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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • The printer is a 350mm3 Voron 2.4, so the scale of photos of things on the bed is a bit off. I swapped to ACM panels and added radiant insulation after my last big print lifted the bed. All was well until this one, but I also haven’t printed any larger rectangular things recently. Printing this 240mmx280mm thing flat lifted the mag sheet.

    I’ve been printing long enough to remember binder clips. IIRC they were originally a reaction to the magnetic sheets originally used getting significantly weaker as temps go up. I would be pretty surprised if clips would help in this case, due to the forces involved thanks to the size of print, but it would never hurt to try I guess.


  • @dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world replied with a link to their excellent focus stacking guide. If you crack this post open again you’ll find it. Between that guide and my post you should have plenty of content to rabbit hole (eg focus stacking, lighting, framing, depth of field, gear, etc).

    As with all things hobby, if you want to get good at something you need to going out and do it. You’ll learn a ton by trying and asking questions. The information you seek will become a lot more meaningful because you’ll be able to relate it to your own insights.

    Deciding how to approach macro photography is no different than any other area in photograph - it greatly depends on your current gear, budget, and what you intend to photograph. If you’re on a shoestring budget and all you have is a cellphone, odds you can start getting up close and personal with that alone. For $20-50 you can get an external lens to start making some pretty good macro photos. If you already own a dedicated camera you can get an extension tube (cheap), reverse lens mount (cheap), diopter (still pretty cheap), and/or a dedicated macro lens (pricier to expensive).

    Your gear will influence how you approach macro photography. Two easy examples:

    • Some cameras can shoot a quick burst with focus bracketing. This makes capturing a series of photos for focus staking a lot easier
    • The smaller your sensor the more depth of field you’ll have. If your camera has a larger sensor you’ll likely need external lighting (flash, etc) before someone with a smaller sensor would

    How you approach macro photography also depends on what you want to photograph. Focus bracketing may become impractical in some situations (eg bugs, etc), so stopping down and using a flash may be be a good approach. If you plan on walking around and finding interesting subject you don’t need to worry about bringing a tripod, a stick or dowel will be just fine. You can also freehand with flash or go without one completely. If you dig through my posts you’ll find a number on !beebutts@lemmy.world that were handheld with no flash.

    As a parting thought, keep in mind that macro photograph opens the world immediately around you to tons of interesting photo opportunities between getting a lot more up-close-and-personal to a subject than people are normally used to, a much greater ease of controlling things like lighting, and the ability to completely eliminate backgrounds in photos thanks to tight framing and shallow depth of field.





  • Three things:

    1. A lens setup that can shoot with high magnification
    2. Focus stacking
    3. Shot setup

    To expand a hair.

    There are multiple ways of achieving high magnifications. The most obvious, and generally most expensive, is buying a macro lens. There’s no real definition here, but any lens with say a 2:1 magnification or better has/can/will be marketed as macro. Note that like aperture, the ratio is inverted from what you would expect. A 1:1 lens has twice the magnification of a 2:1 lens. Macro lenses can also take great photographs, but they tend to be primes so keep that in mind if that’s not your thing. Cheaper alternatives to buying a new lens include focus tubes that attach between your lens and camera, diopters that attach to the front of your lens, reverse rings to mount a lens backwards, and even using back to back lenses with one reversed.

    As subjects fill the frame more you generally get less depth of field. At macro levels your depth of field can be tiny. Focus stacking comes in both in camera and post processing forms, but the general idea is that you take a series of photographs at slightly different focal lengths and slice/add/stack the sharp bits together to achieve more depth of field.

    Shot setup. There are two big aspects here. The first is hinged on gear and technique. Things like tripods, flash/lighting/lighting modifiers, how you’re going to actually take those shots at different focal lengths, etc all fall in here. The second is the idea to take this kind of photo. Macro photograph can be a creative rabbit hole. Having such tight framing lets you do all kinds of things that would normally be reserved for a studio shot or wouldn’t be practical for wider shots. A spray bottle to mist the area can create both fog and dew. You can have near-total control over lighting without needing a huge lighting rig. You’re also opening up worlds people don’t normally see, so lots of things become very interesting.


  • I do not have any recommendations, but the category of device you’re looking for is called a voice recorder.

    Back in the 90s, tape voice recorders were all the rage. The talkboy was featured in Home Alone 2. The tapes got miniaturized with entries like the Sony’s M470, which evidently stayed in production long enough to still be findable on Staple’s website these days. An modern digital example is Sony’s ICD-PX370.

    Good luck in your search!

    Sincerely, a child of the 80s who grew up in the 90s.




  • As someone with a foot in Windows and Mac, they both suck for different reasons and you’re trading pain in one for pain in the other.

    Windows sucks because of all the stupid one drive and AI garbage. No, I don’t want my desktop and tons of other directories in one drive, stop asking me. The constant migration of settings out of control panel is maddening. Windows 10 end of life is fine, but cutting off older PCs from windows 11 for “reasons” was an absolutely horrible choice.

    Mac is fine if you do super basic computing, but if you want to do much of anything it’s very annoying out of the box. Window management is annoying unless you get an app like magnet, the ribbon can’t be displayed on dual monitors and there’s no way of fixing the primary monitor, keyboard shortcuts are inconsistent across applications like command delete and keyboard shortcuts in general suck (command + shift + 3-5), the OS greatly dislikes network storage, etc etc. Macs were somewhat isolated from marketing needing a “new” OS every year until recently. Now they’re in the change for the sake of things to list on the new OS page trap.

    Linux isn’t without fault, but my experience has been much more pleasant.



  • Late to the party, but…

    How well tuned is your printer? This whole print is a torture test with lots of retractions and thin walls. For things to go well you will have needed to dial in flow rate, print temperature, cooling, and retraction. As someone else said, if the nozzle catches on an unsupported lever arm (aka one of the vertical pieces before a horizontal bridge has been completed) it can/will break it off.

    If your printer has never pulled off this type of print before I suggest running through some basic tuning tests before worrying about potentially wet filament unless you live in a very humid environment. I live in a temperate climate where it doesn’t generally get that humid. My printer and filament live in my basement, which has a dehumidifier in it. I’ve never dried a role of filament and I leave spools unfinished for 6+ months. That’s not to say that you never should dry your filament or that doing so won’t improve print quality. I’m just trying to say that I have not experienced a higher rate of print failure with older spools.


  • When I was college back in 2009 I was dual booting Ubuntu and Windows Vista on a gateway laptop. I never fiddled with Ubuntu at all. The things that worked out of the box worked reliability and I never bothered fighting with things that didn’t work like the stylus.

    The reason why I didn’t make the switch back then was not the OS or the drivers. It was the lack of support for the software I needed for school, like Matlab and orcad pspice. Things have improved substantially since then between first party support (Matlab started supporting Linux with R2016a) and wine/proton letting windows applications run mostly normally without their developers needing to make any changes to support the OS.

    IMO the thing that’s most in the way of adoption these days is the lack of mainstream OEM support. Until the masses can easily buy a computer with Linux pre-installed and the driver niggles sorted they’re not going to switch.




  • You already got the hot pan bit, but I’ll give you something to look for - you want the egg to immediately start bubbling on the bottom when it hits the pan.

    I personally use butter instead of oil, but any fat will keep the egg from sticking. Any pan should do fine, but if you’re using stainless a bit more fat is probably a good idea. Things seem to stick the most to stainless pans in my experience.

    As for the top of the egg, you can either give it a flip and cook the other side for a short while (aka over easy) or use a lid. You don’t have to use a lid, but it makes it a lot easier. If you’re going the lid route toss a teaspoon or two of water in the pan before you cover it.




  • We’re way too far north for starfruit, but you’re coming at this from the right angle. Our local fruit trees (apple, pear, peach, etc) produce a ton of fruit. Like 100-200 pounds / 45-90 kg worth for a single teenage tree. If you don’t stay on top of them they’ll attract yellow jackets and the trees themselves require a decent amount of pruning annually.

    Fruit trees sound fantastic to have, but they’re a lot of work.