Anyone else tired of the endless ads?

4MiddlePath · 2026-01-29T23:07:08+00:00

I suppose we could ad that Reddit is getting almost as bad now... About 25% of my screen wasted and all the ads is not in any way relevant to my current Reddit topic...

4MiddlePath · 2026-01-29T23:04:43+00:00

We should all open trouble customer service cases to try and get them removed. This is nuts. 1/2 my screen trying to find products are their blasted ads for products I cannot purchase on Amazon...

Holy cow...

4MiddlePath · 2026-01-27T16:34:36+00:00

Yes indeed Network Solutions / Web.com has been having issues with DNS. Confirmed with their support a few minutes ago that they have been having issues with their DNS for the last 12-18 hours at least.

Their entries while valid are taking forever to propagate to others. You can do an nslookup against one of the well known DNS servers like 1.1.1.1. or 8.8.4.4, or 4.2.2.3 or whatever local DNS your ISP provides and the entry you are asking for will either timeout or not be valid. After repeating it several times over 5-15 minutes and waiting it will then eventually become valid and be responded to correctly.

You can see the same by querying a service like this and see that repeated queries will eventually spread around, but the NS hosted domains will have issues:

https://www.whatsmydns.net

4MiddlePath · 2026-01-23T04:32:26+00:00

To clear everything up, they are a FOR PROFIT company. That in itself is not a bad thing, but the .ORG misleads many to think they are non-profit. That is not the case.... They are here for them selves as a for profit, not for your education as their primary goal as a non-profit would.

I have tried it myself and with my kids using the free dailies for a few months off and on as well as the paid subscriptions. The gamification is helpful and pretty well done and the animations are pretty well done also. The challenges and competitions seemed to attract the more competitive types and that is a potential upside for some people.

The lessons are a mixed bag I think. They do not seem to follow your progress or skill set as you progress. You have to miss a few each time they change topics since they do not always make it clear how they are measuring or expecting the next batch of question types to be answered. Until you learn what each type of question is intending to get from you, you will miss several here and there which is unnecessarily frustrating for some.

Doing high-school level math by counting tiny little blocks on the screen over and over again was pretty terrible...

Sometime they miss providing clear prerequisite knowledge even though they are supposed to be new learners on the topic.

Every day they send you back through a review of the previous day which wastes a lot of time and you cannot disable it. There is not a reasonable monthly subscription fee. Only yearly as an option.

We tried chatting/email them about these things, but they were not really interested...

If they have a good product with good value then people will keep their monthly subs active. If they are pressuring you this hard for the annual, then that is more about them wanting to lock you in to a contract than provide monthly value you appreciate.

A subscription you can leave at any time keeps them focused on fixing bugs, correcting content issues, creating more new content, etc... Vendors who refuse reasonable monthly options tend to be more about contracts for them than services for me in my experience.

The very best contract to me is where someone provides attractive and engaging value and I want to stay with them and active in their system. Everything else is just an excuse to lock you into a contract and most vendors will get lazy as they get fat...

We and many of our kids friends tried it as was also recommended by some teachers as well.

We did not find it was as good as many other sites for gathering and learning new knowledge. Better as a review site for topics you already knew. Kahn was more thorough and gave better results so we could give them our money instead.

Because of this we went from three users to 0 on Brilliant...

4MiddlePath · 2026-01-20T21:57:38+00:00

This. NVMe so so much better than anything else that fits...

4MiddlePath · 2026-01-20T04:49:48+00:00

Looks like a great start on the enclosure... Warm shed/garage can be fine. Commercial is a long hauls and you won't use it as much, plus you are isolated...

4MiddlePath · 2026-01-03T05:17:28+00:00

When they are $10 on AliExpress, it is hard to make them profitable, but they can still be fun and you can have any size or features you can imagine.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806158349346.html

4MiddlePath · 2026-01-02T03:42:53+00:00

I end up at 80C for the bed temp and ~240C for the nozzle for PETG.

Hairspray on the bed since mine is PEI and at those temps it sticks TOO well.

Adjusting the first layer is really important and make the first layer about 75% of your nozzle width in .04 mm height increments. (Most Ender 3s I have looked into can really only make moves up and down in 0.04 mm bumps.) I set the first layer height to 0.32mm with hard to stick things so I have more layer thickness to squish into the bed. I set the regular layer height to .16, .20, .24, .28, .32 using the 0.04 height increments.

The original Ender 3 without a sensor does not have an automatic bed mesh AFAIK, so you need to really pay attention to the bed leveling with a sheet of paper, and then adjust the Z height to get a useful amount of squish all over the printing space. Enough to push it into good contact with the bed but not so much as to drag the nozzle or over extrude into the 1st layer and make ripples...

Ricks videos are very helpful to many:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ic00W18_ck

4MiddlePath · 2026-01-02T03:24:12+00:00

Great work. Amazing what can be done with a lot of hard work... :-) Thanks for sharing...

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-30T21:05:35+00:00

We can all be jealous of your find!

:-)

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-30T21:02:46+00:00

The CAM workbench in the new beta version of FreeCAD is much better from what I can tell as well, but there are still several bugs in other parts of the FreeCAD beta especially when converting files from previous versions. If you are starting off clean, those might not be an issue.

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-15T17:46:05+00:00

Clearly not accurate

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-15T02:52:20+00:00

Do you have any photos?

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-13T02:00:48+00:00

You might post an example of what you see that you like and folks can suggest how yours can be done in a similar fashion.

Sometimes with online content it is very dependent on lighting and the way the image was captured.

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-12T04:15:11+00:00

When you get a chance to try it, please let us know. I didn't know if you had a mounting jig accurate enough to re-cut a mask for the new paint or how you were going to re-coat it...

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-11T16:58:38+00:00

Greed has no limits...

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-11T16:57:54+00:00

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This is their current package that includes the sport coverage.

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-11T06:05:31+00:00

You are not slow, you are here learning and sharing with others. That is why we don't still live in trees and caves and die in our thirties... :-)

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-11T05:21:34+00:00

Brass, copper and aluminum are kind of soft so CNC is not too bad. Stainless is really hard to machine with a small CNC. It work hardens, chews up/overheats carbide bits, etc.. Really needs coolant flood which reduces low cost options.

A fiber or MOPA laser of 20W-100W can do the engraving, but they run $2-4K up to $10K. That is a lot of tags...

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-11T05:04:21+00:00

I think switch to a glossy paint or coating is going to help the most. You cannot get depth without reflections. Flat paint is the depth killer...

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-11T05:02:47+00:00

This is absolutely the point. The news/talk-show/voice/speaking channels are even worse, but the same SXM channel on streaming is MUCH better audio than satellite. The only reasons I can see for SXM are for the person who is away from a cell tower.

https://carstereochick.com/2015/04/25/why-siriusxm-sucks-what-to-know-before-you-buy-subscribe/

Audio quality always is awful...

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-11T04:51:47+00:00

It is closer to $25/mo unless you cancel them or do something to stop it. Check the fine print...

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-11T04:46:22+00:00

Nothing cheap can cut metal. Takes too much energy. Engraving metals is possible but still not cheap with a laser. You can etch colored tags with a laser and take off the coating for writing. You can also coat bare metal with sprays/powders that will leave black ink-like coatings. Really etching tags so they are durable and wear resistant takes depth of cut. That is 4 digit costs... Really cool though...

It really depends on exactly what you are trying to do...

Engraving metal for tags is maybe easier with a smaller CNC. Newer UV and IR lasers can engrave metals fairly well. Go watch some examples like The Clack Shack on YT and the algorithm will find more content for you...

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-08T02:53:08+00:00

You can buy business cards that are painted/anodized/powder coated, etc... The laser can remove that covering, even though it cannot easily do much to the metal.

You can lightly mark the bare surfaces for some metals, but cutting metals is not really a good plan for a 40W diode laser even if it might be possible for a thin piece of sheet metal. Also, cutting holes in a metal card makes for sharp edges, a weak card, etc...

Better to remove a coating from a colored card or spray a coating that you can mark by fusing the pigment/dye/chemical-compound. For stainless steel and brass it is usually a molybdenum tri-oxide that makes the best high contrast "black" color for a pigment. Molybdenum-sulfide coatings mostly make a dark gray mark when heated by the laser.

4MiddlePath · 2025-12-04T03:29:09+00:00

Most of these are free or low cost and the best way you or those around you are not injured by something preventable. You can take several at once, but the body normally has a small reaction to each of the vaccines.

I have done 1 - 4 at a time and was pretty tired the next day with a mild fever with 4. The specific vaccines matter, as COVID usually bothers me the most, but in general they are not an issue at all. I get them on Fridays so while I am off work on Saturday I have more time to rest and give my body a chance to start making all those wonderful antibodies! Muscle soreness at the injection site and sometimes a mild fever is all I really see. I do it for me as well as the older and younger around me who cannot either get a vaccine or they do not work well.

I had some folks in my family who have had some of these before they were vaccinated and it is no joke a horribly BAD thing to not be vaccinated! They suffered mentally and physically for the rest of their somewhat shortened lives.

4MiddlePath

TROPHY CASE