One can hope, but I suspect nobody will be announcing a victor on Tuesday night.

I’ve been reading some discussions this week about fake polls claiming Republicans are winning to make Dems think there’s no point in voting. Apparently it was a technique used in a previous recent election? It would explain all the results I’ve seen in the last few days showing them with a strong lead, where a week or two ago other polls showed an even race. Doesn’t really matter though, everyone should remember that the only thing that counts is getting out and casting your vote no matter what the polls might suggest.

Nice, I hadn’t heard of this one!

If you want to do it right, try to get a static IP (you may need to get a business account). If your provider doesn’t provide IPv6 to static IPs, go to some place like Hurricane Electric and get a free IPv6 range pointed to your IPv4 static address.

Alternatively, you might do a search for any DDNS services that provide IPv6 (I’m not sure if any do?), then that service will fllow your residential address when it changes. Either way I think you’ll have some additional costs you need to weigh against your current hosting provider.

I’ve got another ten years or so before I consider retiring, but I’m close enough that this kind of stuff has been on my mind lately. Retirement itself is easy – just don’t ever get sick, have any accidents, or reach the age where the insurance companies decide it’s cheaper to pay your family for a wrongful-death suit than to pay for your medical costs. The bastards will choose to murder you every time.

I’ve seen the opposite being true… A loved one dies after a lifetime together and the other person no longer has the will to keep going. I think you can keep going as long as you have the desire and your body doesn’t give out on you (and your insurance company doesn’t deny you a life-saving procedure because they think you’re too old and need to die).

Sorry, just because you’re not capable enough to work with something that wasn’t completely fine-tuned for you at the factory doesn’t mean many of the rest of us have any problems with these machines. I do manual bed leveling and I can walk away from my printer for a year, turn it on, and pop out as good of print as the previous time it was used. How well does your “real” printer work after a year of neglect and with all the fancy gizmos turned off?

Hmm I’m out of ideas then, sorry. Still wouldn’t hurt to do a single-layer test print (there are various models that put squares all around the bed) just to see how that’s looking. If the issue had been confined to one side or one corner it might have been a mechanical issue, but random areas makes it a lot harder to figure out.

If I remember right, jerk settings should be rather small, like single-digits, but I think calibrating your e-steps will go a lot further for cleaning up the prints.

One other step (and of course I cannot remember what this is called) is related to calibrating the filament ‘pressure’ along each path. It takes a bit of work to set up but the goal is to create a profile so you get a perfectly consistent amount of filament extruded through the entire length of a path, which compensates for excess amounts at the beginning and end of each path, or too little extrusion through the middle. You might even have to compile your own firmware to enable it if there’s not an option in Marlin to turn it on from the software (I was compiling my own anyway for a DIY direct-drive extruder), but it really does make a difference and it’s a set-and-forget thing that you only really need to do once.

Creality bases are notoriously NOT flat although I’ve heard their quality has improved over the years. I have one of the 1st-gen Ender 3 Pro machines with a terrible dip in the aluminum base. One nice thing about a thicker bed material is that you can use discs of aluminum foil the shim the base. I started with a glass bed and 13 layers of foil to get the glass reasonably flat. I have since moved to 3mm G10 with a PEI sticker which is working pretty well (in case you want to try PEI again). I found some scrap G10 material on ebay and chopped it with a table saw, sanded all the edges, then got a PEI sheet that was 10mm wider than my bed to allow for some slop. Putting down the stickers is a lot easier if you have someone helping you. Then trim the overhang and you’re ready to go.

Yeah that’s a pretty tight range for the bed leveling, shouldn’t be causing any issues then. OK another possibility here… the failing prints, are they on the left side, right side, one specific corner, or does it tend to move around between prints?

E-steps varies per extruder, not per manufacturer. What they recommend will get you close but there will always be some variance. On my printer Creality recommended a setting of 93 but my measurements put me up around 98, so quite a difference. Are you still using a bowden tube style extruder or did you upgrade to a direct drive? And is your filament spool mounted on top of the printer (if so, what guides have you added for the filament path), or did you move it off to the side?

Erg sorry, jerk is probably what you’re looking for here. It’s been awhile since I did much printing so I keep confusing the terms.

Belt tension should be tight enough that you can strum it and hear a tone. It’s possible to tighten a belt TOO much, which causes extra stress on the motors. This would result in the motors being physically very hot. However if these were both printed at the same time, that wouldn’t be the issue here.

I wonder, how level is your bed? Yes yes, you have a bltouch and all that, but you still need to manually get your bed relatively level. Were these two prints next to each other or on opposite sides of the bed? How did the other prints in the same batch compare (like was there an obvious pattern of failure from one side to the other)? The bad print looks to me like the nozzle is too close, so it might be interesting to see what your first layer looks like in a test across the bed.

Even in the good print there’s some blobbing at the end of each path and the main surface should be the same height as the walls around the cutouts. Did you calibrate your E-steps? It kinda looks like you’re pushing out a little too much filament. depending on your slicer options, you may also check acceleration to slow down the head at the end of each path, which can help give the whole path a more uniform output.

One other consideration, although not as likely… Warm up the bed and check to see if all areas feel like they’re about the same temperature. If part of the heating element went bad then maybe you’re over-heating one part to compensate for a lack of heat on the rest of the bed. I only mention this because the bad print looks like it has a slant to it, but that could be an illusion of the photo.

“He doesn’t think that elections are a real thing. He doesn’t think that elections are legitimate, and he doesn’t want an American form of government in which elections decide whether or not he’s in power because he doesn’t believe election results should be binding.”

– Rachel Maddow

Green felt top hat with a size tag stuck in the band. Oof that’s been about 20 years ago now.

According to Buttigieg they are waking up thinking “Oh shit I don’t want people talking about that… what other fucked-up shit can I spew to distract the rubes?”

That’s such a common thing these days that I have to wonder if humans have always had this issue, or if it has anything to do with our modern lifestyles. I was going to do a sleep study at one point, but when I took their questionnaire I checked off no on everything on their list. Then I found out my insurance wouldn’t even cover it, and couldn’t afford to do the study anyway. Ah well, if I ever get back to a point where I’m having trouble sleeping again then I’ll reconsider.

Another suggestion… have you considered if something in particular might be preventing you from getting good sleep? In my case, I’ve had restless-leg for quite awhile which was managed by doing some stretches before bed as needed. After a really car car accident, that went into overdrive, the stretches made no obvious difference and so I didn’t think that was an issue any more, but apparently I was tossing and turning all night. I’d sleep for 9+ hours and wake up a zombie.

After years of this I finally talked to my doctor about it, we discussed a lot of things and I mentioned how I had previous had the problems with my leg pains at night. He decided to try treating this symptom and suddenly I started getting real sleep again. By now it has gotten so bad that if I forget to take my pills at night, my legs absolutely scream at me the moment I lay down in bed. Yeah I’ll be on this med the rest of my life, but I’m getting good sleep now and feeling energetic the day.

The point is, your issue may be something you have already dismissed without realize fully how it affects you. When an unknown problem comes up, sometimes you just have to go back and reevaluate everything.

I think I missed something in your description, but what are you running on your local server? I think most people set up postfix to relay the emails over to gmail or whoever, and there are options in postfix for backwards compatibility with Outlook or even Microsoft Mail so your wife could use whatever client she wants. If you don’t have a local mail server set up then this is probably what you want to do. This method allow a local or remote connection from any client so you could run K9 on your phone instead of a VPN.

For opening such a setup to the internet (and allowing access from anywhere), make sure you have strong passwords on your accounts, require SASL authentication, and set up fail2ban to block repeated attempts to hack your mailboxes. Don’t run anything else on the same server (or use virtual machines or strong containers) to reduce the chance of your mail server getting compromised other ways, and you should be good to go.

It would be rather fitting to see him have a stroke in November as the election counts come in for a landslide defeat, but it’s doubtful either one of those things will happen.

I mean he’s only been holding small, indoor rallies since then, or surrounded by bullet proof glass. He’s obviously scared by the incident so it’s time to twist the knife – popping paper bags or dropping serving platters around him at any public events to really gets his nerves on edge.

No, acshually…

<GROAN>

Damn dad jokes…