Sorry, just because you’re not capable enough to work with something that wasn’t completely fine-tuned for you at the factory doesn’t mean many of the rest of us have any problems with these machines. I do manual bed leveling and I can walk away from my printer for a year, turn it on, and pop out as good of print as the previous time it was used. How well does your “real” printer work after a year of neglect and with all the fancy gizmos turned off?

Hmm I’m out of ideas then, sorry. Still wouldn’t hurt to do a single-layer test print (there are various models that put squares all around the bed) just to see how that’s looking. If the issue had been confined to one side or one corner it might have been a mechanical issue, but random areas makes it a lot harder to figure out.

If I remember right, jerk settings should be rather small, like single-digits, but I think calibrating your e-steps will go a lot further for cleaning up the prints.

One other step (and of course I cannot remember what this is called) is related to calibrating the filament ‘pressure’ along each path. It takes a bit of work to set up but the goal is to create a profile so you get a perfectly consistent amount of filament extruded through the entire length of a path, which compensates for excess amounts at the beginning and end of each path, or too little extrusion through the middle. You might even have to compile your own firmware to enable it if there’s not an option in Marlin to turn it on from the software (I was compiling my own anyway for a DIY direct-drive extruder), but it really does make a difference and it’s a set-and-forget thing that you only really need to do once.

Creality bases are notoriously NOT flat although I’ve heard their quality has improved over the years. I have one of the 1st-gen Ender 3 Pro machines with a terrible dip in the aluminum base. One nice thing about a thicker bed material is that you can use discs of aluminum foil the shim the base. I started with a glass bed and 13 layers of foil to get the glass reasonably flat. I have since moved to 3mm G10 with a PEI sticker which is working pretty well (in case you want to try PEI again). I found some scrap G10 material on ebay and chopped it with a table saw, sanded all the edges, then got a PEI sheet that was 10mm wider than my bed to allow for some slop. Putting down the stickers is a lot easier if you have someone helping you. Then trim the overhang and you’re ready to go.

Yeah that’s a pretty tight range for the bed leveling, shouldn’t be causing any issues then. OK another possibility here… the failing prints, are they on the left side, right side, one specific corner, or does it tend to move around between prints?

E-steps varies per extruder, not per manufacturer. What they recommend will get you close but there will always be some variance. On my printer Creality recommended a setting of 93 but my measurements put me up around 98, so quite a difference. Are you still using a bowden tube style extruder or did you upgrade to a direct drive? And is your filament spool mounted on top of the printer (if so, what guides have you added for the filament path), or did you move it off to the side?

Erg sorry, jerk is probably what you’re looking for here. It’s been awhile since I did much printing so I keep confusing the terms.

Belt tension should be tight enough that you can strum it and hear a tone. It’s possible to tighten a belt TOO much, which causes extra stress on the motors. This would result in the motors being physically very hot. However if these were both printed at the same time, that wouldn’t be the issue here.

I wonder, how level is your bed? Yes yes, you have a bltouch and all that, but you still need to manually get your bed relatively level. Were these two prints next to each other or on opposite sides of the bed? How did the other prints in the same batch compare (like was there an obvious pattern of failure from one side to the other)? The bad print looks to me like the nozzle is too close, so it might be interesting to see what your first layer looks like in a test across the bed.

Even in the good print there’s some blobbing at the end of each path and the main surface should be the same height as the walls around the cutouts. Did you calibrate your E-steps? It kinda looks like you’re pushing out a little too much filament. depending on your slicer options, you may also check acceleration to slow down the head at the end of each path, which can help give the whole path a more uniform output.

One other consideration, although not as likely… Warm up the bed and check to see if all areas feel like they’re about the same temperature. If part of the heating element went bad then maybe you’re over-heating one part to compensate for a lack of heat on the rest of the bed. I only mention this because the bad print looks like it has a slant to it, but that could be an illusion of the photo.

How much privacy do you have when someone has your account password?

Gee are you implying that storing passwords in plaintext is a bad thing? /s

My best lens for capturing the sun and moon is a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6, which sounds like pretty much the same lens you have with a different mount? I found a Kenco doubler that doesn’t seem to produce any artifacts (this one goes on the back side of the lens) which has worked really well for grabbing sunspots. Wish I’d had more ambition to get out this Summer, there’s been a LOT of sunspot activity that I’ve missed.

On the other end I have a Sigma DC 17-70mm f2.8-4 which I’ve been using for model trains. I paid $233 for that one so it’s my most expensive, but getting a faster lens really helped with those low-light shots. Sometimes you find great deals, sometimes you find Chinese garbage. Luckily I never paid much for garbage.

Who said anything about it being standard? I said I know this CAN happen, and I said it was quite some time ago. We can only hope this insanity isn’t still in practice anywhere, but I learned long ago that expecting a corporation to NOT do foolish things will give me the same disappointing results as expecting money to come out of my ass. If there’s a manager involved, then something on the tech side is going to get fucked up in the name of saving a buck. Therefore I cannot just assume OP gets a normal NAT address, nor can I assume they have any other firewall type device between them and the internet. With limited data, the best I can do is try and provide some general information, hopefully encourage them to ask more questions or provide more specific information, and just hope they don’t have a ridiculously stupid ISP that makes things needlessly complicated.

Most of my experience is with iptables, but yeah, I think until you start adding rules nothing is implicitly denied? Once you enable a couple of initial rules then you should have good blocking from the outside while allowing internal traffic to connect freely. It doesn’t get in your way until you start using it, but then it doesn’t take much to get it going.

When you say old gear is not cheaper… I take it you’re looking for some pretty modern stuff? When I decided to get more involved in photography I picked up a Canon Ti4 used from ebay. It was about 6 years old at the time and I picked up a good one for around $250. The same thing with lenses, everything I have is from ebay and everything was relatively cheap (although I’d love to get one of those Sigma 600mm lenses, but oof!). Yeah my body is closer to 12 years old now but I still use it all the time and it’s done well for me, plus the EF mounts are common as hell, and all of my lenses have image stabilization built in.

If you’re having trouble getting trash photos, maybe check back with this group on what lenses match the shots you’re trying to take? There’s definitely some garbage lenses out there, and early-on I discovered Canon’s own 300mm EF lens have two different models that look identical, but there’s a huge difference in the quality between them (which is why the good one costs twice as much, even used).

One good thing about Canon is that you have Magick Lantern available. Most of us can’t afford the functionality that this software provides for free! If you want to stick with Canon and get the best bang for your buck, check to see which bodies ML is compatible with to narrow down your selections. After that I would check the lens mounts to see what other mounts can be adapted to fit a body to give you the widest selection of lenses possible. This is usually a one-way street due to focal length so it might pay to choose a body with greater adaptability.

You’re right, it doesn’t make any sense. And it didn’t make any sense at the time either. After setting up the router with a laptop, I moved the connection to the firewall but it refused to connect. When I finally got ahold of tech support they said the connection locks into the first machine that logs in and they had to release it so I could connect the new machine. And just like that the firewall was given a routable IP address and connected to the internet. Stupidest thing I ever heard of, but that’s how they were set up. Now this was around 15+ years ago and I would certainly hope nobody is doing that crap today, but apparently that was their brilliant method of limiting how many devices could get online at once.

I’ll have to check it out, thanks for the link! [Edit] oh it’s a book, not an online article.

Yeah this article is really long, and a lot of it is over my head (especially the math), but they have brought up several interesting points and provided a much easier-to-understand model of the holographic universe. I mentioned this theory in another post here a few months ago and was basically shut down with claims that this wasn’t even possible and the theory had been long-discounted, and yet here we are with modern work still plugging away at the concept. It makes me appreciate just how much hell all scientists go through when they posit theories that contradict other people’s personal beliefs.

What are you talking about? You’re assuming that every residential router is going to have some kind of firewall enabled by default (they don’t). Sure, if OP has a router that provides a basic firewall type service then it will likely block all incoming unauthorized traffic. However OP is specifically talking about a linux-based firewall and hasn’t specified if they have a router-based firewall service in place as well so we can only provide info on the firewall they specified. And if you look at UFW, the default configuration is to allow outgoing traffic and block all but a very few defined incoming ports.

You’re also making the assumption that OP is using NAT, when that is not always the case for all ISPs. Some are really annoying with their setup in that they give a routable IP to the first computer that connects and don’t allow any other connections (I had that setup once with Comcast). In this case, you wouldn’t even need to define port-forwarding to get directly to OP’s computer – and any services they might be running. This particular scenario is especially dangerous for home computers and I really hope no legitimate ISP is still following a practice like this, however I don’t take anything for granted.

Regardless of what other equipment OP has, UFW is going to provide FAR better defaults and configurability when compared to a residential router that is simply set up to create the fewest support calls to their ISP.

Possibly? The way I read it, it sounded like OP wasn’t really even sure what a firewall does.

Sure it CAN be configured, but the typical policy of firewalls is to start from a position of blocking everything. From what I’ve seen, on Linux the standard starting point is blocking all incoming and allowing all outgoing. On Windows the default seems to be blocking everything in both directions. Sure you could start with a policy of allowing everything and block only selected ports, but what good is that when you can’t predict what ports an attacker might come from?

You’ve got it backwards. A firewall blocks everything, then you open up the ports you want to use. A standard config would allow everything going out, and block everything coming in (unless you initiated that connection, then it is allowed).

So the question you should be asking, is what services do you think you’re going to be running on your desktop that you plan to allow anyone on the internet to get to?

I’ve also read about the John Deere issue as a leading instigator of right-to-repair laws. They weren’t able to provide authorized local repair techs when a tractor breaks down, so farmers were stuck waiting 1-2 weeks for someone to show up while crops were rotting in the fields (think of how fast your fresh fruit rots in your kitchen and then imagine dozens of fields of that crop going to waste). And the biggest insult was when the repair tech drove into town for a $5 part that the farmer had already identified but couldn’t replace because of manufacturer lockouts.

From my own experience it was more about being a solution in search of a problem. I see some comments about how the old init system was so horribly broken, and yet the reality was it worked perfectly fine for all but some very niche situations. The only advantage I have ever seen with systemd is that it’s very good at multitasking the startup/shutdown processes, but that certainly wasn’t the case when it first arrived. For example I had a raspberry pi that booted in 15 seconds, and when I loaded a new image with systemd it took close to two minutes to boot. And there were quite a lot of problems like that, which is why people were so aggravated when distro admins asked the community for their thoughts on switching to systemd and then changed the distros anyway. This also touches on the perception that the “community” accepted it and moved on – no, systemd was pushed on the community despite numerous problems and critical feedback.

But we’re here now, systemd has improved, and we can only hope that some day all the broken bits get fixed. Personally I’m still annoyed that it took me almost a week to get static IPs set up on all the NICs for a new firewall because despite the whole “predictable names” thing they still kept moving around depending on if I did a soft or hard reset. Configuring the cards under udev took less than a minute and worked consistently but someone decided it was time to break that I guess.

What’s your fear of editing config files? They’re just text files, and manual edits certainly allow a degree of customization that you’ll never find in a GUI interface. My own config is set up with domain name folders under /home/ to contain the many domains I run, that’s something I’ve never seen handled by a GUI and yet it makes so much more sense for keeping files organized.