My 3D printer wishlist

3D printing things is one of my hobbies. And while I am reasonably happy with the printer I currently have,there’s always a new and shinier resin 3D printer around the corner.

But they rarely manage to really excite me in the way that I actually want to swap.

So, this is the laundry list of things that I want to see in one machine:

  • A heated vat or chamber. I print with an open window, and that means the room can get cool or even cold. 3D printer resin has a certain optimal working temperature, usually between 25 and 30 degrees celsius. That means a bit of heating.
  • A bed pressure sensor. That is pretty useful for two things: It tells the printer when there is something stuck on the bottom of the resin tank, and whether the print is releasing fine from the film. I haven’t yet had a printer with such a sensor, but I hear brilliant things about them.
  • A tilting resin vat. Again, not something that I had so far, but the Prusa MSLA printer and the new Elegoo Saturn do feature this, and apparently it makes for cleaner and faster prints.
  • A decent build volume. 20×30×30 would be ideal, but 20×25×25 is fine too.
  • A decent resolution of pixels per cubic inch. Although, to be fair, all current printers have that. This is not where technology needs to advance.
  • Fill lines in the vat. Really, how hard is that?
  • A slide in locking mechanism for the vat. I have it on my GKTwo, and it is brilliant.
  • Same for the lever locking mechanism for the build plate. Again, brilliant.
  • Magnetic flexible steel sheets that attach to the build plate that aren’t after market installs. All the FFF 3D printers have these by now, why not the resin ones? It’s super useful.
  • Flip up lids, or doors. With a handle. None of this „lifting a shroud and then looking for a place to put it“ nonsense.
  • An easy way to add an external ventilation hose. Generally, good air management, to keep the resin fumes controlled.
  • A good way to filter the air coming out of the printer.
  • An easy-but-sturdy levelling system. Although again, the GKTwo one works fine for me.
  • A vat with a proper non-drip spout for emptying leftover resin.
  • A non-flimsy vat cover. Sealing the vat firmly, instead of just loosely sitting on it. I want to be able to shake the whole vat full of resin with the cover on!
  • A sensor to pause the print when resin runs out.
  • Feet on the vat, so you don’t scratch the FEP when setting it down somewhere
  • Easy to swap screens with a good screen protector by default.
  • A built-in way to cure the whole vat for capture leftover floating resin bits.
  • A built-in way for exposure testing multiple settings in one go, to speed up dialing in any given resin.
  • Any USB or memory card slots and buttons in the front of the device.
  • Surfaces with as little nooks and crannies as possible, to make cleaning the device easier.

The above are basically things I see as must haves in order to make me want to switch. The following are nice to have features:

  • Make the vat high enough to hold a whole litre of resin.
  • Wifi connectivity is nice, but not really that vital for me. IF there is some, I’ll mostly use it to monitor the print status and being able to cancel the print in case something went wrong. Starting a print is.. eh, not really a thing I’d do remotely.
  • But managing the sliced files on the printer over wifi, adding and removing them would be nifty.

I see printers that have some of these features, but not one yet that has all of them. Any takers? :)

10. Mai 2024 playing, testing Keine Kommentare zu My 3D printer wishlist

I have my own Mastodon instance now

One of the cool things of federated social media is that each instance can have their own rules and conventions.

One of the bad things of federated social media is that each instance has their own rules and conventions.

What do I mean? I started out on octodon​.social and felt pretty good there. Then I realized that a lot of people I followed initially went silent. Turns out that they were on infosec​.social, and for $reasons (reasons I understand, but don’t necessarily need to adopt myself) , the admin of octodon​.social blocked that instance. So I eventually and very reluctantly moved to hachyderm​.io. Turns out, the same thing is happening there too, just with different servers.

Fediverse moderation has several levels:

  • end user self-defense: „This person did something bad and I prevent them from interacting with me.“
  • moderating local content on a personal basis: „This person on the same server as me did something bad, so here are the consequences for them“
  • moderating external content on a personal basis: „This person on a different server as me did something bad, so I limit how they can interact with people on my server“
  • moderate external content on an instance basis: „I find this whole other instance suspect, so I limit how everyone on that whole instance can interact with people on my server“

If my personal sensibilities and those of the people who moderate my insteance differ (and they will absolutely differ to some degree!), you will at best just miss out on a bit of content but at worst will suddenly be cut off from people you interacted a lot.

This is compounded by the fact that there is no documented consensus for moderation across instances. (Like darcy​.is would have provided, btw :) ) You won’t know what’ll happen until it actually does.

So, for me, the problem is this:

A venn diagramm with four circles. Three circles are arranged so they do not overlap and are labeled A, B, C. The fourth circle is in the middle and overlaps each of the other three a bit and is labeled "me"

Yep, that is me, in the middle of a few non-overlapping communities. (There are also a lot of communities that do overlap, but let’s ignore those for now) So, when I join a server in community A, and A suddenly decides to defederate from C, I lose that chunk of people. When I join B instead, and they already hate A, I lose out a different chunk.

Finding that elusive instance Z that plays nice with everyone else is gonna be… hard.

And now that folks like Meta and others are opening ActivityPub servers lines are drawn in the sand: „If you federate with Meta, I will block that instance!“ Or „if you don’t protect the children, I will protect them from you!“. Or „We’re sex positive, if you block the furries, I’ll defederate from you!“ 

And here am I, just wanting to talk to my friends and see cat pictures. So, I opt out of the drama and have my own single-person instance now: @jollyorc@social.5f9.de No, don’t ask me if you can join it, I don’t want that kind of responsibility. Take 9 Euros per month and go to fedi.monster, they’ll help you out.

4. Juli 2023 testing Keine Kommentare zu I have my own Mastodon instance now

Spaß mit Technik: Neuer Wohnzimmeraltar

Cat staring at goat on TV

Vor 10 Jahren meinte die damalige Freundin, dass Split-Screen Spiele auf einem 23″ Bildschirm doch irgendwie meh seien. Ich kratzte ein wenig Geld zusammen, ging zum örtlichen Tech-Discounter und kaufte einen knapp doppelt so großen Fernseher. Bewusst das Auslaufmodell, das kostete nochmal weniger.

Jetzt in der neuen Wohnung schaute das ein wenig… verloren aus:

Im Grunde alles gut, aber aktuelle Filme und Serien zeigen wichtige Plot-Informationen auf den Bildschirmen der Smartphones der Protagonisten. Und ganz ehrlich, die können wir vom Sofa aus nicht mehr lesen :)

Etwas neues sollte also her, und es war ja auch grad Weihnachten…

Das ist ein Samsung The Frame 65″ QLED. Insgesamt ein schönes Bild, der Art Mode ist hübsch, und generell fügt sich Gerät gut in die Lücke hier ein.

Aber wie immer mit „smarten“ Geräten muss man einiges tun:

  • Hauptzuspieler ist die Chromecast. Das sorgt dafür, dass wir uns so gut wie nie durch die Samsung UI bewegen müssen.
  • Sicherheitshalber, und um unnütze Werbung (WTF?!) zu blocken, hat der TV per Firewall nur eingeschränkten Internetzugriff.
  • Die Box mit allen Anschlüssen ist im Schrank. Das hat den Vorteil, dass man keinen Kabelsalat sieht.
  • Nachteil: Ich kann die Sonos Soundbar nicht einfach so mit der Samsung-Fernbedienung steuern. Denn die Fernbedienung nutzt Funk, und die IR-Signale für die Soundbar kommen aus der Anschlussbox. Ich habe also einen billigen IR Extender gekauft, damit geht das gut, und ich konnte der Soundbar beibringen, auf die Samsung IR Signale zu hören.
  • Wir haben alle Bildverbesserungen abseits der Helligkeitsanpassung abgeschaltet, das sieht für uns irgendwie besser aus.
  • Ebenso haben wir Multiview ausgeschaltet, damit man bei Nutzung der Chromecast-Funktion vom Handy nicht erst jedes mal so einen blöden Bild-im-Bild Modus hat.
  • Ich muss noch einen einfacheren Weg finden um eigene Bilder in den Art Mode zu transferieren — der Standardweg über die Mobile App ist.. umständlich.

Alles in allem, kein schlechtes Gerät, wir sind zufrieden.

3. Januar 2022 testing Keine Kommentare zu Spaß mit Technik: Neuer Wohnzimmeraltar

this is why we can’t have nice things

As you may know, I am involved in https://darcy.is, an attempt to build a better social network atop of Solid. The developers are chugging along at a slow but steady pace, expect a new version to come out soon.

Solid itself is a really intriguing and awesome idea: Everything you want to share or publish, regardless of public or for a limited audience gets stored on your Solid Pod, completely uncoupling data from application and publisher.

So your theoretical Facebook posts and likes and comments would not be stored and owned by Facebook. They would just handle the presentation and feed and recommendations and so on. And if you want to change the network, you get to keep all your content and contacts.

Now, the way Solid is designed has one big constraint: You cannot change the URL that points at your pod, ever. If you do, all the links between your content and that of others would get lost otherwise. So, if a pod provider would got belly up, that would be a bad thing.

One of the earliest pod providers is solid​.community. Or rather. Was. The service is shut down. Which is fine, it was advertised as experimental anyway, it was free and purposely only had a very small storage space. It was meant for those earliest of adopters and for developers to see how all this works.

Alas, someone thought it would be helpful to keep it alive and managed to migrate everything to solidcommunity​.net.

Which is also fine and helpful, except two things:

  1. I, as a user on solid​.community learned about this whole thing from someone completely uninvolved in this process, basically by accident. The move included my login data, whatever private data I may or may not have stored on that Pod, everything. I have never agreed to this, nor do I have any idea who the new person is. That is a major GDPR violation, and erodes a LOT of trust.
  2. The move is useless. As I pointed out above, now that the URL is changed, none of the linked data is properly linked anymore. It completely broke everything. And considering the amount of data (I think there was 2 MB of available space), it is not even a thing of „hey, people probably want to keep this!“.
useless people links on my Solid Pod

Seriously, my Fellow Nerds, especially if you work on something that promises privacy: These things matter! No one will adopt your project, if you fuck this up, and here, you fucked up quite a bit.

Before you rant at me: Yes, I am quite aware that what I was using was basically a test system. And I bet that 99,9% of all other users of that system knew this too and acted accordingly. I highly doubt that any actual private data was compromised. And I don’t think there is any foul play involved. People did what they thought would be best. But, well, guess what: They thought wrong!

9. Oktober 2020 testing, working Keine Kommentare zu this is why we can’t have nice things