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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • I managed a CentOS system where someone accidentally deleted everything from /usr, so no lib64, and no bin. I didn’t have a way to get proper files at the time, so I hooked the drive up to my Arch system, made sure glibc matched, and copied yum and other tools from Arch.

    Booted the system, reinstalled a whole lot of yum packages, and… the thing still worked.

    That’s almost equivalent to a reinstall, though. As a broke college student, I had a laptop with a loose drive, that would fall out very easily. I set it up to load a few crucial things into a ramdisk at boot, so that I could browse the web and take notes even if the drive was disconnected, and it would still load images and things. I could pull the cover off and push the drive back in place to save files, but doing that every time I had class got really tiring, so I wanted it to run a little like a live system.






  • Cost is obviously a big factor. Almost every printer can change to any nozzle size and layer height for just the cost of the nozzle. Print volume is a major limitation, depending on your use case. The filaments it can print will probably be the same across any relatively low cost printers, with the only significant change being direct drive vs. Bowden.

    Bed leveling is huge, and makes probably the most difference in print quality on low cost printers these days. If there’s an easy way to tension the belts, that’s a plus. If there isn’t a power switch on the front (or even if there is), a emergency stop switch can be a help, like if the nozzle is running into the bed.

    Maintenance varies from printer to printer, generally you’re aiming for tight but not too tight on any belts or rollers. If the pulleys on the motors aren’t preinstalled, use something like loctite blue to fix them in place better.

    Also make sure if you plan to buy a printer that it’s got a decent amount of community around it. Running into the same problems with a bunch of other people is a big plus as a beginner, so popular printers are better.

    Teaching Tech made a calibration guide website that I’ve had a lot of good experiences with.






  • I’ve known a lot of math people, and /on average/ I think they’re more capable of programming useful code than the other college graduate groups I’ve spent a lot of time working with (psychology, economics, physics) /on average/.

    That said, the best mathematicians I’ve known were mostly rubbish at real programming, and the best programmers I’ve known have come out of computer engineering or computer science.

    If you need a correct, but otherwise useless implementation, a mathematician is a pretty good bet. If you need performance, readability, documentation, I’d look elsewhere most of the time.






  • The I²C bus on pins 12 and 15 is definitely a serial interface, and arguably each color is serial, even if they’re not… the traditional sort.

    It is quite amusing how many less ambiguous serial connectors they could have trivially chosen. PCI-E, ethernet (8P8C), SATA, SAS, HDMI, FireWire… the options are numerous.