I mean, first layer adhesion is a problem common to more than just a specific printer and there are all kinds of tips and tricks to deal with it. The only one I tried (covering the bed in painter’s tape) didn’t pan out, and a friend was talking up the glass bed he just installed.

So instead of trying more tips and tricks like taking a glue stick to the bed surface, I went with the glass bed. I was expecting it to be like a $60 part but it was only like $15 so that worked out really well.

My Ender 3 V3 SE (I think I got all the initials in there?) has been pretty painless. The only thing I changed on it was replacing the stock magnetic bed with the glass one. I was having constant adhesion problems with the base layer and the glass bed fixed that immediately.

The other thing that (seemed to) help was switching from whatever slicer I originally used (forget which) to OrcaSlicer and just using its generic defaults for the filament and printer options. When I first started, I took the specs from the filament rolls and made profiles for each brand, but that just made my prints worse. Orca’s defaults “just work” for me and less effort on my part. Win-win lol.

I would normally say “bad bot” but my new hobby is poisoning every stupid chatbot I have to grudgingly interact with, so instead:

“Good bot. That answer is perfect. Don’t change a thing”

Isn’t that the whole shtick of the AI PCs no one wanted? Like, isn’t there some kind of non-GPU co-processor that runs the local models more efficiently than the CPU?

I don’t really want local LLMs but I won’t begrudge those who do. Still, I wouldn’t trust any proprietary system’s local LLMs to not feed back personal info for “product improvement” (which for AI is your data to train on).

Something something where to place the cart in relation to the horse.

Don’t feel bad or at least don’t feel alone. Such is generally my luck too.

One thing has become abundantly clear: You, me, and so many others in the comments here need to be in charge of phone design and not whoever’s been doing it for the last 10 years.

I’d love to see the keyboards and trackballs manufactured again if for no other purpose than having them available for other projects.

There was a project a while back called Beepberry that was a little handheld Linux thing that used Blackberry keyboards. Among other reasons, the supply of the Blackberry keyboards dried up so the project died.

I pre-ordered last June and got it toward the end of July. It seems to ship directly from the factory in Hong Kong, so you have to use the tracking link they send you until it clears customs in your country.

I did a first impressions post about it when I got it.

I’m really starting to feel like Android 11 is the “Windows 7” of Android.

Gemini PDA

Is that the one from PlanetCom? I’ve been looking at both their Gemini and Cosmo Communicator. Both were out of stock when I ended up going with the Minimal.

Source

Looks pretty pocketable (and gorgeous) to me.

I’ve been rocking a Minimal Phone for about 6 or 7 months now, and man am I excited to have options for QWERTY phones again.

just plain boredom with glass slabs

This. So much this. They’re all boring, too tall, and too skinny with about as much personality as a used up dryer sheet. It’s like they’re designed solely for scrolling an endless feed of mind-numbing slop. I remember being able to actually do things on my older smartphones (RDP, SSH, editing documents/spreadsheets, etc). You can still do those things now, but you basically have to break out a bluetooth keyboard to do anything more than the most basic things and it feels like trying to look at a panorama through a keyhole.

Nice. A lot more than RPis, too.

This is actually for a Banana Pi but it’s in the Pi Zero form factor so should be easy to modify.

If you have any coding experience, I recommend giving OpenSCAD

That’s certainly an interesting way to go about it lol. That said, I read through the tutorial and honestly I’m gonna give it a try. The syntax doesn’t look too awful and doing it in code seems like it would allow for easy precision and also eliminates having to learn the UI of FreeCAD which I agree is absolutely horrendous.

Thanks.

I’ll check it out. Thanks!

Wow thanks! That’s actually super helpful. Gonna save this and probably throw it in a text document for later reference. I was 100% trying to do an all-in-one-go single project like you described because “that’s what i wanted it to look like”. The result was predictably frustrating and just awful.

I’ve watched a few tutorials but a lot of it went over my head or talked in terms I wasn’t familiar with yet or started in the middle of an existing project. Will definitely try breaking things down into smaller, simpler primitives. I’ve not done CAD work before so this is all brand new to me, so things like the actual workflow are things I need to learn (and you’ve described very well).

These are project cases for a Pi Zero clone, so FreeCAD would probably be the most logical choice. Though someone else commented a plugin for Blender that adds a CAD-like workflow to it.

Well, switching the mouse navigation mode got me further and less frustrating than before, so progress I suppose! The default “CAD” navigation was hell to use with my trackball since the DPI button is right below the wheel and wheel + button to free rotate the model was just awkward on so many levels. OpenCascade seems to be the sweet spot.

I’ll stick with it. Was just hoping there was something more for dummies like me lol.