Scheer

I'd start with a BLTouch as it saves a lot of headache with first layer issues once you get it dialed in, then try out some build surfaces to see what you like best. For PLA/PETG I'll likely never use anything other than PEI because how well it has worked for me, however a friend swears by glass for PLA and hates PEI... so it seems to be a personal preference. Then just browse around Thingiverse, there are a million and one printable upgrades to try out. The Y cable chain is handy as I have had a print fail by the wires getting snagged mid-print, and the micro to full size SD adapter is a nice convenience of not having to deal with little cards.

IMO, and to keep it really simple, there are 3 price points of 3d printers you should look at: $300 - Get an Ender 3 (or Pro) and a few upgrades for it (mainly BLTouch and a magnetic PEI build plate for convenience) Any less for a prebuilt and you are likely getting a POS, and a DIY kit for less is unlikely to perform as well as the Ender 3. On the other side of the budget, maybe consider the $500 ish to build a quality Prusa i3 clone, just know you'll likely spend a lot of time tweaking it. $1,000-$1500 - DIY a really nice printer like a Hypercube, Voron, Ultimaker clone, etc. Go all out with ballscrews and linear rails. If you are going to spend $1000 on a prebuilt, I think you'd be much better off building a better one for the price. You're invested this much into it, so obviously you are taking the hobby fairly seriously and should learn the mechanics of the machine anyways. Maaaybe consider a Prusa here, but IMO they are pretty lacking for being nearly $1k. $5k - "Professional" level prebuilt printer like an Ultimaker or Makerbot. This is where you want something that just works and has a tech support team who can help when you have problems. Basically throwing all of this out there so you don't have to wonder "If I just spend $50 more will I get a way better printer?" because I really don't think you do, it takes a pretty major bump up in budget to get a noticeable quality improvement over the Ender 3. I did see a lot of good things about Anycubic when I did my research, but didn't look too much into them. This is all assuming you want to just print "normal" things with PLA/PETG. If you are planning on really tall or long items, or printing oddball filaments then its a whole different can of worms to look into. Finally, in a nutshell I'd recommend you get one of the Ender 3 variants.

I didn't ask, just randomly found it in there while sorting boxes. I'd assume its from one of my brothers as they like collecting weird ammo.

I really thought it would start getting better right around this time, but I just learned its only getting worse. I know at least one ammo producer just completely ran out of their primer stockpile and had to start limiting employee's OT because there aren't enough coming in to keep them as busy as they'd like. About a month ago it was going to to take until May 2022 to catch up to the current backorders at the current production, which is now less... this might be a several year long ammo drought. I never wanted to be one of those guys who hordes hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammo, but I'm sure regretting it right now... Took a few months, but I finally got ahold of two boxes of .270, so hopefully I've got enough for an upcoming hog hunt. In other news, was at my parents to grab some 6.5CM and found a box of 500 Nitro Express in the safe. I've never seen it in person before and pictures really don't do it justice, that is a .223 next to it.

Haven't posted in here for a while, so a little update on my firearm adventures.... I forgot to keep my AR's separated and they made little baby ARs so I had to pickup a 5D jig to finish milling them up. No real plans for them, pry just throw them in the safe and save for a rainy day. Finally bought a AR10 lower as well that I'll likely do a 6.5CM build on. The 5D jig was a little janky for how much money they want for it, I really should have just bought a milling machine instead. Right around two hours for the first lower and a bit under an hour for the rest of them once you get the hang of it. Had a really disappointing deer firearm season and didn't see a single one worth shooting until we saw a massive buck about 1500 yards out right at sunset on the final day and didn't have near enough time to hunt him down. So I figured I'd take advantage of muzzleloading season and picked up a CVA Optima and mounted a Crossfire II scope on it. The Crossfire II is hands down the best scope in the $100-200 range IMO, I really don't know how Vortex does it at this price and offer a no questions asked warranty. (My brother in law left his Vortex binoculars on top his skidsteer tracks after looking at something, then ran them over, called Vortex and they 2nd Day Aired him brand new replacements...) Spent 3-4 days trying to get close enough to the buck, but never could get closer than 500 yards and that's not happening with a smokepole. Meanwhile all that time doe are running all over the place, so first day of late season I get the 6.5 back out and sure enough not a doe to be seen... thankfully they extended late season until end of January so I have another two weekends to get a few for jerky. A couple of days ago I found out something about the foam in the bottom of my gun safe doesn't sit well with brass and had a butt plate all tarnished. About 10 minutes on the buffing wheel shined it right back up, and gave me an excuse to polish up the rest of the gun. I believe I'm finally happy with the setup of my 6.5CM. Had the barrel chopped down to 18" and threaded for an eventual DeadAir Nomad, picked up a LuthAR MBA3, and found an old Larue grip that I didn't like on an AR, but fits and feel awesome on this setup. Only thing left to swap out is the bipod to the Magpul one, just waiting for them to come back into stock... My grandfather in law passed away a few months ago, so at Christmas his guns were distributed among the kids. Only picture I can find right now and I don't want to go digging through the safe, but two of them were an AR15 I built for him as a truck gun, and an old Remington 1100. I'm very sentimental about firearms, and its special to have some of his to make it feel like he is still out hunting with us when we take them out. The Henry Goldenboy above and a matching blued Henry also came from him the year prior. I've always wanted to stipple a handgun, but never wanted to risk messing one up. Last year my cousin was riding in the horse arena and lost his Glock 17, well after about a year it finally showed back up when they were dragging the sand smooth, and it was in pretty rough shape so it became the perfect practice gun. Not super happy with the stippling... but its at least better than it was. I did clean up the border between stipple and non-stipple a little better after this picture, but I never did find a good way of doing it. Took a few hours of scrubbing but the internals cleaned up nice, and it mag dumped the first mag without a hitch after getting it back together. With this whole ammo panic going on, I finally bit the bullet and started messing with reloading. So far just have a Lee APP that I've been depriming 300blk with just to get the feel for it, and have a Lee C frame on order to load a few hundred rounds of 300blk and see how it goes. I figure if I don't want to mess with reloading I'm not out much money this way, and if I do like it I can pickup a nice Hornady press and its always going to be handy having a spare press around for a quick job. Primers and powder have been the biggest issue so far, but my uncle found a few pounds of powder tonight that he is bringing back, and I think I have a lead on some primers... And lastly, picked up some 1/2" AR500 targets as a Christmas present for my brother in law, to put up at his house so I can shoot them.

Its way nicer than the snap/stick on risers, this one is a taller version of the piece you already have on there, you will remove to top section of your stock and put the riser in its place. It will have a little hollow cavity under there now, but the polymer is quite hard and I doubt you'd notice. It also gives you an awesome spot to shove a vial of cleaning oil and should be able to fit a boresnake in there too as long as you buy the really cheap ones that don't have a ton of fabric on them. Yeah, I don't even bother looking for the front sight of a shotgun anymore, just get a glimpse of the rib and habit kicks in, close enough for what you need a shotgun to do. Probably not something I could do on a rib-less barrel though haha. I'm not sure if there is a raised version of this, but something similar to this on the front might be a good option if you wanted a bit of precision: https://www.championtarget.com/shooting-gear/easyhit/ The back 1" or so is shrouded, so you don't see the dot unless you are straight with it, its a pretty neat concept and my uncle won't shoot a shotgun without one anymore. The linked one is a really cheap plastic and fiber version, but I can't find the nice ones... I know he gets them from Italy, and they are aluminum and optionally tritium for the light source.

Not sure if it would be high enough, but they do make risers for the SGA: https://magpul.com/sga-high-cheek-riser-kit.html?mp_global_color=undefined As far as backup sights I'd find a way to mill out the center of the picatinny wide on everything but the lug closest to the stock, and on the last lug cut it out to behave as the rear sight. It looks like the height is at least close to working.

Honestly nothing legal will have the power to blast through concrete walls, you will need to put multiple APs in so get several of the cheapest - UAP-AC-Lite. Mesh systems won't work very well as they need good signal to the mesh point to properly repeat it. That being said, if 160mbps is too slow for whatever your usage is you shouldn't be on WiFi anyways, run a cable.

Amazon sidewalk is basically this: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/ And to be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if they literally just use a private TTN network... Its been around for years and works extremely well. There is very likely a public TTN hotspot near you, if not there is almost certainly a private TTN network near you. The concept of LoraWAN is amazing IMO, and TTN's makes it even better. You willingly host the hotspot, essentially for the greater good of the technology, and get access to every public hotspot to send data across without any monthly charges, really I don't think you even need to host a hotspot... You could build a small transmitter that sends GPS coords every 30 minutes for under $50 with a battery life of several years, so if you bike is ever stolen you can track it down, and its going to work as long as it is within 5ish miles outdoors or halfish of a mile inside of any public hotspot. The only downside is the fairly slow adoption rate of hotspots, but if Amazon was to tie Sidewalk in it would instantly become the greatest IOT network. As for Amazon's implementation, this isn't going to be for sending a video stream of your Ring camera across the internet to you at work, its simply going to be a tiny payload that will send a notification saying your internet is out. Lets say your house starts on fire while your internet is out, or a door gets opened while the system is armed... rather than needing to pay $10+/month for cellular backup it will just send the tiny payload with a warning to you. In a nutshell, think of it like a free miniature version of a very slow network of cellular towers. Plus you get the excitement of another new "deadly cancer causing network" for the media to flip out about and watch people start burning down other people's houses to get rid of the Echo's. It is so low bandwidth I really don't think it could realistically carry IP traffic as it sends payloads of a few bits, a single IP packet is several bytes. Most implementations will send something like 8 bits every 15 minutes or so for status monitoring or even as small as 2 bits for state change if you were to press a button (plus the overhead of end to end 128bit encryption which is most of the bandwidth), we will just have to wait and see how they end up setting it all up. I'm sure there is someway to hack the system and get some sort of encrypted data out of it, but why waste the time, if you already have internet there are a thousand much easier ways to steal information from you.

I'm a little late to the party, but in case someone finds this down the road and is wondering.... Home Assistant works with several Robot Vacuums. It auto discovered my Shark, the Xiaomi integration worked for my Wyze vacuum, and got it working with my Samsung Powerbot thru IFTTT.

Could be wrong here as I haven't looked for a few years, but almost all of my server stuff was 2-3 years old as data center pulls. From the reading I did back then, they rarely keep hardware for very long as its much cheaper to spend $5k on a new server that saves X amount of power as newer, more efficient electronics very quickly pay for themselves. Also helps with performance per unit, and the density gains pay for the cost of new servers as well. I really doubt there is any half knowledgeable person out there running a 15 year old server in a DC, unless its for compatibility of an outdated system. I also don't think SSD reliability has been an issue in the DC for about a decade now, and same with capacity/performance per density, no one keeps the same SSD for more than a few years just take a look at all of the DC pull drives on eBay. Higher speed and capacity will come around to easily justify the upgrade, it would be silly to run a 500mbps 256gb SSD from 2010 in a modern server now.

He isn't looking to start a fight, and was eventually going to convert it to electric regardless of the rules as its less noise and maintenance anyways, it was just moved up in priority and we assumed there would be some easy to find turnkey solutions. The eventual plan is solar panels on the roof so you don't even worry about charging it, just replace the batteries every 5 years or so. Most people on the lake have these, he just wanted something that will hold a lot more people: https://www.protatch.com/pontoon-boats Doubtful, I don't know the exact terms, probably electric only.

Long shot, but I figured I'd try here quick... A family friend kinda screwed himself over, owns a lake that he is having houses developed on and let some of them form a lake association so he didn't have to deal with the nuances of lake management. Well.... they decided to ban gas boat motors and he just bought a 20 some foot pontoon boat. Its a small lake that he just putted around on anyways, so I'm looking into options to convert it to electric. The little 40-50 pound thrust trolling motors barely move it, so I doubt trying one of the $3k 120 pound trollers will do much more. I've found 20+ hp electric outboards, but its looking like $20k all said and done, which I doubt he wants to spend. Aiming for 5-10 mph max speed, and have the power to maneuver around and un-beach it. My thought is to pick up an old 20-40 hp outboard, pull the power head, and essentially slap a ~10 hp golf cart motor and electrics on it. Seems like it would be fairly straight forward and doable for $5k or so. I've seen a lot of the two extremes, either RC plane brushless motors for Kayaks and Jon boats, or 150 hp EV motors for bass boats, struggling to find any info on people doing this in that 10 hp range.

I'm looking for a 65" TV mount that attaches to the back of a cabinet. Right now the TV is just sitting on top, but their dog likes to attack the deer on the screen when watching hunting shows and keeps breaking panels... so I need it raised up 2' or so from the top of the current stand. Its sitting in a corner where I'd need nearly 8' of extension, so a wall mount won't work, and all the floor standing ones look pretty sketchy with a 65" hanging off of them. Basically I want something like this, but already have a nice stand, so just the mount part to attach to the back. So far the best option I've found is this guy, and then weld some 1/8" x 1 1/2" steel strap to it to screw it to the back of the stand. Just wanted to check if someone knew of a better option.

That will work, but its a bad time to buy a USG or USG-Pro, they are likely to be discontinued any day now. If you need it right now, look into a Dream Machine or Dream Machine Pro, if you can wait a little bit Ubiquiti is releasing a direct replacement for the USG called the UXG. Should have been in Early Access by now, but Covid seems to have delayed it. https://community.ui.com/questions/Introducing-the-UniFi-Next-Gen-Gateway-Product-Line-Starting-with-UXG-Pro-/732dd4dd-10bf-463c-8622-382d77702872

New tool showed up yesterday, the M12 Installation Drill Driver, pretty pleased with this one. I expected it to be on par with the M12 Screwdriver, but it has quite a bit more power, and came with 24wh batteries rather than standard 16wh, which was a nice surprise. Entirely possible all M12 have moved to coming with 24wh though, I haven't bought one for a good while. Its pretty crazy the difference the battery alone makes, on a 16wh in the 2nd speed it will drive a 4" #10 GRK into a 2x4, but stall out right as the screw head is flush, on the 24wh it will drive it right down until the bit can't reach any further into the wood. The 16wh I used was a couple years old, but it is dedicated to my M12 thermal imager so it is only been through a handful of charge cycles and should still be at peak performance. The best part is all the weird angles you can get into with the different heads, and the offset adapter will make hiding screws in corners much easier. And then I finally finished my M18 soldering iron I found on thingiverse, just waiting for epoxy to dry on the spade connectors for the battery connection. I've never had good luck with butane irons, and lately I've been using a T12 handle wired up to a LiPo battery, but lack of heat control has been a PITA. While this will be noticeably larger, I'm much more likely to have a charged M18 laying around, and gain nice heat control, it will be worth it.

After being disappointed with results from my DIY Prusa i2 and then i3 clones several years ago, I picked up an Ender 3 Pro to print the parts to make a nice printer like the Voron or Ulitmaker clone. I still haven't bothered to print the parts and build it... I've been extremely happy with the Ender 3 Pro, and I have no idea how another printer could be as good for even triple the price. It took a bit of tweaking and $100 or so for a BL Touch, PEI on spring steel, Aluminum extruder, and bed springs, but the thing runs like a champ. Even doing a lot of ABS printing now that I have an enclosure. IMO, even if you are comfortable spending $1k+, just get the Ender 3 first to know if you will like the hobby or not. It never hurts to have a backup printer, or you could get at least half your money back out of it by selling it. After you spend some time with one, you will know more about what you ultimately want in your "endgame" printer.

I've had two Corsair units die on me now, your CPU will just hit the thermal limit and downclock to ~300mhz. Then you will get pissed off why your computer is slow, finally figure out why, wait 3 weeks to get it replaced under RMA, have it fail a couple years later, install your old Hyper 212 on the system and realize AIO was a waste of time and money. Then a few years later see that shiny new RGB, get a new AIO cooler from a different brand, wait a year, wonder why your computer is so slow, reinstall Hyper 212 with an RBG fan from the AIO. Ooo, I can get an AIO with a screen on it now??? Bye Hyper 212, see you in two years. (Just my experience with my cursed main computer, I have AIOs in two of my SFF computers and one of them has been going strong for over a decade )

Needed is subjective, if you want to download something from the internet at 1gbps, while downloading files from your NAS loaded with SSDs at 5gbps+, all day every day and absolutely cannot wait, then it would probably be worth it. I feel like I'm a power user, have a full server rack in my basement with over a dozen VMs, SSD backup server, Plex server, NVR for IP cameras, etc... and I've never felt I NEED 10gbps LAN. Sure I want it, but its getting cheaper every year, so I'm just holding out for a bit. Worst case scenario backups and file transfers take a few minutes longer. That being said, if you value your time at say $50 an hour, and it will save you 10 minutes a day... it would pay for itself in under a year.

Cat5e and Cat6 are both 1gbps, Cat6 is just better with interference, but very unlikely you'd have enough interference in a home that Cat5e would have any problems. Cat6 is more for running dozens or hundreds of cables in a bundle, or running near high voltage/amperage power lines. Cat6 does have a higher distance it can go for carrying 10gbps (~30m), but if you were going to replace the Cat5e with anything, just get Cat6a which is 10gbps for 100m. If you want more than 1gbps to account for LAN and WAN your cost will increase dramatically. Its gone down a lot over the last few years, but you are still looking at a bare minimum of $130 for a 4 port Mikrotik switch, and each device will be ~$100 for two SFPs (if a DAC isn't long enough) and network card. Need more than 4 devices connected? I believe the next cheapest switch is the Unifi XG 16 port for $600.

Every time I got into RCs I would get bored of them very shortly after, so every time the allure came around again I told myself if I just buy a bigger better one and upgrade more and more on it, I will enjoy it more, but that was never the case. Started on the normal $2-300 RTR kits, put around $2-300 in aftermarket parts on them so they didn't break every 5 minutes. Then stepped it up to a Mini E-Revo with a Castle Creations 1/10th scale setup, RPM arms and beadlocker wheels, wasn't much more at around $750 all setup, but at the time (and maybe still, haven't looked in years) there were no good options for chassis upgrades so you'd snap the bulkheads every time you took it out and spend an hour or so replacing it. I thought it was too small, and didn't to spend the money on a full size E-Revo, so I took my old E-Maxx, put in dual brushless motors, hardened gears, every aluminum part I could find, and absolutely hated it, because when you give it that much power and strengthen almost everything, every break is expensive. So then it was time to really step it up and moved to "pro" levels with a Mugen MBX (4 or 5?, was still Nitro at the time, did a conversion to brushless on it) and while it held up way better than anything thus far, it still did break and parts were really hard to find at the time so it would only be usable every other weekend. Now, its not like these are all fragile as glass, if you are careful with them and just taking it easy around a track or backyard they'd likely never break... but that is boring. At this point I decided to give up on RC cars for good, and then the Losi 1/24th scale came out.... My son was maybe one at the time, so I thought a cheap yet still hobby grade RC would be fun and exciting for him, and I fell in love with it. Nearly 10 years later I still drive them around every so often, making little mods and tweaks. Parts are extremely cheap, they rarely ever break, and you can drive them indoors. They are still nearly as moddable as the bigger ones, I have a few Micro's that can do 60mph if you can find a smooth enough road. Also in all that I had a 1/12 scale hydroplane boat, which was nitro and spent quite a lot of time keeping it running, which is no fun... still have plans to brushless convert this at some point. A few Blade Heli's, the little Coaxial MCX was actually a lot of fun, but anymore I'd rather just fly a quad copter around. And my brother had some Axial crawlers, but I've never had anything put me to sleep so fast. So long story short, I've tried about everything RC (aside from 1/5 scale and road cars) and 1/36 or 1/24 Losi have easily been the cheapest AND most fun I've had with RC.

I've settled on Milwaukee, seem to hold up the best over time. My only semi-regret was getting a M18 Fuel drill and impact and then standard M12 drill and impact, I probably should have just saved some money and went with two sets of M12 Fuel, as my standard M12's can do just about everything I need. Then again, even the M18 will struggle a bit mixing 5 gallons of drywall compound so eh... As for the bigger tools, the Fuel versions aren't much more money if you are just getting bare tools, so definitely do that as the Fuel Sawzall and Grinder are WAY better than the standards, they've completely replaced my corded versions. The standard M18 circular saw and SDS drill do well enough, haven't bothered replacing them yet. You also have the whole ecosystem of M12/18, so lawn trimmers, chainsaws, plumbing tools, etc... Hell I even have a M12 thermal camera. Extremely nice to only have two different batteries to worry about having charged for a giant array of tools, plus there is a 12/18 combo charger, so only one thing sitting out on the bench. Ryobi does have several tools I wish Milwaukee had, and some are so much cheaper it was almost temped to add a Ryobi charger to my garage, but then I found this. So now I have all my nice Milwaukee tools I commonly use, and can buy Ryobi for the tools I'll only use once in a blue moon or the oddball stuff Milwaukee doesn't sell like the grass seed spreader I just got, but still only have to worry about two batteries. Next on the list is their hot glue gun. If you don't have it yet, this is the best $40 M12 tool I've purchased. Use the crap out of it, its the perfect assembly/disassembly tool. There is a 2 speed Fuel version I'll be picking up the next time I catch it on sale. And for the high draw tools, the 4.0 M12 battery makes a noticeable difference in power.

Way off topic here... but anyone have a link to this blue container? Not having any luck searching for it and I really like the size.

Stock bed was fine on larger parts, but tiny pieces like the bit closest to the camera with the stringing in my picture or the support bits for where hex nuts would go would occasionally come loose in the first few layers and ruin the print, have never had that happen yet with the PEI. BL Touch was easily the best upgrade I've done, saves tons of time. I did have a weird issue with mine where it would sometimes not retract, and even not take a zero so the hot end crashed into the bed on me. Turns out it was the set screw on the top not being tightened far enough as it acts at the magnet's core to draw the probe up.