” which convince the reader to immediately buy the product, because of referral links. Even disregarding that the fact that it takes much more time and knowledge to write an actual unbiased review, you’ll most likely earn less money as you might dissuade readers from buying it, or even if you just make them think a bit more before going through with the purchase and they end up buying the printer somewhere else. I’ve started referring to these kind of pages as “fake reviews”, it plagues almost every product category and it has made it very unreliable to use the internet for buying advice.

    Though I suppose it’s even worse for 3d printing, as some manufacturers have been known to pay youtubers for positive reviews and to lie about their competitor’s printers. And even the ones who don’t get cash in the hand still have some incentive to bias their reviews, as pointing out a printer’s flaws or recommending to buy something else would make them less likely to receive more free products to review in the future.


  • It’s literally the same (probably exaggerated) marketing material as Sovol themselves are trying to sell their Kickstarter project with, reformatted to look like an article. Not surprising that it has a couple of “Click Here to Buy Now: $999 $1299 ($300 off). Hurry, only 94/200 left!” referral links…

    It might be true that Sovol has made some of the least bad budget printers recently, but anyone who has brand loyalty to any of the companies that make cheap 3d printers in China is bound to get disappointed sooner or later. Years ago Creality also made relatively good printers, using high quality parts and with acceptable quality control (e.g. OG Ender 3 era) and when they became market leaders they dropped the quality, and I would be surprised if Sovol didn’t do the same given the opportunity. I’d wait a couple of months after it’s released, and try to find some actual reviews.

    3D Printing discord’s List of 3D printers even has a generic warning for Kickstarter printers:

    More of a warning against kickstarter machines, up until now almost all of them huge failures, with delays in shipping and troubles in terms of QC. They just use the early backers as free quality check/beta testing for the most part. Remember you are not buying a product on kickstarter, you are paying for a possibility to get a product.



  • If I, a humble computer hobbyist can figure out Nix, why don’t more users do so, and why is Nix so niche?

    My guess as to why this isn’t a more central feature of Linux distros is that this is not something most users need. If you need to reinstall the OS because you broke it, then a full system backup is probably more convenient, even if it’s less than optimal to back up packages which you could download. If you need to reinstall the OS because you want a clean slate when upgrading to a new version, then your package list for the old version could cause a lot of conflicts as maintainers regularly remove and add new packages.

    I have backed up my zsh, vim, tmux, etc. configs and written a few shell scripts which install them and download vim plugins etc. If I ever need to reinstall the OS I would use these. However, in the last 20 years since I ditched Windows I have reinstalled Linux exactly two times: Once because I was an idiot and didn’t have a proper backup when I accidentally formatted the wrong HDD, and once when I switched from Xubuntu to Fedora in which case a package list wouldn’t have been usable.






  • I use Fedora (KDE) and game a lot. While I mostly like it, I’ve had some problems with it that were non-trivial to solve, so if you’re a Linux beginner I would not necessarily recommend it to you.

    Perhaps Bazzite would be a good option? It’s based on Fedora and created with gaming in mind. I got it recommended here and installed it on a friend’s kid’s computer and he’s very happy with it so far.

    There’s also Nobara which builds on Fedora to create a gaming-focused distro.