Seems like it, yes: https://lansinggardendesign.com/blog/2020/9/6/arctostaphylos-bark
The old bark cracks into sections as the trunk expands. This ability to shed is part of the plant’s defense against insects and disease. When each year’s skin is shed, insects and disease are shed along with it. As opposed to the skin/defense of thicker, rougher bark, as most other plants have, Manzanitas are able to have the thin, sleek, smooth bark they are famous for.
A very related question to ask is: did your parents, or extended family, ever help you financially?
Here's my answer.
Have I ever received help from my parents and/or extended family? Yes. I was able to live rent free after high school while I found my way. When I eventually started college I was able to live at home and commute. My family started a college fund for me when I was little, so I was able to cover about 15% of my in-state tuition. We also got a cash loan from my Grandma to put toward a down payment that we paid back over the course of a few years. Without it we wouldn't have been able to buy our house.
Am I getting help from my parents or extended family now? No, I haven't for years. Money and support have started flowing the other direction. I've given my mom a (used) car and also let her live with us for a year and a half while she switched careers.
It is all about trade-offs, but the tradeoffs have to be situational.
Considering only shutter speed and a "static" subject, you have to consider whether or not your subject is actually static. For example, are there flexible things present (plants, etc) and is it windy? For something like a desert landscape with zero motion your shutter speed can be as low as you want it to be (note that you might need to block some light from reaching the sensor using a ND filter). For "still" people you probably don't want to go too low because we're constantly in motion. That said, ever rule was made to be broken. Want to photo stars? Don't use a super long shutter speed - you'll get star trails. What's that, you want star trails? Bump shutter speed even more so they look intentionally vs somewhat smeared balls of light. Sports and wildlife are basically the only scenario where you need a fast shutter speed... until you want some motion blur. Granted, motion blue and sports will still probably be a fairly fast shutter speed.
Aperture follows a similar arc - do you want shallow depth of field, do you want to see more of the foreground/background, maybe you forgot your ND filter and want a slow shutter so you have to stop down, maybe it's really dark so you have to use a fast (wide aperture) lens wide open.
The only thing you universally want to take one way is ISO and that way is low. Unless you want some grain. Or you're shooting something with motion indoors and you can't compromise any more on shutter speed or depth of field. Or your lens aperture is already wide open and you still need more light.
When staring off you might want to try shutter or aperture priority, based on the situation, and let the camera handle the other two values. Heck, I still do this 95% of the time 15 years later.
Thanks! That's exactly why I asked. I figure if I am going to get one I'll need to shell out some $$ if I want it to last.
Or random application availability and/or ease of use.
Two cases in point:
- Photo Mechanic. It makes it really easy/fast to sort through tons of photos. There are some Linux compatible alternatives, but they're just not as good
- Fusion 360. There are a couple of things you can do to make it work, but since Linux isn't officially supported the install process can be a bit fiddily and there's no guarantee that an update won't break things.
Things are certainly better now than they have been in the past, but if you're somewhat time limited (eg your computer is more of a tool than a thing to spend time tweaking) Linux can still be a bit offputting - especially if some of the core applications you use aren't officially supported.
First, nice photo! Even "old" gear can take great photos. Throw motion and/or low light (with a fast lens) into the mix and you'll beat a modern smartphone.
The quick lead into the exposure triangle is:
- ISO is basically "gain" applied to the photons that hit the sensor. Some gain = fine. More gain = you start to run into signal to noise ratio challenges
- shutter speed helps you freeze the action, or can also let the action blur on purpose. Examples of intentional blur include panning photos (think auto racing) and long exposures (at night or during the day with the aid of a ND filter)
- aperture. This is the ratio of focal length to lens aperture. Keep in mind it's 1/x, so as x grows the actual aperture is getting "stopped down" (aka closed/smaller). Wider aperture (aka small denominator) = less depth of field and more light will hit the sensor. Stopping down = more depth of field and generally more sharpness/less vignetting, but if you take this too far you'll hit diffraction and lose sharpness
You wind up trading values against each other in various scenarios, which is why it's called the exposure triangle. It's very much a "you pick two and deal with the third" situation. Which two you prioritize really comes down to what you're trying to accomplish.
For your barn photo's exposures, let's talk tradeoffs. It sounds like you know that your ISO value was too high, especially for a static subject and good light. So how to get it to go down? You could do a mix of:
- using a slower shutter speed. Unless you have a tremor, the rule of thumb is minimum shutter speed should be more than 1/focal length. You could have easily shot this at 1/100, if not lower. That would cut ISO down to around 1600
- open your aperture. f/14 is very closed and likely isn't needed unless you really want to see something deep in the background/foreground. You're also likely losing some sharpness due to diffraction
Happy shooting! Feel free to ask follow ups.
Looks nice! Details on that green house? I would really like to jump start my season here if I can...
Very cool. Was this a test piece or do you intend to do CNC carving like this in the future? What finish do you think you'll use? Any surface prep ahead of time like sanding? Details on the CNC?
So many questions!
You're four forks deep now Slic3r to Prusa Slicer to Bamboo's slicer to Orca. It also borrowed a lot of ideas from Super Slicer. Since it's open source, and has been gaining some momentum, it seems to have a decent amount of contributors
Why Orca?
- all the features you know and love from things up the tree
- a revamped UI
- built in tuning tests (temp tower, extrusion multiplier, volumetric flow, pressure advance, etc)
- great Klipper integration if that's your jam
I hope you're back to your normal physical self soon.
As far as the 3D printer goes, there are three main types of categories of people with printers at home:
- Tinkering with the printer is the hobby. This can be a mix of tuning for better quality, faster prints, etc as well as physical modifications to the printer. One of the extremes of this is the speedboat race where people go all out for the fastest print of a common model
- Modeling things and then printing them. I fall largely into this camp. I've made many a replacement part for a kids toy, jigs/fixtures, brackets, printer mods, speakers, wagon wheels, a thing to keep cats out of potted plants, even a tiny toolbox for the minimal amount of tools I used to carry at work
- The printer is largely an ends to printing free/paid designs from the Internet. There are tons of designs out there that are a mix of cute (but probably throw away), functional/practical, things you could sell, etc
If you're modeling it will be mouse and keyboard, but a SpaceMouse will improve ergonomics. All you're really using the keyboard for is number input.
If you find yourself in the functional print crew, don't be surprised if you wind up printing things to help in your garden. Some of the PVC fittings holding together my arch are now printed parts (less effort to model and print a replacement than drive to the store) and the hooks the "gates" to my fence hang on are also printed. Once you get in the habit of finding things you can print you'll be finding them everywhere.
It's all tradeoffs. I've been too busy with mulching to cover my squash vines and it's vine boarer season here :( it's on the list for this weekend.
Excellent photo! I fell into team photographer for my kiddos T-ball team and the parents really liked some photos of the kids being kids during games - playing in the gravel, making faces, etc. Many people appreciate well executed "normal" phoses, but it seems like well executed photos of not quite normal activities get more appreciation.
Thanks! For either mulch or pavers you're going to have some level of maintenance. My personal take is that the maintenance for mulch is more frequent, but less intensive, than pavers. Both will benefit from a boarder to keep roots out.
This fence has been in place for at least four years, so this has been a very long time coming. I went with mulch because getting rid of rocks is really annoying should we want to change the area again in 5-10 years.
Thanks! I don't know about professional, but it should be pretty practical.
I thought about stone, but it's too permanent. We have crushed marble (that white stuff) in some of our flower beds from the previous owner and it's a pain. If we wanted to get rid of it we would have to pay someone to take it away.
Thanks much. Here's hoping you feel better soon!
Is that the same custom printed speaker I saw a post about last week or so?
Indeed it is, functional prints for life.
When I planned these beds I spaced them far enough apart to get my lawn tractor in-between them, but getting between them and the fence involved my weed whacker. As anyone with a fence has found out, maintaining the grass at the base of a fence is a pain.
I'm 3/4 of the way done with the edging. It's 10" tall with something like 6" or 7" of it buried. It does a good job of keeping grass out of our other beds, so I'm sure it will do a good job here. The downside is the most effective way of installing it is to trench first, put the edging in, and then refill the trench. If you try to use one of those big pizza peel looking things to make a narrow slide the will usually get wavy due to variation in trench depth.
I mowed to basically ground height between the beds, weed whacked around the beds, and put in a layer of that thick paper builders will use to protect flooring below the mulch. Some areas for cardboard instead, but we just didn't have enough cardboard to cover it all. Hopefully it will be enough to kill the grass and hopefully that results in less grass appearing in my raised beds.
I got tired of remaking my sisal trellice every season, and didn't like using nylon netting, so I went with something more long term. The downside? Vine removal in the fall will likely be a slog.
No banana for scale, but let's say that it's not too big and not too small. The dimensions are 295mm tall, 270mm wide, and 240mm deep. If I had to do it again, I would be tempted to go a bit wider and touch less deep. It's probably better to be large in one of these dimensions as opposed to both of them.
Here's the top. It has a jack for charging, a connector to program the DSP, a switch to turn it on and off, and a battery gauge.
The speaker also has a built in handle that's way chunkier than it appears, but is still particle.
The big BOM pieces are a Dayton Audio LBB-5Sv2 for the BMS (battery management system), a Dayton Audio KABD-250 2 x 50W for DPS, amplification, and Bluetooth, a Peerless by Tymphany BC25SC08 tweeter, and an Italian-but-made-in-India woofer (a Coral PRF 165).
The print itself is three pieces: the bottom bit (black), the middle bit (white, blue, and white again thanks to not having enough white left to do it all in white), and the black top. Here's a CAD view that more clearly shows the three pieces:
the three pieces are held together with heat-sets and m3 bolts. There's also a tong and groove like joint to help the enclosure leak less air. I haven't noticed any evidence of air leaks while listening.
The amplifier and battery board mount to the bottom like so:
The middle was printed with some supports for the driver overhangs, but the ports and everything else were designed to print in place without supports.
This is certainly not meant to be audiophile build, but it's surprisingly decent. This isn't my first blue-tooth speaker, or even my first printed loudspeaker enclosure, but it is the first that was somewhat intentionally designed to have OK bass response while also being reasonably compact.
It measures fairly well. Frequency response, along with harmonic distortion, is pretty good. There's zero windowing or smoothing on this plot. I suspect the distortion spikes at 1 kHz, 2 kHz, etc are induced by the Bluetooth stack the board is running since they've shown up in multiple different enclosures and with multiple different drivers.
There's no nasty ringing, caused by either the drivers or the enclosure, so life is pretty good:
Our kids wish we had more. I'm not sure which verity these are, but they put out tons of runners which makes me not want to put them directly in soil.
Tips for a bigger crop are welcome :)
Title basically. I have a decently large solid wood desktop (guessing around 72"x30"x1") that supports two computer monitors, two studio monitors, a tower computer hanging under it, a laptop on it, and a decent amount of clutter because it's a decently sized space I spend a lot of time sitting in front of. I'm currently using Ikea IDÅSEN legs (they were a lot cheaper in early covid) and they're stable, but man are they slow to go up. They have no problem going down though, lol.
It would be nice to have an equally solid pair of legs stability wise that go up faster with some weight on them. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
At least so far. The first go round had the nozzle crash into the tree support, resulting in a layer shift. The good news is that the print stayed very firmly stuck to the bed.
I've reset, lowered my extrusion multiplier a smidge, switched to a more traditional support pattern, and am going for it again. Wish me luck!
Both pots were started at the same time from the same batch of strawberry starts. They should have the same soil box. Both grew vigorously last spring/summer and got visited by deer in the fall. Both bounced back pretty well before winter set in. The left pot is very happy, the right... Not so much. I do recall the big pot having quite a bit of wilted leaf cover all winter, but don't think that was the case for the pot on the right. Maybe I didn't notice a late in the season deer visit that set the small pot back? Maybe the smaller pot got just enough colder than the big pot to kill some roots? Any other theories?
I think I'm going to lean into the FF E-mount world, which means giving up my D5300 + Nikon AF-S 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 VR (115 - 450 FF equivalent). Before kids, I used this lens for motorsports/landscape/travel. Post kids we don't do a ton of that, so I've been getting along well with a pair of 35mm and 50mm primes.
My kids are pretty young and are starting to play outdoor sports like T-ball and soccer. This has brought my D5300 + 70-300 out of retirement. I'm missing the conviences of my A9, so I'm trying to figure out what lens I should get for sports duty. At this point, everything is outdoors during the middle of the day so there's no need for a fast lens. It was pretty drizzly last weekend and my current (slow lens) setup still kept ISO below 1k most of the day with a 1/640 shutter. I figure I can comfortably double ISO and halve my shutter speed on the A9 while still getting a lower noise image than I have today, so I don't think I need fast glass.
Looking through EXIF data from the previous few games on the D5300 + 70-300 it looks like I use the full range of focal lengths, but the vast majority of shots are under 400mm FF EQ and above 150mm FF EQ. I'm a little wary of wanting more reach in a few years when the kids are on bigger fields, but they'll also be bigger so maybe it will wash out. Who knows if they'll still be interested in playing either.
So what do you think?
- Third part lens that stops at 400? This means no teleconvertor in the future, but this seems like it would work well for today
- First party 100-400? Adding a 1.4 teleconvertor makes this a 140-560, but it also makes the f-stop at the long end f/8 which might not be great for sports
- 500mm? Tamron's 150-500 seems decent and doesn't call too much attention to itself, but it is heavier
- 600mm? These lenses are all fairly bit/shouty visually, but are potentially more future proof....
This is a follow up from my spaghetti post a few days ago.
Good news: I caught the nozzle catching on the infill during travels. The infill must have been curling up ever so slightly. Turning z-hop on solved this. I also bumped my nozzle to 255 based on a temp tower, but I don't think my original issue was flow related.
Bad news: this brought me to the failure above - evidently my chamber temps are too low for this size of ASA part and it warped. Maybe the higher nozzle temp contributed. Maybe this size of ASA part is unrealistic despite not having sharp corners. Maybe it's the fact that it's continuous from side to side. I am still going to attempt to print a hollow cylinder to go between this piece and another similar piece in ASA, so I guess we'll find out!
Good news: the part did not let go of the build plate. I'm pretty happy about this. My first layer is not overly squished, I've never used any adhesion aids (glue stick, hair spray, ASA slurry, etc), etc. Tuning my print_start sequence is resulting in a very consistent first layer.
Bad news: the build plate came up with the print. Holding the build plate down with binder clips or the like would probably just make something else fail.
Good news: I had enough PETG in stock to use that instead. Zero warpage, so great success. I had to go a bit slower because a flow test showed that I'm limited to around 25 mm^3 for PETG before the extrude motor started misstepping, despite bumping temp to 255 °C. I limited flow to 20 mm^3 to be safe. The print's a success so meh.
Any suggestions before trying again after a reset? This is my first go round changing nozzle diameter. I went from a 0.4 mm nozzle to a 0.6 mm nozzle.
After the swap I checked my extrusion multiplier (no change needed) and tuned pressure advance (I had to decrease the value a bit, but it looks spot on now).
As part of the nozzle swap, I also bumped line width from 125% to 150% in Orca Slicer (should be around 0.9mm extrusion width) and increased layer height to 0.3mm. This should put me around 22 mm^3/s of material, which shouldn't be an issue for a Rapido 2 but this is the most flow I've pushed through it so far. Maybe I should bump temp a touch? I'm still at my fairly-low-for-ASA 230 that I was using with my 0.4mm nozzle.
The print didn't move on the bed and shows no signs of warpage. There also aren't any signs of curling on the areas that the nozzle must have hit to cause the layer shift.
The only thing that seems like a miss was having z lift turned off while troubleshooting a print quality issue. I had it set to only lift above 0.25mm (not on the first layer) and only lift below z 0mm (this probably disabled z-hop). Z hop when retracting is set to 0.2mm, which is less than my 0.4mm retraction length so it seems like changing the "only lift below below z" value would re-enable z-hop.
Title. My bin overwintered pretty well in my Zone 6a garage, so I'm a happy worm farmer.
The printer is a Voron 2.4, the extruder is a StealthBurner, and the hot end itself is a Rapido MK1. I'm printing Polymaker ASA on a spool that hasn't given me any grief thus far (I last printed with it a few days ago) and am slicing with Orca Slicer.
The printer has about 700 hours on it. In that time, I've run 4.1 km of filament through it. These two prints are two of the three jams I've experienced in that time span. The first print failed on a very similar feature (internal bridge), but on a much much much smaller print. I've printed some pretty long (> 12 hour) parts on this printer with the same brand of filament, and similar settings, without issues although this is the first large "fairly normal polygon with big parallel faces" that I've tried to print.
For all three jams, I was able to release the extruder latch and pull the filament out of the heat brake. There was a blob at the bottom of the filament, which would be too big to get through the orifice in the heat brake (it's a very snug fit on a Rapido). I suspect this is from sitting touching the heat brake for the remaining hour and 50 minutes in the print after the jam occurred. Note to self: install a filament run-out sensor....
There's also always been a little bit of filament left in the hot end. The photo below is what came out after manually pushing it out with a metal rod I got with my i3 clone.
After the first clog on the small print, I reset and the print went off without a hitch. I didn't think about it again until the top print above failed. I decided to swap nozzles just to be safe and bumped my extruder temp up from 230 to 240.
It looks like I might have been under extruding a tad on the third print and/or I need to tune pressure advance. The OG nozzle was plated brass, and I had recently tuned, so if it was starting to wear out then some minor under extrusion with a new/fresh nozzle makes sense.
Here's what the slicer shows as happening on this layer. I am not showing the full layer so you can see it ends with the internal bridge on the lower left. There are a handful of retractions, but they're not very frequent. There is no retraction at the end of the internal bridge before the travel to the start of the next layer.
The next layer starts perimeters first in the lower right hand corner. I don't see evidence of the perimeters starting, so odds are the jam is happening between the two layers.
I have the slicer set to print nearly all features at the same speed, other than overhangs. This is potential correlation #1
I have the fan set to 40% with no cooling for the first 10 layers. However, for overhangs it's going to 80%. This is potential correlation #2
Looking at a graph of what was going on with the extruder, it looks like all is (fairly) well here, at least from a temp perspective. The min PWM value might increase a hair for this layer, but without calculating the average and/or smoothing the line it's hard to eyeball meaningfully. It does appear that the PWM falls off some once the jam occurs.
All ideas and tips welcome!
I've had a few pepper volunteers come up in my seed starts. They're happy little accidents, at least for the time being. Hopefully they wind up producing. Past results have been mixed, but I have the space so I separated them into their own containers.
I have no idea why, but my pepper leaves always turn black under my grow lights. They flip to green once they're outdoors.
Pardon the brim remnants. Not pictured: the many prior iterations. This started as a head on photo that I imported into fusion 360 and scaled after some measuring with calipers. It's not perfect, but it's rapidly approaching good enough. The square indent is to help with orientation - although the part obviously is not symmetrical, it's much harder to judge the home.