Sounds like a fun trip!

and used my 15 year old REI Chrysalis solo tent for the first time in a while. It continues to hold up

A lot of our camping gear is seriously old. A Coleman fuel stove and lantern from the 70s, which still works although TBH propane is somewhat appealing.

Our tent is the same tent I used as a kid - a “3 person” dome from Eastern Mountain Sports, which was basically a smaller scale REI store. The tent must be pushing 30 and is still going pretty strong. It’s held up really well to some pretty serious wind and rain on a few occasions too - much better than the newer tents of some of my friends. I low key dread having to eventually replace it.

Our kids are old enough to start camping with us soon, so it’s about to see it’s third generation.

For ACM - like aluminium honeycomb?

ACM is more of a sandwich. Aluminum, plastic, aluminum.

I have a boring old klicky. It works very for me 🤷

Great read, with some amusing asides.

Shots fired!

We probably have the same model - the one with the big oval stand. Every once in a while I wish it was OLED and/or higher resolution, but it’s not worth the expensive or all the modern “features” such as these.

I personally am pretty happy with my 2.4, although I would suggest skipping the cable chains and going to an umbilical. I went the nitehawk route. If you’re going to be printing ASA or ABS add an under bed carbon filter and bedfans. I would also suggest skipping to ACM panels if you plan on big ASA/ABS prints.

If you dig through my comments you can see me talking about it. Mechanical bed leveling, that actually squares the gantary to the bed, and Z calibration make for very consistent first layers.

$1,200 is Voron and RatRig territory. Vorons cap out at 350 mm³ for build volume and 500mm³ rat rigs are $1,550. I agree that plenty of folks are probably over buy on printers, but if you want this kind of build volume the price seems reasonable - especially for a printer that ships assembled. Personally, I went the Voron route and if I wanted a larger printer I would probably either just make my 350mm taller or go the RatRig route.

That said, high velocity on a large format printer isn’t that useful for big prints IMO. You’re probably going be running a bigger nozzle and laying down wide/tall extrusions, which means you’re probably going to be limited by how fast your extruder can melt plastic. That’s the case on my Voron with a Rapido HF with “only” a 0.6mm nozzle, 0.8mm extrusion widths, and 0.3mm layer heights.

Not OP, but wanted to chime in.

I get the sentiment Some Gen Xers did grow up with home computers. However, I suspect those people are outliers due to both the cost and general user friendlyness. In the late 90s it seemed like everyone had a home computer, even the normies. This let their kids grow up messing around

It almost seems like we’re heading back in this direction, where normies have moved on to phones and tablets because they “just work”. I don’t think the average kid will grow up as immersed in computers as I did unless their parents are intentionally about making that introduction. I bought my kid a used Thinkpad for Christmas last year. Most of his peers have tablets or just stick to their smartphone.

Agree, but also - what if they aren’t declined and that’s just the way they were all along?

I have a coworker who’s a total idea factory, but struggles to communicate their ideas clearly. They’ve found LLMs grestly help writing their ideas in a way others can understand.

TBH, I am not that fond of the idea. After all, if a LLM can write what I do there’s not really a need for me. But I also wonder if I’m gatekeeping a bit. Even if I have a hard time empathizing with the situation, I understand that we all have different strengths and weaknesses. Maybe they’re just using a LLM to help fill in one of their weaknesses?

It’s probably either a long exposures or a bunch of stacked exposures to get decently even lighting.

These units are somewhat silly IMO. It all comes down to volumetric flow. Big nozzle + thick extrusions + thick layers would probably mean needing to print slower than that speed due to the ability of a hot end to melt the filament.

/ someone who has been mm^3/s constrained for a while now

For quite some time now, Marlin has been the firmware of choice for any kind of custom 3D printer, with only Klipper offering some serious competition in the open-source world

Confused Voron noises

It does seem like an interesting concept, but I wonder how much benefit it will have, both in tuning effort and final outcome.

Get your self a “fast” lens and you’ll be back to hand holding pretty quickly. Granted, you’ll lose depth of field so this may not work for every shot. Prime lenses are your best bet here. f/1.4 should be plenty but f/1.8 or even f/2 will do.

You can use the exposure information from the photos you took to play the “if I had a faster lens, what kind of ISO and shutter speed could I get away with”. The zoo lights photos I posted a few days ago in one of my comments were hand held.

EV calculator

That seems like a lot of damage for one week, but I guess anything is possible.

In general, plants don’t like sudden changes to their environment. That’s why you should gradually introduce indoor plants to sunlight if you move them outdoors - you’ll give them sunburn. I suspect the same is true for roots. I keep my orchids in bark and let them dry out some between waterings. I suspect if their roots were suddenly moist 24/7 they wouldn’t be too happy about it.

I hate to link reddit, but more info found here

That your company has an in-house software dev team is impressive. Does the revenue-generating business have access to that team?

Not OP, but in a similar situation. We have in-house dev for both tooling/infrastructure as well as revenue generation. For better or worse, leaders have neglected the software tooling and infrastructure that we use to build and deliver our revenue generating software for decades. Some serious cracks in the foundation showing and we might finally start fixing things.

I find that I’m really choosy with which landscape photos I like, but I really like the post photo and the first photo in the post. Nice work!

That’s probably the same one we have, or at least a closely related sibling.

Mine has two different speeds it follows, but yes - it doesn’t move very quickly. You can also mess with the angle of the sprayer which will impact the amount of water delivered to the area it covers.

tomateo tomoto

That’s good to know! We’re trying to get some seeds to start, so I’m not watering that deep. It seems like our first good spring rain drives out a bumper crop of worms - they’re all over the street. My kids enjoy going for a walk to collect them in a bucket to put them in our vegetable garden. That usually happens before the robins arrive though.

I got this one at my local ace hardware. It’s Nelson branded, but this general design has been around decades. I’m sure thrt are a number of different mechanical underpinnings. We’ve had this one 7 or so years in and it’s holding up well. It makes covering a large area very easy.

Same! It’s a great design if you’re lazy and want to cover a lot of area. I bought this one at a local ace 7 or so years ago and it’s been going strong with minimal attention.