Anafroj

joined 1 year ago
[–] Anafroj 7 points 11 months ago

This. Nothing is more difficult than understanding someone's else code and architecture, and even if you manage that, you're now stucked with the choices somebody else made and nobody wants that (we want to make our terrible choices!).

More than a final app, the best thing to publish as FOSS is libraries extracted from it to help other developers build there own products faster. That's something other may want to maintain when we abandon it. And on top of that, it still help to publish your app using this lib to serve as practical example about how to use your it, of course.

[–] Anafroj 0 points 1 year ago

I mean, that's a perfectly valid answer to someone asking to a wizard for healing. ^^ Next time, that warrior will learn his spellcasters. :P

[–] Anafroj 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As a trader, I would say this is a minor correction and we really should not read much into it. :) (of course, this is not a financial graph, but I've seen the similar patterns of impulse/correction in many graphs that measure opinion and/or human activity)

[–] Anafroj 2 points 1 year ago

By the way, I think this is the soundtrack of this meme :) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If27FnxvjZA

[–] Anafroj 4 points 1 year ago

That's why the evocation school is the best. Sculpt spells, then fireball all the things!

[–] Anafroj 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That's the same thing. :) If you reduce computing load, you reduce the need for costly hardware and you reduce the need for energy, thus you reduce the amount of money needed to build and run your setup. There's a saying in (software) engineering : "reducing energy consumption and increasing performances requires the same optimizations". Make your code faster (by itself, not by buffing up hardware) and it consumes less energy. Make your application simpler, and it will run faster, and it will consume less energy. It's not an absolute truth (it sometimes happen that you make your code faster and it consumes more energy), but it's true most of the time.

[–] Anafroj 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Basically, yes. You can configure most cron programs to mail task output to you (it's usually done by setting the MAILTO variable in the crontab, provided sendmail is available on your system).

I use that to do things like:

0 9 11 10 * echo 'lunch with John Doe at 12:20'

It sends me a mail, and I can see the upcoming events with crontab -l. If it's not a recurring event, I then delete the rule.

[–] Anafroj 24 points 1 year ago (8 children)

My favorite cost cutting tip is to avoid big webapps running on docker, and instead do with small UNIX utilities (cron instead of a calendar, text files instead of note taking app, rsync instead of a filehosting dropbox-like app, simple static webserver for file sharing, etc). This allows me to run my server on a simple Raspberry Pi, with less than 500mb of used RAM in average, and mininal energy consumption. So, total cost of the setup:

  • Raspberry Pi : 77€ x 2 = 144€ (I bought two to have a backup if the first one fails)
  • MicroSD 64gb : 13€ x 2 = 26€ (main and backup)
  • average energy consumption : 0.41€ (2kWh) per month

With that, I run all services I need on a single machine, and I have a backup plan for recovery of both hardware and software.

Getting used to a UNIX shell and to UNIX philosophy can take some time, but it's very rewarding in making everything more simple (thus more efficient).

[–] Anafroj 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I have both a resin printer and a FDM printer, I can confirm the price difference exists, but is not prohibitive (resin is about 2x PLA). The difference of quality is mind blowing, though (in favor of resin printer). If you're building an army, I assume you will have many pieces? If so, the difference of printing time is also mind blowing in favor of resin printer. The reason for that being that if you print 10x the same mini on your build surface, with FDM it will take 10x the same time as a single mini (the printing head must move to cover each point) while with the MSLA (resin printer), it will take… 1x the same time. That's because each layer is flashed from a PNG image, so all points of a layer are created at the same time. On top of that, there are things you can do with resin that you just can't with FDM, especially because of supports needed for hanging parts : if your character has arms, chances are the hand will be lower than the shoulder, which means than when printing from bottom to top, the hand won't be connected to the body until printing reaches the shoulder, so you need something to support it (a "tower" under the hand, that you will cut off). It's easy to do with resin, because in a bath of dense liquid, Archimedes is your friend and you can build the support in wild angles, but it's way more difficult in thin air (with a FDM).

An other thing to know, though, is that resin printing is way more messy. You will manipulate toxic products, that you can't throw in the sink, you need gear to cover your hands and face, and resin ends up everywhere and is near impossible to clean. But it's worth it, especially if you're into minis. :) FDM, on the other hand, is unbeatable for functional prints (because those resin prints are damn fragile, and tend to not be perfectly at the scale you designed).

[–] Anafroj 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh, I see. Yes, that may very well be a matter of point of view. For me, modding the printer is part of the fun, not something I do to try desperately to stay on the cutting edge. :) The RepRap dream of "printers that can reproduce themselves" never fully materialized, but modding is the next best thing.

[–] Anafroj 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Are they still sold, anyway? I mean, sure, someone who has no printer should buy a more recent one. But that was not the subject, here : the question was if it was needed to replace an Ender 3. I certainly would not, personally, it would be throwing out a perfectly good printer for incremental upgrades. Of course, it depends on the usage. For someone who uses their printer professionally to serially print all day, sure, it's probably worth it upgrading. Me? I really don't care if my prints are slower. I really don't find the Ender 3 hard to get a print right either. But I've been printing since the wooden Printrbot Simple about a decade ago, maybe I'm just used to it.

[–] Anafroj 3 points 1 year ago

I'm using a pi4 8gb as my server, with a pi4 2gb as backup in case the first one dies. It's a very classic server, running postfix/courier-imap for mails, lighttpd for web, bind9 for dns, ergo for irc, sqlite3 for databases. I also use fail2ban for IDS and cron to run tons of various task. All of that is hosted on a Gentoo linux OS.

The one thing I don't want to use is docker. I love docker for development or for deploying the main app at work, but it makes managing updates a nightmare for handling multiple services on my server (most your containers probably contain vulnerable software due to lack of system updates), and it eats resources needlessly. Then again, it's made possible because I avoid the big webapps that usually need it.

 

This was recently published on GitHub. I didn't try it myself since none of my printers are wireless, but I figure people may be interested to know it exists. We're still far from parity, but FOSS coverage of resin printers gets closer to coverage of FDMs!

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