Category: hardware

3D Printing, art, Culture, hardware, technology

Cartesian Geometry is for suckers!

| be3n

be3n unboxing monoprice delta pro

I am very thankful for an early Thanksgiving toy!  It’s a Monoprice Delta Pro!  (originally $1400, they have dropped a few times and are now on sale for $550. Delta printers are so cool.  They do not move at all like traditional 3D printers. i can watch mine all day.  you can too, the live cam is back!

Delta Printerhttps://printer.be3n.com

It was a snap to get it setup. The opposite experience of my Maker Select V2. Oh i love the auto bed leveling. There is no official Cura profile for the Delta Pro, so i had to throw one together from the Delta Mini and the specs.  I did have a few failures.  I bought some inferior filament and it would continually get clogged. After switching to the good stuff, my prints were beautiful.  Then i started to play with the speed rate options.

S.S. Cheap rainbow filamentSpeed Printing with Delta Pro
That articulated slug is a great example.  you can see the first layer is a bit sloppier on the head segment compared with the other segments. I turned the speed rate up to 130%  I’m not sure exactly what that does, because it certainly doesn’t have that profound of an effect on the print speed.  but if you raise it high enough it gets very sloppy.  i shaved about 30% of the time for a print by upping the speed rate to 200% but the first few layers had much more serious flaws than the slug. On the whole it wasn’t a bad speed print.  I’m sure i can improve it with tweaks.

Status update:

Drobo Speed Test

My Drobo has been acting up since last week.  I couldn’t get speeds over 40MB/sec  for a while i wasn’t seeing anything faster than 25MB/sec.  I read all the forums and i was on deadline to return some customer data.  I put hours into this only to get to 35MB/sec.  The final answer was actually a stupid one i read in a forum but didn’t put much stock in.  My favorite part of USB-C is that it doesn’t matter which way you plug it in.  At least that is what i thought.  Turns out that with some Drobo 5c it does matter.  After flipping the port, i’m back to useful speeds. It’s even mentioned in the Drobo 5c FAQ.

hardware, Soapbox, Software, technology

I am joining the largest super computer in the world to help fight COVID-19!

| be3n

The amazing people behind Folding@home have set their sights on COVID-19.  Their efforts are to better understand how the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 can be targeted with small molecule and antibody therapeutics.  Got any computers that aren’t doing anything?  join up.

folding@home status panel

The Mac client needs work to support GPUs, but my stats are rising!

hardware, Politics, Soapbox, Software, technology

I hope everyone is having a Super Tuesday!

| be3n

super tuesday - i voted

I got out to vote a little later than i hoped and encountered a longer line than i have ever before (at least from voting).  Only 55 minutes, nothing like some lines i have heard about. I got to play with the new electronic voting system.  “It’s not connected to the internet” was the response that i received when inquiring into the device security.  I have high confidence of the paper trail on these units, but I imagine that these machines do some sort of tabulation.  Unless we actually count the paper ballets, it is those tabulations that we are expected to trust.  These tabulation are trivial to manipulate if the devices are tampered with.  “Don’t worry, it’s offline” dissuades none of these fears.  Here are some pictures i took.  Not pictured are the 2 broken units that were taped off at my precinct. Also, i was told that they should not have allowed me to take these pictures.  i don’t know if that is true, but they did not seem to mind at the time.  (i wasn’t wearing that shirt at the time)

super tuesday - electronic votingsuper tuesday - paper ballotsuper tuesday - electronic voting - bernie

hardware, Soapbox, Software, technology

Finally retiring my last legacy windows box!

| be3n

Final transfer from an ancient windows

This particular ancient server has stood as the glue holding several ancient record keeping systems together.  Today marks the last day that it was operating.  I supported this computer for almost it’s entire lifespan.  This Dell ran consistently for over 10 years with very little trouble.  Now your watch is over.

I have been retiring or upgrading unsupported systems all year. it’s to know that all the critical systems are up to date.  Let this be yet another warning if you are running Windows XP, Vista, 7, or 2008 Server (or anything earlier), you should upgrade immediately if you are online in any capacity.  Same goes for macs older then 10.13 (High Sierra). Seriously, don’t let it become a problem.

Status update:

Backup Begins Again

For the first time in i don’t know how long, i have enough backup storage to backup ALL my critical data and even some less critical data.  This also marks the end of my OS X Server.  From a graphite G4 through so many minis, I have always had an OS X Server on my network. . . until now.  I left the label from its previous installation while it was in operation.  This mini i inherited the way i acquire so much equipment, it’s previous owner thought it was broken.  I tried to explain, but i wasn’t going to say no to this lovely unit.

Bad Server