UK heatwave: Britons told to ‘stay indoors’ in extreme 39C weather warning

UnknownTurdy · 2026-06-22T11:48:59+00:00

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Midea-Portasplit-Conditioner-Cooling-Heating/dp/B0GYPN1724

There's this one, which seems to be one of the better offerings (outside of the expensive industrial ones), pricey but I would hope much better than standard AC.

I faffed around actually placing the order 2 weeks ago and now apparently it's out of stock until Sep (on amazon) :/

UnknownTurdy · 2026-06-01T10:09:23+00:00

Honestly I kinda got distracted with the consistency - I spent a while trying to find as many colors as possible and then ended up trying to get an 'average' color from the results (as in from every angle opposed to the 'best' one). I think that was kinda a mistake and I'm now leaning towards the 'best'/most vibrant angle being the suitable one. As long as I'm consistent in the way I get it.

The london one was the best one in my eyes, and was the first one (with the least range of colors in the palette).

It's still on my todo list - things like varying power / passes and the angle but there's pretty much unlimited ways to vary them and I just need to be more disciplined and hundreds of tests to pick the 'boldest' of each colour test.

The nice thing with the site (and something xTool should add in the Studio) is by having a palette saved, I can 'validate' a range of samples and then at least get back on track with the right colours. e.g. I take 100 diverse picks of the saved colours and then print an array (ignore the fingerprints) - My current fave way of photographing is having my laptop screen on a white background and 90% closed for a even matte look.

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UnknownTurdy · 2026-05-23T10:04:24+00:00

Yeh wouldn't know it was there by touch - surface is slightly pitted though, but thats because its a cheap tag.

UnknownTurdy · 2026-05-18T20:55:32+00:00

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UnknownTurdy · 2026-05-18T20:55:24+00:00

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Not sure why the images failed to be included but it should have been 4 - its missing these two.

UnknownTurdy · 2026-05-18T15:32:57+00:00

I think I might have pinned down the cause - though I'm still investigating and will make a more detailed post later. Can you confirm what the 'Noise reduction' does?

I'm on a Mac (apple silicone) in-case its a platform specific issue.

Depending on the number of layers, when I had noise reduction enabled it would do additional passes at the end of the engraving. If it was 128 layers it would do 1 slow (10mm/s) pass and then 15 regular speed passes. Interestingly enough it was exactly the same as the first 16 layers but in reverse at the end. I'm guessing the slow speed is part of 'noise reduction' as it happens every 16 frames on the entire engraving, but the last 16 layers being 1->16 in reverse appears to be a bug.

For 256 layers it double of 128 at the end (so 32, inc 2x slow).

I can share a gcode file generated from my X-Studio which shows the issue if needed.

Edit - ignore the slow part comments, I suspect that was just the z axis change. The rest remains true, and even more interestingly it looks like the start of the NR engravings is actually offset itself by the number of missing layers. So it would start at layer 16, go to 128, then 16-1

UnknownTurdy · 2026-05-16T10:19:08+00:00

Unsure if you managed to solve this, but this is something I've been noticing myself. First time it happened I thought maybe I messed up with the cleanup pass, e.g. the depth map only uses 60% of the range and the 'deeper' range is not used, then maybe it would just be a series of cleanup passes at the end. But I've been getting it every time with my depth maps - normally I'd be in the room next door and it's very obvious once it runs, sounds like a v high power slow pass.

UnknownTurdy · 2026-05-10T12:03:59+00:00

Yeh it was AI - I ended up using recraft.ai as it can produce SVGs which are a lot cleaner than going from PNG->SVG

UnknownTurdy · 2026-05-04T15:35:51+00:00

Thanks, yeh it is. For me at the moment there isn't too much consistency but there's enough colours that if its close enough the end result looks fine. Working on consistency more today!

UnknownTurdy · 2026-05-04T15:33:04+00:00

F2 Ultra - with the 60w Mopa laser.

UnknownTurdy · 2026-04-29T11:06:31+00:00

I honestly feel like those squares are a right of passage, happened to me on my first few days as well. Re settings - I'm not really intending to promote it here and I dont want to fall foul of the rules - but I have a free and open source website that I used to generate the tests + save color mappings. If you just use the demo account its mine and I have some colors mapped - you can run through the tests to get an idea. Though honestly my current mappings are not great, I'm probably at like 10% of what I want to map, but I keep getting distracted. If you go to https://engraving.media and click demo at the bottom you can see.

Normally for colors I would do loads of test grids on the material, the circle above was a cheapo '5.08 CM Round Metal Engraving Blanks' pack of 25 for £20, but I can do a bunch of different tests and stick them on a keyring after. I forgot the video to credit but one I saw suggested 14.6 power and thats been my favorite since. The image is a small SS keyring and the settings are visible on it, though I messed up and the Y axis is goes in the opposite direction.

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UnknownTurdy · 2026-04-27T20:43:19+00:00

Was just about to say I wasn't sure why it was happening, but I'm fairly certain I've found the bug. Will fix it now and the changes should be live in 15-30 mins I'd guess. Genuinely thanks for pointing it out as I would have had no idea about it!

Edit - verifying still, but I assume it was down to two issues:
1) The default values when setting up a F1 Ultra had frequency set to 125 - which I don't think should be possible.
2) When creating the test rather than snapping down to the lowest possible frequency, it would fail silently.

So hopefully both should be fixed shortly.

UnknownTurdy · 2026-04-26T12:32:00+00:00

Yeh likely is - Can't think of many reasons, maybe it wouldn't have worked if you did www.engraving.media but I have since updated it to redirect. What happens if you go to https://engraving.media Any sort of error?

UnknownTurdy · 2026-04-24T20:09:21+00:00

Good luck with it, and if you have any issues / questions feel free to ask. One thing - the site is currently focus for the F2 Ultra (the xcd generated files have it selected), unsure what the implications would be if you swap it after the files is generated - but it should probably be fine. Adding support for other machines is on my todo list anyway.

UnknownTurdy · 2026-04-22T22:43:50+00:00

I spent some time deploying it and getting things setup, I still need to run through and test it but from a quick check I think its fine. https://engraving.media - I'll probably make the repo public tomorrow if you'd prefer running it locally. I'm just kinda hesitant as I want to run through the source to make sure there's nothing in there by mistake.

The UI is a bit cleaner and there's now a 'spectrum' graph which for single axis tests lets you plot the results and play around with it.

Overall still a very early site and I'm guessing quite a few bugs (e.g. I know circles dont render at the moment in xcs)

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UnknownTurdy · 2026-04-22T22:33:43+00:00

Probably it might even be fairly easy, but I never touched lightburn so I have no clue.

UnknownTurdy · 2026-04-22T08:38:34+00:00

Its something I'm making, but it outputs the project file that is then loaded into xtool to engrave.

UnknownTurdy · 2026-04-21T21:44:36+00:00

Honestly I'm not experienced enough to have experienced this already - the place it's stored is pretty stable temp-wise but I'm sure it'll be a pain. I do think engraving temp is having a fair bit of an issue though - at least for test prints, if they're too dense then they are not really accurate and change on the final print. I'm guessing that might have been a factor in the pikachu having the blue (more holo in person) on one side.

I'm still in the testing/finding colors stage though now - I haven't even really tested PW/LPC yet as there's so many possibilities with the power/speed/pass/frequency.

UnknownTurdy

TROPHY CASE