For fuck’s sake, don’t talk about it. Don’t posture, don’t chest-beat, and don’t blather about it in public. Don’t give the fucker any warning. Just do it when he shows up.

Edit: This is real proposal, by an outfit called Reflect Orbital. I thought it might be a given that people reading knew this, but just in case I figure I ought to mention it anyway.

It’s a venture capital scam. I’ve commented on this startup’s deeply moronic idea several times, but the takeaway is that the math doesn’t work. These guys failed their middle school science classes and are desperately hoping all of their deep pocketed investors did as well. The allure of seeking rent on a natural resource is powerful, though, and of course everyone saw that episode of the Simpsons where Mr. Burns blocks out the sun with his giant disk. So here we are regardless.

You can’t reflect any more sunlight onto the Earth’s surface than you have surface area of satellites in orbit, and compared to the surface area of the Earth — even the relatively piddling fraction of its potential surface area with owners who might actually pay for such a service — you’d need an absurd number of satellites with enormous footprints, all in stable orbits where keeping them on target on the surface would not be feasible. But even one highly reflective satellite can handily fuck with somebody looking through a telescope, so it’s still a dick move even though it self-evidently won’t even begin to accomplish its stated purpose.

The Russians already tested such an idea and the results were underwhelming. Illumination over a relatively small area on the order of regular old moonlight is already a pretty piss-poor use of launch fuel when you can accomplish the same results much more easily and cheaply with, you know, terrestrial electric lights. Which we already have. In abundance. Reflect Orbital’s proposal that you’d be able to drive solar panels or even grow crops with the things are laughable. For reference, the Znamya satellite only managed to shine a dim patch of light onto the surface for around six minutes, during which the spot raced across most of Europe before the thing was no longer in a position to maintain an acceptable angle of incidence and then passed into the Earth’s shadow. The notion of keeping something like that acceptably on target for any useful length of time is laughable, and even then you’d need a whole horde of them all aimed at the same spot to get even part of the way towards the equivalent of daytime illumination.

And putting enough of anything in orbit in order to block out sunlight on anything approaching a meaningful portion of the Earth’s surface is right out.

No, no no. That’s only if you do it. If a huge corporation does it, see, that’s different. Corporations are “people” for the purposes of free speech (with money) or even voting (example), but when it comes time to throw somebody in jail for overtly criminal behavior, all of the sudden the legal system can’t find anyone to target.

It certainly is not. As administrator:

Get-AppxPackage -allusers *WindowsStore* | Remove-AppxPackage

Oldish used point-and-shoot cameras are very cheap on eBay and similar, and fill a niche that basically no longer exists in the new market because the current point-and-shoots are pretty much all prosumer grade models now that everyone else and their dog uses their phone as a camera instead.

So I’ll recommend a used example of whatever the newest Canon PowerShot SX1xx line you can get your hands on. I have my old SX130 IS but the 150 and the 160 are also excellent choices. SX160s are selling for about $120 USD on eBay right now.

These have optical image stabilization, a much larger sensor and thus better low light performance than any cell phone camera, very decent optics for a compact point-and-shoot, and here’s a very important factor: Everything in this series runs off of regular AA batteries. That means no scrounging around for proprietary lithium packs, nor hoping new-old-stock you find on eBay actually works, nor the myriad of charging and connectivity issues you’ll experience using knockoff battery packs. Provided you manage not to break the thing, you should be able to keep any PowerShot SX working for the rest of eternity, one way or the other.

These also have very long zoom ranges. The SX160IS is a 28mm to 448mm equivalent, or “16x” zoom in consumer parlance. Thus it can go from reasonably wide angle to very telephoto, all in one go.

There are a lot of even smaller models you can find like the Canon Digital Elph series, Panasonic Lumix, Nikon Coolpix S series, etc. but all of these without exception take titchy little proprietary lithium battery packs that are going to be a crapshoot. Fun to play with as a curio and very slick, but I would not be in a hurry to make any of those my primary camera these days.

I wear highly unfashionable hiking pants 365 days out of the year and I can fit my SX130 IS into any of my pockets comfortably. It’s got a smaller footprint than a modern smartphone, but is about four times the thickness.

Yeah, mine does it with everything.

The cause is immediately identifiable under magnification: There’s an engraving on the nib which crosses the split in the tines. Given the way capillary action works, this entices the ink to flow to where that engraving is and then stop there, because it tries to flow up the channel in the engraving and can’t, but it’s enough to cause surface tension to form there and that’s where the ink tends to hang out. If you press down so the tines spread a bit it’ll tend to slosh down to the point again, or you can tap the point against the paper and that’ll do it, too. But it’s still annoying.

I could probably get in there with one of my jeweler’s files or something and mitigate this, but I decided many years ago I couldn’t be arsed. I have other pens.

The closely guarded ancient ninja secret to DIY tire changes turns out to be to use actual professional tire bead lubricant. I finally got a gallon bucket of the stuff online which will probably be a lifetime supply, and using it almost feels like cheating. Forget about Windex and dish soap.

On every rim I’ve tried it on it completely eliminated the struggle other than breaking the bead on the crustier examples, for which I have a selection of bead breaking tools anyway. I put a front tire on my KLR a couple of months ago which is a 21" diameter, and using the lubricant stuff after breaking the bead I was able to shove the old tire off by hand without using any spoons at all, and I very nearly got the new tire back on without any spoons, either. I only needed to spoon it for about the last one sixth of its diameter on the second bead.

You’ve got a Parker IM, too. Is the nib on yours awful and prone to skipping all the time due to the stupid chevron engraving on it trapping it in the center of the tines, or is it just mine?

That seems like one of those things that ought to be inherently contradictory, but I’ll be interested to hear how it goes. Note that fiber fillings in a material inherently reduce its layer adhesion strength, so your formerly stellar adhesion may not be anymore with the inclusion of the glass fiber. It’ll also make your flexible TPU a lot less flexible. This mitigates the two major advantages of TPU, which leads me to wonder if it’s even worthwhile. But still, give it a go. For science!

Don’t forget to get a hardened steel or gemstone nozzle, otherwise you’ll destroy your brass nozzle in very short order printing with fiber filled materials.

Note that while people conflate the two and use the terms interchangeably, leveling and setting your Z offset are not necessarily the same thing.

Leveling the bed is a process to ensure that it is square (“trammed,” in many peoples’ parlance) and flat relative to the travel of the print head, preferably at all points on its surface. This may or may not also entail setting your printer’s Z offset as part of the process depending on how its inbuilt process works, or whether or not you do it manually. The point of the bed being level is so that the gap between the nozzle and the build plate is always the same no matter where on the bed you’re printing. Otherwise you’ll have adhesion and gap issues in some places on the bed and not others, etc.

Z offset adjustment is ensuring that the starting position for your printer’s nozzle is the correct distance from the build plate on its first layer. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with ensuring that this value is the same everywhere across the build plate.

You should make sure your build plate is level relative to the nozzle first, then mess around with Z offset heights. Theoretically you should only have to level the plate once, unless something works itself loose or some other mechanical issue presents itself. If your bed is not level to begin with you’ll drive yourself nuts adjusting the Z offset because what ought to be the correct value will turn out to be different on different spots on the plate. Your Z offset should be adjusted between prints when you switch from materials that require one temperature versus another, either on the plate or the nozzle itself. (Plate temperatures affect this more than nozzle temperatures, but they both affect it.)

On my machine, a Qidi X-Max 3 running Klipper, I can directly twiddle the Z offset from the printer’s touch screen while printing, or at any time in the console via the Mainsail interface which is accessible via web browser over the network. I have a test print that’s just a 0.2mm thick rectangle I use to assess the correct-ish Z offset, since I can observe it while it prints and diddle with the Z offset setting as it goes until it looks right to me. Since it’s only 0.2mm tall, the generated print will automatically be only one layer thick. I then use that value going forward for whatever that temperature/material is. My printer has a built in routine that allegedly assists you in setting the Z offset but I’ve found that it’s functionally worthless and also much more of a hassle.

Because I’m lazy, I then created a bunch of Klipper macros that do nothing but set the Z offset to one of my figured out values, one each for each material and also for either side of my plate (textured on one side, smooth on the other). To switch offset values I just hit one of those macros from the list in the Mainsail console and it’s done. That way I don’t have to keep a Post-It note or something around with each temperature/material’s Z offset value, nor remember them.

If you’re switching between a flat and textured plate, or the flat and textured sides of your plate, you’ll also have to make a Z offset adjustment. Your nozzle has to be closer to the plate on the textured side to ensure the extruded material makes it all the way down into the valleys in the textured surface. If your printer has a bed probe it will only sense the very top of the textured surface, which probably has a depth of 0.15mm or more all by itself which is nearly the entire thickness of a print layer to begin with.

I think it’s a sound theory then, that your nozzle scraped the surface off of your build plate. Both the plate and nozzle are now probably roached. On the bright size, nozzles are cheap. The plate, less so.

I have learned not to allow my printer to auto-level with every single print. It’s just as likely as not to get it wrong, and unless you have major league mechanical issues the relationship between your plate and nozzle should not be changing from print to print except when you change temperatures. You should be able to generate one level mesh and then Z offset preset per temperature combination and use it repeatedly until you make some other mechanical change to the printer such as replacing the nozzle or replacing the build plate.

Also watch out for having debris trapped underneath the steel build plate and its magnetic base, which will cause nozzle crash issues. Scraps of black filament are the classic way this happens, since they’re functionally invisible in poor light against the black magnetic surface.

Are you sure you didn’t scrape your nozzle against the plate the whole way? I’m looking at those long diagonal lines there that appear to be travel moves.

You will have to adjust your Z offset every time you print at a different build plate temperature or appreciably different nozzle temperature, because thermal expansion will cause the plate and nozzle to grow in size slightly the hotter they get and that will take up some or in extreme cases all of the gap.

I have a different set of Z offset presets for every material I print with, because the temperatures are all different.

This is why I immensely respect Stefan from CNC Kitchen, because in addition to his long winded and detailed Youtube videos on the topic at hand he has a companion equally long winded and detailed written article on his website with exactly the same data and content for every single one of them. So if you’d rather not have to watch the entire video or try to scrub through the timeline to get to the information you want, you can get it from the article instead.

I see you didn’t read my last paragraph. Thank you for proving my point.

Or you could just… not do that? I certainly don’t. Practically none of the bird or wildlife photos I’ve posted here are edited. Most of the time I don’t even bother to crop them, and when I do I usually mention it. I take them out of the camera, I show them. (To be fair, I also watermark them with marching penguins first. But that’s not an aesthetic modification. It’s more for my own amusement and also tracking my images when the get stolen. This is the internet, after all.)

Don’t pretend that in the film era, photographers did not go to heroic efforts to edit their photos after the fact using analog means and especially development techniques, which were hassles and problems that digital explicitly set out to solve. When you develop your film photos, you make decisions during the development process that determine what the final output will look like. This is exactly as much of a “tweak” as what most digital photographers do to their photos and is done for the same reason.

“But I don’t do that,” you say. Awesome! I don’t do that with my digital photos, either. See above.

No, we’re right back to where we started. You’re claiming that intentionally shackling yourself to the limitations of film allows you to hold yourself aloof in some way from the mainstream which is doing it digitally. That is a textbook argument from hipsterism. Using a digital camera instead of a film one does not automatically detract form the “serendipity and intentionality” of your photography. I have an entire album I posted recently that proves this. Likewise, shooting film does not inherently make your actions any more “pure” or “authentic.” That’s down to the operator, not the equipment.

Now, now next job is to not come at me all pissy because you think I’m attacking your preferences, because I’m not. Any workflow is valid provided it produces the output the artist (I’m using that term rather loosely, especially in regards to myself) wants in the manner they want to. But conversely, an intentionally high effort workflow does not invalidate the work produced by others via some other means.

This comment somehow seeks to erase the entire history and development of digital photography that isn’t related to movies or cell phones. TIL the Canon R10 sitting on my desk right now apparently doesn’t exist.

Damn. I’m going to have to up my zoom lens game.

What, like how Obsidian made a better Fallout 3 than Fallout 3 with New Vegas?

Luckily for me at least, like so many of us dweebs here, I drive my TV with a little media center PC anyway. So I couldn’t care less which of their services they disable. The more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. The real annoying part is that these don’t work (presumably), but you still can’t remove the icons from the thing’s home screen.

Not only that but my old LG smart TV (47LM8600, I think manufactured in 2012) has literal suicide timers in its built in apps. Mine has never been connected to any network and yet it mysteriously informed me after approximately three years of ownership that all of its player apps such as Youtube, Hulu, Netflix, etc. would stop working because they were “no longer supported,” all of them within the time frame of the same couple of weeks. It knew this somehow, apparently via magic, or quantum fluctuations, or psychic brain waves. Without internet connectivity.

Obviously I don’t use any of those features so I didn’t give a rat’s ass and I still don’t. But I still find that deeply suspicious.