“Nee Jabba no badda.”

Porter Robinson is probably worth a listen.

First thing to try is to get your sleep hygiene straight.

No screens for an hour before bed, get your room dark (no night lights, light-blocking windowshades, and cover the lights on any electronics in your room) and quiet (ear plugs can help in a pinch), quit caffeine, get some sunlight in the morning (optimally before 10:00 AM), get some physical activity during the day, don’t eat for a couple of hours before bed. It also couldn’t hurt to do some meditation before bed during that hour of no-screen time.

That meditation will probably particularly help if the reason for your insomnia is stress.

(And try not to be overwhelmed by the above list. Any one or two items in that list that you do will probably help quite a bit. And try to think of this as a “long game” of incremental improvement.)

If that all doesn’t work, you could try adding CBD maybe an hour or so before bed. Melatonin might be a tempting option, but be careful with it. Melatonin doesn’t stay in the bloodstream all that long, so melatonin supplements tend to be big doses in an effort to try to keep it in your bloodstream longer which… kinda works maybe, but not as well as you might hope. The result tends to be that you fall asleep quickly, wake up in like 4 hours unable to get back to sleep, and then are resistant to your body’s natural melatonin for a night or two. If you’re going to do melatonin, spend the extra money on time-release melatonin. The company “Life Extension” has a 750mcg 6-hour time release melatonin that is a good one to try if you do go that route.

Bottom-right:

“Jimmy, hold still and let me comb your hair.”

“Mooooooooom…”

So, the one I used appears to have been removed from Thingiverse in the meantime, but I’m pretty sure it was V1 of this (which has been remixed a couple of times by someone else and is up to V3). It is a very tight fit, though. (Like maybe the original designer left zero tolerance.) If I had it to do again, I’d go for a different one, but I’d guess probably V2 and V3 have resolved the way-too-tight fit issue.

I made a couple of things myself for mounting my Joycon charger on the wall. (Definitely improvements that could be made to the wall mount one. Conical holes for the screw holes for one. But it does the job.)

My washing machine broke. Wouldn’t drain. I took it apart and realized it was going to be a huge pain to fix if I didn’t drain it first, but it wouldn’t drain on its own. So I designed and printed an adapter that would let me run the pump that drains the washer from my cordless drill. PLA isn’t the strongest material, so I went through like 3 of them draining the washer, but it worked fantastically. Very simple to design and a quick print. Big payoff.

Aside from that, wall mounts for my Nintendo Switch and accessories as well as a wall mount for my NAS solution, a shield for the face of my alarm clock so it didn’t shine bright digital-clock LED light in my face all night (but I could move it aside and check the time), mounts for SAD lamps in convenient places. Most of what I print is custom-designed stuff for utilitarian purposes.

There are many dimensions to each of our senses. Just taking super-vision as an example, would that involve seeing very small things, seeing things at great distances, seeing through things or around corners, seeing more colors and/or wavelengths of light, seeing in 360°, seeing more subtle things than others see (like being able to see when someone’s heart rate increases), processing what you see quicker (for quicker reactions), photographic memory, seeing things others can’t (like magnetic fields or temperature), greater “frame rate”, seeing in the dark, a HUD with information display, seeing ghosts, or something else entirely I haven’t even thought of?

Anything to shorten it sounds good to me.

So say we all.

In the U.S., a few years ago, GOP Senator Josh Hawley, one of the speakers who helped incite the January 6th insurrection, introduced a bill to make the term of Copyright 28 years with optionally one renewal for an additional 28 years.

And, it’s so weird to me that I could agree with him on anything really.

Mind you, he introduced that bill in an effort to punish Disney for being too “woke”. And the bill didn’t go anywhere. But I’d let the MAGA nuts use such a bill as an opportunity to crow for a few minutes about their victory over strong woman protagonists or whatever if it got us more reasonable copyright terms. (And honestly that’s too long, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the bullshit we have now.)

Also, fuck Sonny Bono.

Not in the U.S… For work-for-hire, It’s 95 years after publication. For works owned originally by a lump of flesh, blood, and bone, it’s 70 years after the author’s death.

My employer considers developers, infra, SRE, PC Support, even QA all to be part of the “IT department”. I’ve always used the term “IT” to just cover any specifically “tech” sort of function. As opposed to, say, finance, sales, HR, operations, etc.

So, basically, when you auto-home, that lets your printer calibrate itself with regard to the position of the print head on the X (left-right), Y (forward-back), and Z (up-down) axes, right? For each axis, it just keeps moving in the negative direction until it hits a switch. (An “endstop”.) When it hits the endstop, it considers that “zero” for that axis.

For the Z axis specifically, you have a couple of different options where you can put that switch. You can put it on the frame of the printer and position it such that when the print head moves down, the bar that the print head is on hits that switch at roughly the right place. That’s a “Z-endstop”. Or, you can put the switch on the print head so that it can be moved not only up and down but left and right and forward and back. That’s a “Z-probe”. (The “CR-Touch” is a specific brand of Z-probe sold by Creality.)

With a “Z-probe” your printer can take Z-axis calibration values not just for the arm that the hot end rides back and forth on, but for multiple different spots on the bed. (Typically in a grid pattern.) So, for instance, it can check the front-right corner of the bed, the front-center, front-left, middle-right, middle-center, middle-left, back-right, back-center, and back-left. Once it’s got values for all those spots, it can do some math to get a good approximation of the “shape” of the bed.

Your bed ought to be close to flat, but typically beds – or at least stock beds; again, I’m not sure about the glass beds – will be subtly parabolic or hyperbolic or something. (Like, shaped like a bowl or a hill or a Pringle chip or some such rather than truly flat.) So if you have a Z-endstop and can’t do calibration at multiple points on the bed, then your printer can only act under the assumption that the bed is flat. If your bed is actually (for instance) bowl-shaped, then the print head will be closer to the bed when the print head is far to the front-right, back-right, front-left, or back-left than it is when the print head is closer to the center. In that case, the best you can do is just kindof manually calibrate your Z-endstop offset until you’ve got the most reasonable compromise between too far from the bed when you’re near the center and too close when you’re near the extremities.

(Sidenote: It’s not 100% true that you can’t get your printer to account for bed curvature if you only have a Z-endstop rather than a Z-probe. From what I’ve heard, there are ways to manually “probe” your bed to get figures for the shape of your bed and then give those figures to your printer’s firmware to get your printer to account for bed curvature that way. But it’s a big pain and may have to be redone a lot. It’s been a while since I’ve looked into that option, but I think it may also have required rebuilding the firmware and stuff. As I said, big pain.)

But with a Z-probe, the “auto-leveling” process, when it probes the bed in a grid, it can build a model of what shape the bed really is. And then as it prints, it can follow the curvature of the bed as the print head is moving in the X and/or Y direction in order to stay a very consistent distance from the bed, rather than getting further or closer to the bed (or perhaps it’s better to say the bed is getting closer and farther from the print head) as the print head passes over “hills” and “valleys”.

When your print head is too far from the bed, it doesn’t adhere well and there’s increased risk of the part coming off the bed mid-print. When your print head is too close to the bed, you run the risk of underextrusion, clogs, and first layer expansion. But with a Z-probe, it’ll be better at making sure you get the best of both worlds, and not just on part of your bed. On all of your bed.

The Ender 3 V2 appears to come with a Z-endstop, not a Z-probe. (Just looking at the image on Creality’s official page.) So if I got an Ender 3 V2, I’d add a CR-Touch immediately. (That said, again, the glass beds may have less issue with bed curvature, so it might not be so worth it with your glass bed. If you’re successfully using most to all of your bed and not having adhesion issues or first-layer expansion, there’s definitely no need to worry about it. But it wasn’t until I got a Z-probe that I understood just how reliable my printer could be and how little first-layer expansion I could expect from it.)

One thing to note. Bed curvature with a Z-endstop won’t matter so much once you’re a few layers in. It’ll cause issues with the first two or three layers, but by the time you’re up to five or so layers, it’s not really an issue any more. Most of the issues I had with bed curvature with a Z-endstop before I got my second printer were that the print failed within the first few layers. Usually by popping off the bed rather than adhering as it should.

I’m being trolled and I ain’t even mad.

Be serious, please

My first printer (that I still have and use) is an Ender 3 Pro. My second is an Ender 3 v2 Neo.

The Ender 3 Pro doesn’t have a Z-probe or autoleveling. Just a Z endstop. When I got that V2 Neo, my whole world changed. I could use the whole bed without adhesion issues now!

So I got the CR-Touch upgrade kit for my Ender 3 Pro, and it now works just as well.

A Z-probe is definitely on my “cannot live without” list of features for any printer I get in the future.

I usually prefer the stock beds, though, and I don’t necessarily know whether warped (like, not just “not flat” but actually not planar) beds are when talking about the glass beds. That said, if you have issues with not being able to use the whole bed without adhesion issues in some parts of the first layer, I’d strongly suggest a CR-Touch.

I had to upgrade the mobo on my Ender 3 Pro for the CR-Touch. Not sure whether you might have to for the V2, though.

Yup.

A good guy with the affectations of a bad guy.

Not sure I fully understand the question. Is this about parents trying to push their adult children to live their life a certain way?

If so, I’d say children should be allowed to exercise as much self-determination as can reasonably be afforded from pretty much toddlerhood, of course taking into account the danger of physical harm or lasting trauma. (Like, let your kid be interested in art at 3 years old and allow them to pursue it seriously as they get older even if you’re a 4th-generation army brat. But don’t let them jump off your roof at 3 to see if they can fly.) It’s not so much that parents should “hold on” until a magic age is reached at which point they should “let go”. If the parents are trying to get their 30-year-old son to quit being gay, or pursue a career in law rather than performance arts, or not play video games, or whatever, they probably weren’t allowing for age-appropriate levels of self-determination when the kid was under 10 either and his raising could likely be described as an enmeshment sort of situation.

If that wasn’t the nature of the feud at all, then who knows who if anyone might have been in the wrong. Like, telling your 30-year-old son to quit stealing money from their 85-year-old grandmother is probably entirely appropriate.

Wow. How are Colbert and John Oliver not on that graphic? Meanwhile, I don’t think I’ve ever watched more than three or four YouTube clips of Trevor Noah.

Oh god, am I old?

Also, it sucks that Brand’s a right-winger. There was a time when I thought his heart was somewhat in the right place even if the execution was… questionable.

Be careful with Fourier transforms, people.

Hmmm.

Maybe Dragon Roost Island from The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker.