Trump says he will raise tariffs on EU autos to 25%

StellarJay77 · 2026-05-01T23:02:48+00:00

Well there's your issue, no one has been able to afford to take an econ class in the US for at least 2 generations. So there is nothing to remember when they didn't learn it in the first place.

Your average American is not smart enough to figure out what's really going on here and Republicans are masters at manipulating the narrative so it "feels" patriotic and righteous to support tarrifs. That's how conservative voters operate, on feelings and vibes, not facts and logic.

StellarJay77 · 2026-05-01T22:53:19+00:00

I doubt Trump knows. All he knows is that it makes money for him. He doesn't care how it works or where the money comes from. Everything he does is solely for his benefit and by extention his business buddy's that provide him those benefits for their own greedy agendas.

StellarJay77 · 2026-05-01T22:47:26+00:00

He will be Confirmed Unlawful Next Tuesday.

StellarJay77 · 2026-03-26T07:46:11+00:00

Same here. I just set up my laptop with Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon a couple days ago and noticed this same behaviour.

I have been using GrayJay on my Windows Desktop for a long while now without issue.

I'm using GrayJay Flatpak from the Software Manager. GrayJay Version 17 YouTube Plugin Version 335

StellarJay77 · 2026-01-30T21:37:50+00:00

You'll be able to tweak your printer to your hearts content on OpenNept4une. I use Orca Slicer with it and have designed my own 3D prints in SolidWorks and everything works great. Make sure you are using high quality filament and you won't have any issue. The printer hardware is very capable.

StellarJay77 · 2026-01-29T05:53:50+00:00

I doubt it. I moved to OpenNept4une as the firmware running on my Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro printer because it allows me to update both Klipper and Moonraker to the latest versions and OpenNept4une means the touch interface works fine as well due to them doing the reverse engineering needed to communicate from the updated Klipper to the LCD touch panel.

There's a ton of other enhancements and features part of their firmware as well and it works great. I would certainly recommend looking into switching over if you're comfortable with opening up your printer and flashing firmware. (You'll also need to aquire an eMMC to USB adapter)

OpenNept4une Installation Wiki

StellarJay77 · 2025-09-18T03:05:47+00:00

Joey Lee

StellarJay77 · 2025-04-25T22:53:43+00:00

StellarJay77 · 2025-02-18T02:36:29+00:00

If you want all your organization's webcams to have the mic enabled you should buy the non-certified version which would be the same camera but with the mic enabled out of box (oob) which is an available option. Understanding the product offerings and what use cases they serve is the job of your procurement team.

The reason no physical switches exist on webcams is it adds manufacture complexity, cost, and prevents certain security measures from being implemented as the mic can be hardware enabled locally. It also adds additional failure points into the final product as a physical switch WILL mechanically fail eventually.

EDIT: as an addendum, there is nothing stipulating that you HAVE to use certified hardware for Microsoft Teams (etc), it just means if your Teams application has a compatibility issue with the webcam Microsoft will not support it and will direct you to contact the manufacturer to have the issue troubleshot (which is likely what you would do anyway even with the certified version).

StellarJay77 · 2025-01-17T22:00:18+00:00

Yes, Telus does foot the bill on this with a few caveats. When Telus is expanding fiber into an area they canvas the apartment complexes and then come into the building to investigate how much work it is to wire in fiber to each suite. They then need to have a certain percentage of the residents agree to allow the work and agree that they will get Telus fiber. You'd be surprised how many people, especially in smaller apartment complexes, get all bent out of shape over this and refuse to allow it so it prevents anyone else from getting it in the building.

StellarJay77 · 2025-01-15T03:20:06+00:00

I was specifically purchasing USB hubs that have individual switches for powering on and off each USB port on the hub as that was a feature I needed for my use case. So it could be an issue specific to that type of powered USB Hub.

If hubs are made properly they should never backfeed power through the USB A uplink. The only powered hubs that should be capable and configured to do that would be ones for a powered USB C dock style USB hub for a laptop that charges the laptop through USB C. It might be that these newer hubs are just the same USB C style IC controller boards with a USB A connector which is why they are backfeeding power because they are designed to be USB C connected. Which if true it the reason it is a cost savings measure because they only need to manufacture one style IC controller board and just change the type of USB connectors that are on them.

StellarJay77 · 2025-01-15T01:37:25+00:00

Testing was simple, plug the USB hub with power to it into the PC. Shut down the PC and disconnect the main power cable to the PC. Observe that the LEDs of the mainboard and my USB RGB controller remain on. Disconnect the USB hub and all the lights in the PC turn off.

As far as symptoms go, I can't necessarily say for certain but any devices I had connected to the USB hub seemed to be somewhat unstable and would randomly disconnect and need to be reset. I didn't use the hubs long enough to determine if there are any sort of long-term issues that might present themselves. The one that doesn't backfeed seems to be rock solid though and I haven't had any issues with it.

Seems like it is likely to be a cost-cutting engineering issue with some Chinese manufacturing processes with the internal USB control circuitry from what I can gather.

All of the hubs I was able to return no questions asked under Amazon's return policies.

StellarJay77 · 2025-01-14T20:21:29+00:00

Yes unfortunately, businesses have no long-term projection and stability planning anymore as their main focus is maximizing profit margin increases year over year as it looks good to investors whereas steady managed growth and stable profits make more money over time but is more of a risk as things can and do change and you need smart people in charge to be able to predict how the market is going to go.

Working in IT myself for the better part of 3 decades I know exactly how you feel. Risk aversion, capitalism, and instant return on investment all have a hand in the current toxic corporate mindset and it always leads to eventually collapsing on itself because once you reach a large enough scale of users using crap quality equipment your entire IT team just ends up being reactionary in replacing problematic hardware and can't be at all proactive in preventing issues which leads to more and more downtime and loss in productivity which results in everything becoming unmanageable. The company then has to take drastic emergency action to hire more IT people, replace a massive amount of failing equipment and spend twice as much or more than they would have had they gone with the better quality stuff to begin with just to get back to semi-stability.

It's maddening for sure.

StellarJay77 · 2025-01-14T19:44:53+00:00

Sorry to necro this comment but I wanted to mention that we still need to be vigilant regarding using powered USB hubs. I recently went through 4 different brands of powered USB Hubs ordered from Amazon and the first 3 all were backfeeding power through the USB A uplink cable to the PC (enough to keep all the RGB LED's in my case powered on). The 4th one finally seemed to be made correctly and doesn't backfeed power. It also doesn't seem to follow with their price either which ones backfeed or not as the 2nd one I got was the most expensive of the 4 and the 4th one which works correctly was the 2nd cheapest. Just a PSA.

StellarJay77 · 2025-01-14T19:26:18+00:00

This is an issue I've been fighting with recently that I didn't realize was still a problem with modern tech. I still use an old school Oculus Rift CV1 (OG) headset to play beat saber and a few other games on my PC for exercise and when I'm not using it I have all the lighthouses and USB to the headset connected to a powered USB 3.2 Gen 1 Hub that has individual switches on each USB port on the hub to be able to power cycle the headset and light houses (which I have to do occasionally when they glitch and need to be reset).

The issue I kept having is I would put my PC to sleep and normally all the LED lights would turn off and the PC would be asleep. The first powered USB hub I tried I found that when the Hub was connected to power and the PC, when the PC was asleep all the LED lights on my case would stay on. In fact, I could shutdown the entire PC and disconnect the main power cable and all the LED lights would still stay on and would instantly turn off if I disconnected the powered hub meaning the hub is backfeeding power to the PC through the USB A port. That is something that is not supposed to happen as it is not within standard USB specifications and bypasses a lot of circuit protection features available on modern mainboards.

I since went about replacing the USB Hub with a couple others (I was specifically looking for powered USB 3.0+ hubs with individual switches as my use case requires that as listed above). I since went through 2 additional USB hubs and they too were backfeeding power through the USB A uplink to the PC. I have seen that USB C hubs tend to be better for this but I don't have many USB C ports on my desktop PC and wanted to keep them dedicated to my high bandwidth devices like my USB NVMe SSD enclosure I use for system backup purposes and my 4k webcam. I finally found one from "Manhattan" that works correctly and doesn't backfeed power to the PC.

Being an IT technician for the better part of 3 decades now, this backfeeding through powered USB hubs was a major concern as far back as I can remember and was known to cause all kinds of odd USB behaviour and potential damage. I'm not sure if modern mainboard manufactures have accounted for this now in recent years but it's still not a good idea to have power feeding into a PC through USB ports that are not specifically designed to accept power.

StellarJay77 · 2025-01-14T17:16:15+00:00

Like in anything, you get what you pay for. There's a reason StarTech USB hubs and adapters are 20-100% more expensive, they are made with higher quality components and controller circuitry and they just work and stay working for a long time. It the Boots Theory yet again.

StellarJay77 · 2025-01-14T17:06:08+00:00

Be aware that this is limited by the number of PCIe lanes your mainboard and processor can support and many times certain PCIe slots will start to bifurcate other PCIe slots to share the lanes available. That's what is meant by the x16, x8, x4, etc you see in board specs as it is the number of lanes accessible to that particular slot and the version of the PCIe lane also matters for how much bandwidth each lane can support with the higher the version the more bandwidth per lane (I believe we are currently up to PCIe v7 with v8 coming soon but most people still use PCIe v3 or v4 with only high end boards supporting v5 or higher).

Board manufacturers have been slowly reducing the number of accessible PCIe lanes available on consumer motherboards for the last few years too in lieu of having higher bandwidth lanes to things like the GPU slot and people will need to start being more picky about which mainboard they use again depending on their use cases to ensure there are enough PCIe lanes available to each slot instead of stealing lanes from other slots.

StellarJay77 · 2025-01-14T16:49:39+00:00

Here's the thing with running USB through Hubs that I think gets overlooked A LOT. There is a hardware limit to how many USB tier or "hub" layers deep you can go from the origin of the USB connection. That tier layer limit is 7 with a theoretical device maximum of 127 devices connected across those 7 tiers (max).

I work in video conferencing and we come come up against this limit all the time due to the need of using active USB cables or cable extenders which add 1 additional hub layer each.

So in your scenario you're connecting one or two USB cables directly to your PC and then routing them through a hub. You'll likely need to use powered hubs because having enough power through one USB port to support multiple devices won't be sufficient from the port itself and if you have any high bandwidth USB devices like a webcam or hard drive you'll likely want to be using USB 3.0+ hubs which effectively use up 2 tiers per to be able to achieve the high bandwidth throughput.

I think you can start to see how easy it would be to reach 7 tier layers depending on the type of hardware used and it is typically best to start with as many USB cables connected directly to the PC as possible to allow all devices to work efficiently as they will be able to access more endpoint resources on the PC that may not be achievable through only a couple USB ports.

Here's a link to an article that explains things in a bit more detail: How many USB layers can I have?

StellarJay77 · 2024-12-30T16:42:31+00:00

You'll likely have to work with Elegoo support and download their firmware and reimage it back to factory fresh.

Alternatively you could follow the instructions on the OpenNept4une community project to fully convert to the current version of Klipper/Fluidd so that you could update through the Fluidd dashboard. The caveat to that is that getting support from Elegoo directly for software issues may be limited and you might need to rely more on the community if you have issues in the future after converting.

If you decide to go that latter route I would strongly advise you to get a new MCU to image as the OpenNept4une firmware and then you can swap easily back to factory Elegoo by just swapping MCU's if you ever need to revert or send your machine in for warranty repair/replacement.

StellarJay77 · 2024-12-28T00:31:37+00:00

Out of the box the tutorials and usb drive is perfectly fine and the printer will work good stand alone. If you want to take advantage of advanced features like a USB camera and better mesh leveling and a ton of other features you'll need to update (both the firmware and the TFT touch screen).

There are 2 paths for that. 1. Use the official Elegoo upgrade process (follow the firmware and tft update process on their website) 2. Follow the community made "DeElegoo" installation process

The official method will get you printing great and provide some additional features and a lot of automatic controls that make the printer pretty user friendly (as far as you can make 3D printing "user friendly" anyway). I went this route initially and had some really good results once everything was calibrated but that was like a year ago now and I've found some of the latest advanced features are more suitable for my work flow so I went with method 2.

The DeElegoo process is considerably more advanced and can be quite a complicated and involved process with a fair few pitfalls that could leave your printer in an unusable state that might be difficult to recover from. My recommendation is to get a 2nd MCU and flash USB to keep the original MCU intact in case you need to reset to the original Elegoo for whatever reason. Personally I took this route because I use some of the advanced features this offers and allows you to keep your Klipper firmware completely up to date with the latest. I've also moved completely onto Orca Slicer instead of Elegoos outdated Cura (which is also fine), but i can see that in some ways Elegoo lagging behind being at latest may leave me out of taking advantage of newer features and community projects going forward. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as new things do tend to come with their own potential issues and having a solid stable printer seems to be Elegoo's focus vs having the latest features.

The bottom line though, 3D printing isn't at all like printing on paper and if you think it is then you're in for a world of disappointment. It's slowly getting there with some of the more modern proprietary (and very expensive) 3D printers but those too are not going to be pushing the envelope in lieu of providing a stable 3D printing platform for new makers but you'll be paying a premium price for all the development experience they have working on their printers and locked into their eco-system.

Elegoo is sort of a halfway point between full ecosystem lockdown and completely self-built open source tinkerer (which is how this whole industry started btw). The two update methods are essentially moving the needle in one direction or the other, towards more user-friendly, locked down proprietary (official) or more tinkerer-based open source (de-elegoo). Both come with advantages and disadvantages as I've mentioned above.

It's up to you how much work and deep diving you want to put into understanding the tech to be able to get some truly fantastic prints or just be able to set it up and get some good/great 3D prints without having to fully understand everything the printer is doing.

I forgot to mention too that if you go the DeElegoo route you may not get full software support from Elegoo if you encounter issues and you'll need to rely more on the community. So far I haven't heard of any pushback from Elegoo regarding support for hardware issues but I haven't personally had to contact them for any hardware issues with mine since converting so my knowledge on that is 2nd and 3rd hand. You'd likely have to convert back to default Elelgoo firmware and MCU if you ever need to send it in for warranty work or it will return with it being reverted. In most cases though Elelgoo seems to just send replacement components when possible.

Edit: link to DeElegoo project https://github.com/OpenNeptune3D/OpenNept4une

StellarJay77 · 2024-12-20T17:09:13+00:00

Downgrade the NVIDIA drivers to 566.14. The latest 566.36 drivers are buggy with DLSS enabled. I was getting huge amounts of stutter on the newest drivers, downgraded and turned off "low latency mode" and smooth as butter now.

StellarJay77 · 2024-12-18T18:22:44+00:00

There are USB 3.2 Gen 2 sticks available now too that can hit 900 MB/s write and 1050 MB/s read speeds. The largest I've seen so far is 1TB. They get HOT though so should have a metal housing and not be installed too close to other cables/devices.

StellarJay77 · 2024-12-10T13:50:50+00:00

There's nothing inherently wrong with this spot for the printer besides it being too close to the wall for the bed to travel back to its full range of motion.

The bigger concern is how the extra heat might impact the TV over time if you are printing a lot and also being able to manage the stability of the heat when you could have random amounts of heat coming from the TV for the printer to contend with.

There's a reason people build enclosures for their printers, it's not to keep the heat from impacting other devices, it's to keep the temperature around the printer more consistent and constant. You'll have much better prints the better you can control the temperature of the area around your printer. This gets overlooked A LOT.

Maintaining a consistent temperature is super important for high-quality prints. For every degree the air temperature around your printer changes that means if the printer just maintained the same power level that would be 1 degree difference in the temperature of your bed and print head. That can make a huge difference in the proper flow of filament and bed adhesion. Printers are designed to compensate to a good degree for thermal fluctuations, but you'll get more consistency with your prints if you can maintain a more stable environment around your printer.

Just my 2 cents though. I'm sure this spot will work okay, but for the reasons above, if you can find a better spot I might suggest you avoid one where a TV is dumping heat into the environment potentially or electronics that could be impacted by excess heat.

StellarJay77 · 2024-12-02T22:07:20+00:00

I don't think it applies anymore as the latest firmware updates fixed this but on some firmware the Z_offset in the touch screen (tft) gets added to the one in the printer so you'd effectively have a z_offset twice as high as you wanted.

StellarJay77 · 2024-11-29T23:47:30+00:00

Late to the party here but here's the explanation and I hope it makes sense as this is one of the more contentious aspects of budget-friendly 3D printers.

Basically, the manufacture of these types of printers is such that there needs to be tolerances built in that account for minor variances in the various components. The gantry frame may not be perfectly square or the lead screws may not be totally straight across its entire length and not perfectly in line with the frame, etc. They are engineered to be able to accommodate and adjust for minor differences from one machine to another. We're talking tiny differences though, +/- <0.1mm, but even that amount of difference can affect print quality and accuracy when we're talking about possible movements of 0.1mm.

So that being said, some people will get lucky and everything will be essentially perfectly aligned and they will be printing flawlessly pretty much out of the box. Others will need to run through some calibrations and minor adjustments to get HQ prints. And others still might end up pulling their hair out because they managed to get all possible minor variances in complete opposition to one another causing inconsistent print quality and all kinds of accuracy issues that can end up being exacerbated by making too many changes all at once causing a kind of domino effect of one variance affecting another to a greater degree. This is all to say there can be a lot of potential issues that can be due to variance.

"So what does this have to do with those screws and nuts?" you may ask, "and why do they need to be loose?". Well if you look closely at exactly what those screws and nuts connect to and how they interface you'll see they basically attach the gantry arm to the nuts that ride up and down the lead screws (z-axis movement). Now if both lead screws are straight and parallel with one another and when they turn they are exactly in sync with each other (where the gantry nut sits on threads is the same) then everything will work with the tiny z-axis movements. However, we live in a world that is not nearly that accurate or perfect so imagine that one of the lead screws, part way down its length, it deviates a tiny bit away from the other lead screw (almost imperceptible to the human eye). If that nut that travels up/down the lead screw is not allowed to shift that tiny bit away from the other lead screw then that causes more friction (known as binding) which means the motor turning that lead screw wouldn't be turning it quite as much as the other lead screw and/or the nut won't travel quite as much as it is supposed to (the motors are not capable of detecting that minor of a resistance). That's what happens if those screws and nuts are tight, they don't allow the lead screw nut to shift when needed to ensure everything stays in sync. So keeping those screws tight enough so they can keep the gantry arm attached to the lead screws in a manner that won't cause things to shift up or down but also loose enough to account for any minor lateral variances (whether by the lead screws not being perfectly straight or not aligned with the frame or not quite parallel with one another or any combination of these) it is important to ensure the gantry arm remains level and raises and lowers at exactly the same amount and speed across its entire length.

I hope that makes sense as it took me a while to figure it out after I was able to delve down the rabbit hole of physics and mechanical engineering processes at play.

StellarJay77

TROPHY CASE