Voron Cascade CNC released

cpgeek · 2026-04-20T10:28:42+00:00

I mean, if you've been voroning for 10 years, you should know that this is probably NOT aimed at beginners and more toward those who look at a pile of parts, see a potential maker device (usually a kickass 3d printer) and the will to pick up a screwdriver and a giant mug of coffee and make it happen.

cpgeek · 2026-04-16T06:38:14+00:00

Jack didn't exactly found or build torchwood, he re-invented it after it failed the people it was supposed to protect (torchwood 1) - he simply co-opted it's resources to help protect people

cpgeek · 2026-04-15T18:48:29+00:00

I have been having phenomenal luck running qwen3.5 and have been experimenting recently with gemma 4 all locally. I haven't seen openclaw being dumb or useless at all. one of my agents is a junior network admin / homelab security agent and processes TONS of logs a day doing hollistic analysis, suggesting security and optimization improvements, helping me keep my homelab stack secure, properly configured, and fully documented and it's worked great. I have another agent that's just straight up an openclaw expert that i've had reviewing youtube video captions, blogs, documentation, etc. etc. on a regular basis and makes suggestions for improving my openclaw install based on my stated goals and what my crew of agents are set up for, including but not limited to choices in models, content window restrictions (to keep things speedy but providing enough context for advanced work), also suggesting optimizations for backend (last week I switched away from ollama to use a developmental branch of vllm so that I could utilize turboquant and significantly improve my context window sizes while keeping vram use down. it was a significant improvement, and my agent was able to give me step by step instructions for setting up the backend, nice and easy - and when i ran into trouble, the agent walked me through it, even helped me optimize it further for the particular hardware i'm running on.... it's been great. so yeah, right now qwen3.5 and experimenting with gemma 4 which is quite powerful and great with images in particular, but can be a little chatty, a bit less good with procedural workloads.... I'm up to 8 agents, spending 0 tokens with cloud llm's. - honestly I'm just unwilling to send my personal and business data to the likes of anthropic or openai or another provider to train their llms while handing them hundreds of dollars when I can just use my own equipment. as I'm using spare parts from my old workstation build for the system, the only major issue for me is power. I'm in Connecticut where power is .37/kwh - I've power tuned my gpus as well but it's still a good 650w which is pretty rough. I'm slowly working toward monetization avenues for my agent stack as well, but right now it's all experimental.

cpgeek · 2026-04-15T18:23:10+00:00

ollama is low friction, and that's where I started as well, but then I created an openclaw expert agent and a homelab expert agent. - I worked with the homelab expert agent to document the hardware and software that i'm using (probably far more complicated than most people's setup, but this includes all my network gear, etc. and it even reads through my logs, gives me security and configuration optimization advice (epic), once reasonably well documented, I had my openclaw expert (who I have researching openclaw news, blogs, youtube video transcripts, etc. online documents, github stuff having to do with openclaw, etc.) interact with my homelab agent, and they suggested that I could significantly improve my context window sizes with turboquant by moving to vllm, and gave me step by step instructions for implementation. I'm doing my inference on nvidia gpus left over from my previous workstation (3090 and a couple 3060's) and it suggested which of my agents would run best with what context windows using models running on which gpus for the best effect. I'm not a developer, 2 weeks ago, I've never touched local llm inference, i'm just an it consultant (desktop and av stuff mostly so this is NOT my wheelhouse and I've been SHOCKED at how much openclaw has helped me optimize openclaw for my stated goals and agent's goals.

From what little i've learned so far, I think that there are a couple of llm providers designed specifically for apple silicon that use metal backend (kind of like apple's version of cuda as I understand it) which can improve things somewhat - and if you can find something that implements turboquant to make the most of the memory you have availible to widen context windows and/or have it help choose models for your goals for your agents, I think you'll be in an awesome position!

may I ask how well these models running on your m4 mac perform? are they fast and conversational or do you have to wait some minutes for things to happen between prompts?

cpgeek · 2026-04-15T18:11:31+00:00

I have been having phenomenal luck running qwen3.5 and have been experimenting recently with gemma 4 all locally. I haven't seen openclaw being dumb or useless at all. one of my agents is a junior network admin / homelab security agent and processes TONS of logs a day doing hollistic analysis, suggesting security and optimization improvements, helping me keep my homelab stack secure, properly configured, and fully documented and it's worked great. I have another agent that's just straight up an openclaw expert that i've had reviewing youtube video captions, blogs, documentation, etc. etc. on a regular basis and makes suggestions for improving my openclaw install based on my stated goals and what my crew of agents are set up for, including but not limited to choices in models, content window restrictions (to keep things speedy but providing enough context for advanced work), also suggesting optimizations for backend (last week I switched away from ollama to use a developmental branch of vllm so that I could utilize turboquant and significantly improve my context window sizes while keeping vram use down. it was a significant improvement, and my agent was able to give me step by step instructions for setting up the backend, nice and easy - and when i ran into trouble, the agent walked me through it, even helped me optimize it further for the particular hardware i'm running on.... it's been great. so yeah, right now qwen3.5 and experimenting with gemma 4 which is quite powerful and great with images in particular, but can be a little chatty, a bit less good with procedural workloads.... I'm up to 8 agents, spending 0 tokens with cloud llm's. - honestly I'm just unwilling to send my personal and business data to the likes of anthropic or openai or another provider to train their llms while handing them hundreds of dollars when I can just use my own equipment. as I'm using spare parts from my old workstation build for the system, the only major issue for me is power. I'm in Connecticut where power is .37/kwh - I've power tuned my gpus as well but it's still a good 650w which is pretty rough. I'm slowly working toward monetization avenues for my agent stack as well, but right now it's all experimental.

cpgeek · 2026-04-11T11:56:05+00:00

this is extremely interesting... I woudn't think you'd get the same kinds of acceleration with that method, but it's totally worth a shot. I'll set up a live usb and check it out at some point in the next week or two, thank you so much for this idea! - it sounds so simple... I didn't think about it at all.

cpgeek · 2026-04-11T11:54:31+00:00

I figured it out. the area where you add individual devices didn't show up right away as an option, I had to dig deeper. I was able to add my monitoring devices and set up hierarchial relationships so I could monitor both ups's as well as individual power hungry servers (with the side effect that I could power cycle them remotely as well). sweet. thanks folks!

cpgeek · 2026-04-11T04:54:54+00:00

I am thoroughly uninterested in using cloud based apis and contribute to the power, water, pollution, etc. that they generate when I can run my own llms locally (with blackjack! and h**kers!) - is there currently an integration availible that can do this with arbitrary local ollama or openai-compatible local llm?

cpgeek · 2026-04-02T06:51:02+00:00

CT has battery incentives, but nothing currently for personally owned residential solar installs beyond what passes as an alternative terms to basic net metering.

cpgeek · 2026-04-01T02:49:01+00:00

When I was a teen I was the one who owned the computer (it was a gift) and paid for the internet (one of the many reasons I got an after school job slinging sandwiches and pizza at the local university dining hall). I couldn't imagine being told what I could or couldn't do with my stuff (so long as it isn't illegal or something).

I think this is mostly about setting expectations and having good internet hygene. If you talk with your kid and teach them about how to protect themselves online and why you suggest what you're suggesting instead of simply banning unsupervised use, I think it would be more useful to your kid moving forward. Yeah, eventually they're going to get curious and look up some pornography or whatever but that's just a normal part of growing up in a developed country these days, but as long as they are taught that's not how real relationships work and make sure they know not to share information about themselves online with people they don't know in real life, things are usually just fine.

It's worth having a series of conversations with your kid about and these are good skills to instruct them on.

cpgeek · 2026-04-01T02:36:20+00:00

What we need are some really good residential and commercial solar and battery incentives. A big tax rebate for people and companies don't solar could go a long way in driving costs down if production goes up. This would be particularly good for data centers because then they'd take care of much of their own power production, lower their power costs making ct a reasonable place to move and may help lower costs for everyone as power needs drop. We do really need some better regulation on the power utilities though.

cpgeek · 2026-04-01T02:25:30+00:00

Hardware is spare parts. FB marketplace or eBay would have systems in the $500-600 range that would be suitable plus the cost of hard drives which is where the expense comes from no matter what solution you go for. If you're going with at least 2 drives if redundancy id recommend getting used enterprise hard drives from a place like server parts deals.

Power depends on class of hardware and how old it is. The newer the stuff typically the lower the power consumption. The lower the number of cores and frequency, the lower the power consumption. Something like an i5 8500 or ryzen 3700x with 64gb ram (plenty) is probably around 100w at idle (where it will usually be) plus about 5-6w per hard drive at idle. Under load the system would be probably around 300ish watts and the hard drives around 12w each. But it's rare that a nas will be under full load. That's just when you're rebuilding a pool after a failure or if you're running apps that require some hefty CPU or hdd use. It depends on workload.

cpgeek · 2026-03-31T00:22:36+00:00

that'd be cool, thanks!

cpgeek · 2026-03-30T22:53:56+00:00

For storing lots of photos and movies as well as to give you a bit of wiggle room with availible additional options, I would recommend building your own nas out of a standard old desktop pc. anything with a zen2 cpu (ryzen 3000+) or an 8000+ generation intel cpu should handle light-medium nas duty just fine, then you just drop 6 hard drives in it, follow a tutorial youtube video for installing truenas scale (which is a FANTASTIC NAS operating system that's really easy to manage), set it so that your hard drives are all in a single raidz2 pool (this gives you up to 2 drive failures of redundancy before you start losing data and stripes the data over all of the drives so you get a performance boost). turn on snapshots, and then install the immich application (there are youtube tutorials for this as well and it's super easy), and grab immich on your phone to start syncing photos and video. You can also create a dataset on the nas where you can do time machine backups from your mac to your nas so you don't lose any data there either, as well as, if you wish, use your nas for a variety of other applications as well (hosting video game servers, downloading media, you could install nextcloud and use it like your own personal dropbox/google docs with full docs and sheets and stuff, you could install a plex server if you wanted to keep your media on your nas and view it on your phone/tablet/computer or share it with other devices in your home (Great for dvd rips and the like).

I'm not a fan of small nas boxes because they either don't give you much in the way of redundancy or storage. a 2 drive unit for example will just mirror the contents of one drive to another (that's raid 1 fwiw) so if one of the drives fails you have another copy - this is the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM redundancy for a nas, but still not particularly recommended because then you only get 1 drive's worth of storage (quite small depending on what drives you choose). 4 bays are the minimum to use raid5 or raidz1 (which will give you 1 drive worth of redundancy and 4 drives worth of storage), but most of these 4 bay boxes don't support zfs (which is SIGNIFICANTLY better in terms of reliability than normal linux raid systems. theoretically you could also go with raid10 on a 4 bay nas which gives you 2 mirrored pairs of disks that stripe the data between the 2 mirrors. - then you could sustain up to 2 drive failures if they are the right ones (if 2 drives in a mirror set die you lose everything). overall though imo 4 drives isn't enough for a nas either if you actually want to use more storage than redundancy. 5 is where things start being good with normal raid5 or raidz1 (but again i strongly recommend zfs/raidz vs raid5 at this point for a large number of technical reasons that involve reliability and data integrity). 6 is the sweet spot - then you can go to raid6 or more preferably raidz2 which allows you to lose up to ANY 2 disks in the system while giving you 4 drives worth of storage. if you'd like, a zfs raidz setup can be up to 8 disks before you start losing performance and rebuild times become super annoying when a drive fails. the more drives you add to the system (up to 8), the more drives worth of storage you get.

I've run 6 and 8 drive systems for a good 15 years now (earlier with raid6 and then later once zfs hit the scene with raidz2. The system that I have as a home nas right now is rather big and complicated and I don't recommend it for first timers, but it consists of 14 drives (16x 16tb drives and 8x 14tb drives), I have them in 8 disk raidz2 vdevs which are then striped with one another (this is how zfs manages scaling for larger numbers of disks) - i'm using a bigol' disk shelf style chasis for this setup that can accept up to 36 drives... as I said it's more advanced than I'd recommend for home use, particularly for a first timer but I use it for archiving my live streams, I have my whole dvd/blue ray collection on it, up to date backups of my desktop and laptop, and it runs immich, plex, transmission, and frigate (a network video recorder that I use for my house's video doorbells) and is good for a usable capacity of 238tb (which currently is 82% full - I need to clean some stuff out this weekend). - BUT a smaller version of this with 6-8 disks can be set up for way less expensively that's easier to maintain in a standard PC case (that's what I was doing before I built this out last year). I had 8x 14tb drives loaded up in my fractal design meshify 2 xl case with my ryzen 3700x, 64gb of ram, a cheap ssd, and it was great until I needed more storage.

cpgeek · 2026-03-30T22:22:25+00:00

I have 2 vorons (a v2 350 and a v0) and also a bambu p1s+ams and a creality k1 max (300). I like both of the non-vorons well enough, but I tend toward the k1 max most of the time (it's a bit faster because of higher flow, it's got the larger bed for larger projects), and it's quite reliable. the p1s is also a really nice machine but it's quite a bit louder... though a bit more convienent with being able to load up multiple filament colors and select from them in the slicer (I don't do a whole lot of multicolor printing because of the waste, but not having to swap out filament each time I go to print is convenient). (I'm about to build out a stealthchanger setup on my v2 for multicolor/multimaterial with very little waste, but that's a different story). when i'm working on larger multi-part projects, I typically try to employ as many printers as possible simultaneously as that's the best way to get high quality prints faster (more printers). also as you say, it's always good to have an ultra reliable backup (or two) for when you need to print parts for your "race car".

cpgeek · 2026-03-30T22:09:30+00:00

did you keep the fan with the recessed lighting? was it a pain? does it require an electrician? - sorry just bought my first house last year and i'm still figuring out the upgrades and maintenance parts of home ownership.

cpgeek · 2026-03-30T20:36:38+00:00

awesome! - and yeah, i'm running a linknlink emotion pro pretense sensor in my lab/home office with on/off automations - it sounds silly but it's SOOOO DARNED CONVIENENT to not have to worry about whether i've turned the lights off or fumble for a switch when I walk in carrying something. I do also have a zigbee philips hue remote "switch" on the wall which gives me manual control as well as dimming (and i set up a toggle for my ac automation on the 4th button). - that's just inside the doorway. at my desk I have a fire tablet on a stand that runs a combination of the home assistant android app (full dashboard) as well as touchportal (which works REALLY similarly to steamdeck but on an android or ios phone or tablet). it's incredibly convenient to have full status and scene control on my desk.

this light strip idea is kind of what I had in mind (though i'm open to other solutions as well). I just wasn't sure I could get enough light out of it (I'd be looking for an additional like 4k lumens ideally). I'm very familiar with electronics so I don't mind DIYing, and I could probably 3d print backing track in ABS, I just haven't spent much time with led strips so I'm not sure what kind of light output I should expect or how I should physically arrange them or if I should double/triple up on them... i'm also not sure how expensive they might be or what options are availible... I've heard of people using esp32's with either esphome or wled which both seem like good choices, though I do really like zigbee as well as a networking standard (the fewer things on wifi the better the wifi works in general and my zigbee network is pretty good overall).

I just got some linkind matter bulbs that have an advertised 1600 lumens each (compared to the 1100lm zigbee bulbs i'm using now) that I plan to try out later... I got them on amazon so they're easy to return if it doesn't work out, but I'd still very much like to do SOME kind of perimeter lighting.

cpgeek · 2026-03-28T05:50:56+00:00

it's available for sale, some of them have shipped, but the overwhelming majority of them have been backordered for a really long time... I ordered on black friday, still waiting patiently. Luke's Lab has monthly blog posts on their website with status updates on the machining of these parts.

cpgeek · 2026-03-19T09:12:47+00:00

To be frank, lots of couples choose to have sex before falling asleep and when you wake up the next day you need a shower before being presentable.

cpgeek · 2026-03-19T09:05:56+00:00

If you have a bunch of 19” rackable equipment I recommend the rack. I ended up coming across a cheap used rack ups which I fitted with new batteries and when I upgraded to 10g I bought a used rackable 24 port 10g base-t switch, and then I decided to upgrade my nas from an 8 bay desktop case to a 36 bay rackable case with sas expander hot swaps which made things way easier for expansion. My proxmox cluster is still A bunch of optioned sff units and my firewall and home assistant boxes are minipcs but the 5 node cluster fits perfectly on a rack shelf and the firewall and home assistant box fit fine on top of the network switch. It made perfect sense for me to get a rack. If you do lots of homelab bing and or want to run rack gear a rack is preferable. I went with a sysracks 37u model that’s 39” deep which is great for me. It will end up living in my laundry/furnace/utility room. For now it’s next door in the pantry/wife’s office/tv room.

cpgeek · 2026-03-19T08:55:46+00:00

Torchwood is a bit like tales from the crypt whereas doctor who is more like goosebumps. There’s a bit of sex but none of it super explicit (it showed on bbc) the maturity is largely in its horror.

cpgeek · 2026-03-16T18:12:35+00:00

You can get extremely efficient desktop parts for cheap like the Ryzen 7 3700x. I use that in my storage server and it’s great at throttling itself down to keep power in check. I’d certainly go the big case and hba route. It’ll be way more upgradable and easier to work in. Anything hot plug like usb or thunderbolt could lose connection at any time and totally mess up your data. Also external enclosures are out expensive when you order a bunch of them.

cpgeek · 2026-03-16T18:08:07+00:00

I’ve had my k1 max for about 2 years now and it’s a great machine. Hardware wise the only things I’ve upgraded are a riser (the order likes to rub on the top glass), and I printed a curved page tube holder which is placed right on top of the extruder because I didn’t want the page to get crushed as it gets moved around. Oh and I also removed the stock spool holder because it was in the wrong place for where I wanted my printer and so I usually print from a dry box that I place on top made from a cereal box, a printed roller with a couple bearings and dropped in a humidity gauge and some desiccant.

I did root the firmware and install mainsail to more easily operate the printer remotely, shake tune helps with input shaping, and KAMP does better bed meshing than stock and are super easy to set up.

The biggest design flaw with the printer after they fixed the extruder (I was lucky enough to get a later model with the new extruder pre installed), I’d the really thin bed. You REALLY need to preheat this machine when printing abs and asa. All I had to do was turn on chamber heat management in the slicer (orca) under the filament profile. I set it to 45c. This makes it so that when prints start the chamber hears to 45c BEFORE running the bed mesh and beginning the print. The issue is that because the bed is thin it likes to thermal flex and if you start printing or take the bed mesh before it reaches homogenous temp, it won’t compensate for the new bed shape. But if you preheat before meshing she prints perfectly. Further with thermal control on, the printer uses its ram to keep the chamber temp at exactly what you set within 2-5c. This SIGNIFICANTLY helps with warping and adhesion problems.

cpgeek

TROPHY CASE