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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2024

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  • What would dual Z axes on the mini achieve? The existing cantilever design is plenty stiff in my experience, I’m skeptical you’ll get any significant increase in print quality or speed, and I suspect at the cost of having to fiddle around a lot tuning settings to get it back to where it started as the existing firmware has a lot of tuning for the mechanical behavior of the exisiting design. So, if you’re not happy with the mini as is, I would be looking at a different printer rather than a dual Z mod.

    Having myself indulged in the temptations of homebrew 3D printer mods, I came to realize that not all mods out there actually improve performance, especially this type of serious mechanical overhaul of what is already a fairly sophisticated and optimized design. A decent part of the mini’s secret sauce is in the firmware, and this is going to break that.







  • Not fully, there are still places a backdoor could be hidden (and that’s disregarding the possibility of backdoors in OpenWRT, which just recently fended off its own supply chain attack), but I’d sure trust it more.

    The thing to keep in mind is that the more sophisticated and difficult to detect a backdoor is, the more valuable it is. And therefore, the less likely it is to ever be used against a normal person. So getting rid of blatantly buggy and insecure software, which TP-Link unfortunately has a bit of a reputation for, goes a long way. And not to pick on TP-Link, evidence suggests many/most home routers are riddled with vulnerabilities.



  • RCV was also on the ballot in Colorado, but for some reason they bundled it with a “jungle primary” for governor and a bunch of other seats, where the four choices on the ballot for governor in the general election would be the top four from the ranked choice primaries, regardless of party (so you could end up with four options from the same party in theory). The latter addition was pretty unpopular with both parties, who put out tons of messaging against it and especially conflated it with RCV. It got voted down with a significant margin.

    I’m not opposed to either measure, but I’m really struggling to understand why they rolled the two together into one ballot initiative instead of separating it. Alas, I’m just a lowly voter not privy to such advanced political reasoning. Fortunately most of Colorado’s other ballot initiatives went well, at least according to my preferences.



  • It’s not useless, it removes a lot of the tracking cookies and such and sponsored links loaded with telemetry. Theoretically you can also get the benefits of anonymity if you proxy through Tor or a VPN, which I originally tried to do but turns out Google at least blocks requests from Tor and at least the VPN endpoint I have and probably most of them. Google or whatever upstream SE can still track you by IP when you self host, but its tracking is going to much less without the extra telemetry cookies and tracking code it gets when you use Google results directly.

    But yes, practically you either have to trust the instance you’re using to some extent or give up some of the anonymity. I opted to self host and would recommend the same over using a public instance if you can, personally. And if privacy is your biggest concern, only use upstream search providers that are (or rather, claim to be) more privacy respecting like DDG or Qwant. My main use case is primarily as a better frontend to search without junk sponsored results and privacy is more of a secondary benefit.

    FWIW, they have a pretty detailed discussion on why they recommend self-hosting here.