If you are already into, or want to get into self-hosting you could set up a media server like Jellyfin or Navidrome and use a mobile client that works with the one you choose. I am using Jellyfin with the Finamp beta on Android. I use it only in offline mode when I am out and about.

I sometimes hear people complain about some issues with Jellyfin, although I have not had any of those myself (I have a comparable collectiom to you). I run all music through Musicbrainz Picard before adding it to the server, so I think that may be a pre-requisite for a smooth experience. Navidrome is perhaps more forgiving.

What benefits are you getting from actually updating the 8BitDo-firmware as opposed to… not doing that?

Can it be used without arr-integrations? As just a way to keep track of stuff users would love to have available, but currently isn’t?

No. I have a RTX 3050 Ti Laptop which I have not had many issues with. The biggest issue I have experienced was that a game completely froze at the same point every time. This was due to a regression in their drivers. They spent their sweet time fixing it to, and following the issue thread highlights one of the main issues with their drivers being non-free: extremely competent users providing logs and effort to troubleshoot, but unable to work on the fix themselves. And what seemed to be summer interns replying once in a while and nothing happening for a long while.

But that said, I find the hate overblown. You could get tge impression that running Linux on a machine with an Nvidia-GPU will instantly burn down your house or spawn a portal to hell. It will not. I will get an AMD card at the next crossroads, but I am not ditching my card now just because it is Nvidia. It works fine enough.

Had a 6-year old Macbook Pro that was increasingly difficult to use due to the small SSD-drive (I think only 128GB?). Coudn’t really update the OS without uninstalling most stuff due to this. In addition, I had started to get the urge to tinker with stuff again, but ran into roadblocks often (often following a guide to do something in the terminal only to get stuck at inatalling something from apt). Same time I got more and more fed up with Big Tech, so when I was buying a new laptop to replace it, the choice to avoid Apple and Microsoft was obvious. Having used a terminal on macOS, doing work on HPC-clusters (which obviously ran Linux) and moving an increasing amount of my workflow to Got Bash on Windows on my work machine (all three of which reinforced my level of comfortability with the terminal and desire to use it), the prospects of the terminal was more enticing than frightening.

Now I have been a full-time Linux user for three years, my partner, brother and mother have since switched, I manage some bare metal Linux servers for work and IT has finally agreed to allow me to ditch Windows for Linux (although they are taking their sweet time setting it up, so I am still waiting to actually get it).

I like FreshRSS - I also have some readers that connect to my instance, like FluentReader that provides a better full article view, but I mostly use FreshRSS directly these days.

“Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’, believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’.”

• Terry Pratchett

Strange, I am rarely experiencing any lag on my four year old mid-range model, browser included. Maybe we have a very different perception of what lag is? Or maybe you have an insane amount of background processes running that bogs down your phone?

Camera is not great, but I always have a good time looking back at pictures taken with it and it is certainly much, much better than what I took 10 years, let alone 20. If your flip phone took better pictures, something is wrong and there could be ways to fix that.

I got the Epson ET-2815 (non-cartridge, tank-based inkjet). Works pretty well with Linux (they have drivers available, but not officially supported). Had to set it up on WiFi via app (which was an annoying process) first though, but I could have just wired it up and then I wouldn’t need that. Maybe it is possible to somehow set it up on WiFi some other way after you have connected directly?

Got tripped up once because I could not connect to it via the utility software (while printing still worked). Turned iut that was due to me being connected to VPN, and for some reason the request went through that (which I think is a little suspect…), so it couldn’t find it. So I have to disconnect VPN to do that. You will not have access to this heavy self-cleaning program on Linux, but you should probably avoid it anyway because it wastes a lot of ink and deposits in this sponge you then would need to buy and replace every now and then.

Biggest issue I had was that it stopped printing some.colors after a while. Had to do a manual cleaning by opening it, removing these dummy cartridges and connecting rubber tubings to the nozzles and pump isopropyl alcohol through. Was a lot of research and took some time to get working again. Think maybe my humidifier was the issue, as it tends to deposit some white powder around my home that I think caused a clog. We’ll see this winter as I fire it up again.

EDIT: Printed a fair amount and the tanks lasts a long time. If you go inkjet, then this is the economical choice. More expensive upfront, but much cheaper in operations. But you still have the drying issue wich could cause you to have to do what I described above. Or print regularly at least. If you don’t need color, laser is probably your best bet.

To this day I still can’t understand what all the “need” for incredibly high-end phones come from. Gaming? That’s the answer I’ve gotten before, and that just leaves me wondering why anyone would want to game on a phone to begin with. Are there other use cases for a phone that actually requires anything top of the line?

My phone was considered “mid-range spec” when it was released 4 years ago and it is still perfectly capable for anything I would want to use a phone for.

As for pricing - remember that there are other things than pure specs baked into a price. A locked down phone (i.e. no way of unlocking bootloader) riddled with spyware is likely cheaper than it otherwise would be from a company that won’t be able to keep monetizing you as a product after your purchase. That’s not to say that there is no such thing as a price mismatch, but matching price vs specs does not tell the whole story.

That’s a nice service, thanks for the share! However, I couldn’t quickly get an overview of what metadata may be included in a .3mf file, so I won’t upload it for now. Thanks for the offer to look at the file though. :)

Gyroid infill used to be the default in PrusaSlicer, but they changed it to grid when the MK4 came out with input shaping and much higher speeds. Straight lines gain most from the increased acceleration. Gyroid will now make your printer vibrate like crazy.

Good to know - don’t think my neighbors would be all to pleased with additional noise (and not me either).

This is also not cubic infill, that’s another one (which I would recommend over grid for structural pieces). I actually almost always use Adaptive Cubic infill, which saves a lot of filament.

Ah nice, it seems that the adaptive cubic will make larger pockets? Neither cubic nor adaptive cubic seems very… cubic to me, though. Why is it called this?

So far I’ve not been making any structural pieces, but that is something I will remember for when I do.

I also believe that your print would probably had turned out fine in the end, it doesn’t seem like there were any catastrophic failures in your photos, despite the noise.

Hm, OK, maybe - I think however it would have been difficult for me to keep it going when it sounds like I am destroying the printer for every layer

Do you know of a secure and private file drop where I could upload the file? I am not to keen to share anything from a personal account here.

Thanks for a very thorough answer!

It’s possible your original Blender design had an issue. Blender is not always kind to 3D printers.

I’ve had good success with previous Blender files, although this is the first time I’ve used a boolean operator to cut out anything. I usually use FreeCAD for these custom Gridfinity pieces, but the process of converting the .stl mesh to a solid part in FreeCAD seems a bit error prone (several steps involved), and I haven’t yet used booleans in FreeCAD. I could try that again.

The first thing I would tell you is to stop using cubic infill, it is evil. It never always causes me failed prints, especially larger prints. Nozzles often tend to drag across the previous layers and can easily cause failed prints. I can even hear the nozzle hitting the infill as I print. I often recommend gyroid as a good all around infill pattern.

Good to know! I use PrusaSlicer, and this grid infill is the default. The way you describe it sounds like what I experience, and I can in fact see some artifacts when I inspect it closely. Though, the sounds I hear would only start when the concave part starts, and that’s also where I see the failures. But that could possibly because there’s too much overhang over the cubic infill? Anyway, I checked out gyroid pattern, and it was pretty dense with the 15% default infill value. What type of infill % do you typically use? Seems I could get away with less here.

I look at it and I wonder, does the rolling pin need to be supported full length? A wooden rolling pin is ridged and only needs minimal support on the ends. So I might just design the cradle only at the very ends. And then design the middle to be a simple flat that connects the two end pieces. I might even skip the middle altogether and just print the ends. That saves the most material and time and still does the job perfectly.

You mean an open container with maximum depth and width between the ends that holds the ridges? That could be a good way. They way I ended up doing it was essentially just a rectangular cut-out which worked fine and is similar to your suggestion (although I could save more material doing it your way), but feels less custom… as if that is a goal in itself. I would not like the gap by just printing the ends though, as I wouldn’t be able to squeeze anything else underneath and it would not look right to me. Wish I didn’t think like that, so I could save material, but I know myself enough that I would be annoyed every time I opened the drawer…

When it comes to slicing your print, orientation matters. How you support overhangs can be tricky and often compromises must be made. While I will use the auto supports as often as I can, sometimes you just need to use paint on supports to get what you needwhere you need it. Pay attention to the top zed support gap. The defaults are never right. I always open them up more. With a .40mm nozzle, I use a .265mm gap. For a .60mm nozzle, a .365mm gap. You might even need to print your parts at an angle. Often tipping the part at 30 to 45 degree angle can make those nasty over hangs completely printable without supports. And this is only a good beginning. How fast you might print an overhang matters, the amount of cooling fan can affect the over hang, lots of fine details that you will learn about as you keep doing this.

This I will need to read up on more. I don’t actually use supports for these Gridfinity prints (but PrusaSlicer does warn me about potential instability…). The printer handles the overhang between the grids fairly well, but I guess I didn’t think about the long lines crossing the infill. In other prints I’ve only used the auto supports. Could I ask you what slicer you use?

Good Luck and never fear making a mistake!

Thanks! I must admit I do fear it sometimes when the printer makes some weird noises…