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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • The Free Press. (They are a monthly subscription) Journalists who left the New York Times. I find most of their articles to be refreshing and insightful. They seem to be truly middle-left for American politics. They don’t try and feed on outrage to gain clicks. You’ll find less low hanging fruit like Trump rage-bait, and provide more thoughtful, unbiased reporting like NPR used to back in the day. I learned about them from an article where a right-leaning NPR editor did an interview with them about lack of balance at NPR and was subsequently fired for his views. As someone who’s listened to NPR for decades It really hit home as I listened to it happen over the years in real time. I value balance over the unchecked shift to one side or the other. I really enjoy the Friday editorial newsletter, TGIF. The humor is a good way to wrap up the week.

    If I have one complaint it’s that the stories skew Israel/Jewish heavy, but given that the founder is Jewish. I understand why and can forgive it. They have plenty of good talent working other stories so there is always a good read.








  • Windows 11 has taken a feature from Linux distros called “Task View” where you can create additional “desktops”. You could do something similar with that and forego the additional laptop/desktops.

    This might be a little unorthodox, but this is an option to reduce hardware costs and maximize desktops.

    • 1x PC
    • 4x Monitors (or more if you want to buy another video card)
    • 1x server to be used as a Proxmox Virtualization Environment server to host as many desktop OS’s as you want.

    you can split your four-monitor workstations’ screen real estate any way you like. keep using the same mouse and keyboard and just tab through the virtual workstations that you need to work on.

    Proxmox is free for personal use. You can run it on a dedicated desktop workstation connected to your network. you are limited to the resources in your hardware. RAM, CPU, Storage. you’ll be slicing that up between the number of Virtual Machines that you create, so think about what you will be wanting. For example, if your specs are one desktop with 8G of ram and 128G of disk space. multiply that time the number of workstations you want, add the basic requirements of Proxmox as a server, and you have a good idea of what you are going to need.

    If you want tons of resources you could buy a decommissioned server off of ebay. something akin to a Dell R720 or better. They can be upgraded to quite a bit of RAM and storage space. I think mine has something like 2 physical CPU’s @ 32 cores, 256G of RAM, and 3.2T of disk space (RAID10). I paid around $500 for mine a few years ago. and a few dollars more to max out the RAM, and a few dollars more to add some sold state drives in the drive bays. The entire system came in under the cost of a mid-range gaming pc. or a little under the price of one NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080.


  • I haven’t owned a phone with removable storage since the Samsung Galaxy S5 back in 2015. (I miss that phone) Since then I’ve gone from iPhone, to Pixel, to Pixel, to iPhone, to iPhone. None of which had/have removable storage. Personally I don’t require much storage. The largest consumer of storage on my current phone is “Messages” at like 10G. I’m pretty sure the Photos app offloads photos to iCloud regularly so It says only 1G of storage.


  • The new-ish Federal Trade Commission head has been making a push to work on quite a few projects for the past couple of years. They have a very small resources and man-power compared to the war chests of multibillion dollar companies, but recently, somehow managed to bring charges against Google as a monopoly. This in my opinion is a good thing. I consider myself a social liberal and a fiscal conservative. I don’t like how our government seems to take the money of these companies and turn a blind eye as they do what they want in pursuit of the almighty dollar. I support her endeavors working for the interests of the majority of people and not those few with the most money.


  • The best upgrade I made for the Ender 3 for adhesion was a PEI coated build plate. I don’t know the specs of the V2, but the brand I went with was “Wham Bam Systems” mine didn’t have a magnetic bed so I had to purchase the kit with the magnetic plate, and stainless steel PEI coated build surface. It was nice being able to pull off the plate and pop prints off of it. Be careful printing PETG on PEI it can fuse to the PEI

    If the V2 has some sort of leveling system make sure it’s working correctly or the PEI sheet isn’t really going to help. Mine did not. I had so many failures where the print head crashed into the sheet and gouged it. The Z end stop wasn’t the best. I added a BLTouch probe and flashed the firmware and it got much better.


  • Creality is good because they brought an entry level 3d printer to market for an affordable price, and people like me got into the hobby because of that. The price point shows in the parts they use to assemble it. I’ve clocked countless hours learning how to correct failures, and upgrade the cheap parts for better, more reliable parts, add features, modify and flash firmware.

    Five and a half years ago I bought that ender 3 pro. I think it was around $250 USD. I probably spent over $300 more upgrading it and replacing parts. In retrospect I shouldn’t have cheaped out, but that’s the conclusion I came to. I no longer want to waste time fixing the printer. If I walk away and don’t print anything for weeks/months at a time I’d like to have confidence when I fire it up it’s going to work.

    I ordered a Prusa MK4S about a month ago which was the top-end hobbyist printer back then, and I am blown away by the difference. Prusa may not be the top at the moment, but the quality and support is there.

    I recommend that unless you have the free time, you’re willing to tinker, and are not easily frustrated, you should look into a higher quality brand.




  • Couch co-op is rare these days, but I would like to see more co-op in general. I used to have game nights on Friday night with friends on discord, but we just ran out of good games to play. Limiting factor being how many people can play at the same time. Most of the co-op games we have right now seem to be designed to make you miserable. You’re gonna fail, but how long can you last? I just want to have some fun with 2-6 friends without getting discouraged. One of the best ones we played was “Golf With Your Friends”. I don’t even like golf, but we all could play, no one had to sit out, and we had a blast until it got boring.




  • Ethernet speeds historically were measured in 10/100. In my past life I worked for an a small rural isp. And part of my learning I was taught that cat5 was 8 strands of wire, or 4 twisted pairs. I got very familiar with crimping patch cables. If one strand were cut a network card would negotiate down to its lowest speed and still work at 10mbps. Operating on 4 wire or two pairs. It’s possible with those numbers you had a bad connection, or a broken strand in the cable and it auto negotiated down to 10mbps. To this day I still crimp my own cables, and I own a cheap cable tester to make sure the crimps and cables are good.


  • I’ve had very bad luck with raspberry Pi’s and SDCards. They just don’t seem to last very long. I swapped to usb storage and things got somewhat better. I just had a usb drive die after 3 to 4 years of use. When I was still using SD it seemed like multiple times a year. Heat. Power loss, you can only punch holes in silicon so many times before it wears out. Whatever the reason.

    My approach for this is configuration backup not the entire os. I think this approach is better for when it’s time to upgrade the os or migrate to a new system.

    For my basic Pi running WireGuard and DNS, I keep an archive of documentation on steps to reconfigure the system after a total loss. Static configs are backed up once, and If there are critical configuration items that change then I back those up weekly. I’ve got two systems (media related servers, not Pi’s) that I keep ansible playbooks to configure 90% of the system from scratch so it’s as hands off as it can be.