For everyone following along at home: this website is worth a click if you’ve never seen it before!

Rinsing rice does wonders. Without a rice cooker you’ll need to strain it, but it’s still worth it.

1. Measure rice by volume. Let’s say 2 cups worth
2. Put into fine colendar and rinse until the water comes out clear. Mixing with your hand will speed this up. You can also do this in the pot you’re going to cook in and dump water out
3. Put strained rice in your pot
4. Add cold water. The ratio of water to rice matters a lot and varies by species of rice. The ratio will be printed on whatever container your rice came in. For Jasmin rice it’s 2 water to 1 rice, so for our two cups of rice you’ll need 4 cups of water
5. Cover, turn on medium-high heat, being to boil. Don’t go far because it will boil over when it does boil
6. Turn the heat down to low, crack the lid, and set a timer. The amount of time needed will vary based on rice. For Jasmin, 15 minutes is a good check-in time
7. Pop the lid. See water bubbling up? If yes, replace lid and come back in a few minutes. If not, use a wooden spoon to get a peek at the bottom of the pot. See water? If yes, replace lid and come back fairly soon to check again. If not, your rice is done. Turn the heat off, fluff, enjoy.

We made rice for years using this method and it is a very reliable cooking method. Rice doesn’t really leave you a lot of wiggle room though, which is where a rice cooker comes in handy. As an added bonus, some rice cookers come with water lines in them. I measure my dry rice into the cooker, rinse using the cooker, dump most of the water out, and fill to the appropriate level.

Different species of rice have very different textures and somewhat (subtle) different flavorss.

Some rice, like basmati, can be cooked using the pasta method (intentionally use way too much water and strain the excess off after the rice is cooked). I guess all rice could be cooked that way, but you would be giving up some starch.

You can always talk and express yourself! Absolutely no one will be upset if you do, assuming you don’t have wildly unpopular opinions and/or aren’t interested in rehashing politically fraught issues for the upteenth time. Find a vaguely appropriate community here and go nuts.

Building an audience over time is exactly how blogs, and publishing in general, work unless you start off with a lot of advertising or endorsements. For better or worse, there’s far more content than there is time for a large audience to read it all.

This gives you three choices:

• specialize and post in an existing community that’s aligned with that specialization. People will nearly always engage, especially if the content is good
• specialize and start your own blog. You could even try seeding it by referring people to it from already existing specialized communities. People will know what to expect content wise and keep coming back if the subject you’re talking about is interesting to them and the content is good
• don’t specialize and strike out on your own. If the content is good and you stick with it your audience will eventually grow. This will probably take more time because your audience will initially be looking for content that relates to what they’ve seen in the past, but what you’re really offering is your personality, writing style, world view, etc

Personally, if I’m looking for engagement I choose the first option.

Believe me, no one here is going to be upset if you write some interesting content. The real challenge will be whether or not your content find traction with the masses.

Both Lemmy and Reddit also favor new content over existing content, so expect decreasing engagement with a post as time wears on. This is different than a traditional forum, where a new comment will bump the whole thread.

I’ve kicked off a few good conversations here with OC, granted my posts tend to be more project/image based than what you’re thinking.

Ah, sorry. That does sound a bit hot for PLA. I still suggest a temp tower. If you’re having bed adhesion issues, have you cleaned your bed with dish soap lately? Be sure to use only paper towel to clean/dry it - not a sponge or towel. If that’s impractical, I’ve found Windex to work better than IPA.

For PETG that’s not that hot. On my i3 clone I was usually 70 bed and 230-235 nozzle. I would try a temp tower and do what looks best. Based on what you’ve said so far, temp does seem like a possible culprit.

A lot of my camera gear is second hand too. It’s a great way to save some serious $$. As an added bonus, some of my “used” gear was very lightly used by their previous owner.

The true best gear is the gear you end up using

I dabble in photography as a hobby. One of the sayings is, “the best camera is the one you have with you”. The “best” cameras and lenses tend to be big and heavy, but are often overkill. There’s a certain amount of prestige attached to this gear, IMO you’re better off with compromise gear that’s smaller/lighter - especially for frequent casual use. You’ll take it out with you more.

TIL: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

In publishing and graphic design, Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content

Pandora will play a lot of repeats :( it also seems to stick to “safer” (eg popular) songs. I’ve had much better luck with YouTube music. I’ve found a lot of eclectic, but very good, music using it.

https://ingenext.ca/products/boost-50

50 hp for $1k

I can’t find them right now, but there are similar things you can buy to unlock factory features at a discount.

That you’re looking for is called a flange mount. If you search your favorite search engine with “2mm flange mount” you’ll find some results. I do wonder how much torque you’ll be able to transfer, but given the shaft size I suspect you’re not looking at big loads.

They are harsh chemicals and people definitely aren’t even disposong of them correctly most of the time

This is what really gets me with resin printing :(

Aluminum’s expansion coefficient is 0.000023m/C. Using my Voron, let’s say the z extrusions are 530mm long and my extrusions go from 22 °C to 55 °C. This means they grow 0.35mm. That’s in total, so the effect at the print head isn’t 0.35mm, but let’s say my gantry rides 25% of the way up. That’s 0.0875mm, which is roughly 3x the z-offset of my last print.

2.4 owner here. Happy to hear some feedback on the SV08, it looks like a pretty good deal.

Fast (printed something that took 26 hours on the Ender, and it took less than 4 on the SV08

I’m surprised you saw that much of a speed improvement, but I guess I ran my old i3 clone somewhat fast. My print times were a bit faster on my Voron, thanks to cranking speed and acceleration, but the biggest time savings came from taking advantage of the much better hot end and using a 0.6mm nozzle with thicker line widths (I can cover nearly 2.0mm with two perimeters) and thicker layers (0.3 on most prints these days).

Finicky for the initial z-offset. Heat soak the bed for 30 min at 65 degrees, then run the automatic z-offset

Were you homing z with the bed cold? If homing z involves touching the build plate, I could see this. You could probably just adjust your start g-code to accommodate this. One of the nice things about the 2.4 is that the z end stop is bolted to the frame, so as long as your print routine is consistent you can dial it pretty easily.

That said, just wait until you enclose your printer. The frame will grow in z fairly significantly as it heats up. I’ve not let my printer heat soak, printed a number of sequential parts in one print, and watched the first layer squish getting worse and worse with each sequential part. Eventually filament won’t even stick to the build plate, so you need to tweak z-offset.

If you’re a Klipper user, odds are you’ll have easy access to both print hours and filament length extruded. Some marlin printers also track this information as well.

Granted, nozzle wear is also filament specific, but it’s better than nothing.

Let’s start backwards:

• If you want to print larger and/or high aspect ratio (say greater than 1:2 in terms of x:y or y:x) you’ll need an enclosure. You’ll likely need to actively heat it with bedfans. It’s also worth saying that you can run a fan with ASA/ABS, but only if your chamber is warm. Think 55-60 °C. As with other filament, fan generally helps quality. If you’re not able to crack 50 °C you should probably run fan off aside from overhangs
• These chamber temps mean you’ll probably want your electronics outside the chamer
• CoreXY printers lend themselves to being enclosed. Bonus points if the enclosure is easy to open if you want to print something like PLA, PETG, etc. I’ve found that bigger PETG prints do benefit from being enclosed, but I open the top of my enclosure
• CoreXY printers can be pretty quick. If you want to print quickly you’ll need an extruder that can keep up. Also note that mechanical speed only gets you so far. If you want to really drop print time you need bigger extrusions (width and height), which again means high flow needs

All of this sounds somewhat expensive TBH. Consider why you’re considering a new printer then ask yourself what on the market will help meet those needs - especially at your price point.

Haha, just like most brown sugar. Spoiler: it’s usually white sugar with molasses added back in.