To an extent. As I mentioned, some redditors are really too interested in having an enemy to fight, so hopefully we can get some cool people over without attracting the nutjobs who see 1945 germans everywhere.

Short side hamper handle from the top:

https://social.fbxl.net/media/c06e0e29294d96565b1b189f3bde757486e4af9d79cb92ab3387419f5a802f4b.jpg

Long side hamper handle from the bottom:

https://social.fbxl.net/media/9890d325f4126ae3d58d94435392bff91c44b5f6b557e39a97bf5e16f891b1c7.jpg

I always enjoy prints that just become part of our lives (and especially ones that let us keep using something that's going to the landfill otherwise)

The hamper has handles that break. For most people I think that'd be time to replace it. I didn't want to do that, so I designed a new handle based on the handle on the short end. This ended up being a mistake later, I'll explain then.

I printed 2 handles (the connection between the two is just to make the printing work better since it can print the two pieces as one piece, then I just snap the two apart and clean up the spot they were connected)

I used my rotary tool to remove the remnants of the original handles. I should have used the cutting tool but I had the diamond grinder so I used that. It worked fine, I was able to fully remove the old material. A quick test fit confirmed that the handle design was pretty good (I just used a tape measure for the measurements so this was a real potential problem)

I went to the long side, but realized that the design of the hamper was different lengthwise than widthwise. I removed a couple tabs that were going to block the new handle, and instead of putting it in as designed, I just put it sideways, which fit.

I put the two in and added gorilla glue. Gorilla glue requires water to foam up, so I wet all the parts. Now everything is fitted, the glue is in, and it's just drying now. I'd consider this repair a success, and I expect the strong PLA part to give the whole hamper a lot more stiffness at those parts, and there's significantly more material in these spots that break. If the other two handles break, I'll just print two more, and at that point I can't help but think that the hamper will be bulletproof.

Link aggregators have a problem on the fediverse. The approach is server-centric, which has positives, but it also has major negatives.

The server-centric approach is where a community belongs to a certain server and everything in the world revolves around that server.

The problem is that it's a centralized formula that centralizes power in a the hands of a whichever servers attract the most users, and potentially breaks up what might be a broader community, and makes for a central point of failure.

Right now, if user1@a.com and user2@b.com talk on community1@c.com then a lot of things can happen to break that communication. if c.com defederates b.com then the communication will not happen. If c.com breaks then the communication will not happen. If c.com shuts down then the communication will not happen. If c.com's instance gets taken over by management that doesn't want person1 and person2 to talk, then the communication will not happen.

Another problem is that user1@a.com and user2@b.com might never meet, because they might be on community1@a.com and community1@c.com. This means that a community that could reach critical mass to be a common meeting place would not because it's split into a bunch of smaller communities.

Mastodon has servers going up and down all the time, and part of the reason it's able to continue functioning as a decentralized network is that as long as you're following people on a wide variety of servers then one server going down will stop some users from talking but not all of them so the system can continue to operate as a whole. By contrast, I'm posting this to one server, and it may be seen by people on a wide variety of servers, but if the one server I'm posting this to goes down the community is destroyed.

There are a few ways to solve the problem...

one method could work as something like a specific "federated network community". There would be a local community, and the local community would federate (via local mods, I presume) with communities on other instances creating a specific metacommunity of communities on many instances that could federate with other activitypub enabled communities, and if any of the federated communities go down the local community remains. If any servers posed problems they could cease being followed, and in the worst case a community could defederate totally from a server (at a community level rather than a server level) In that case, community1@a.com and community1@b.com could be automatically linked up once both connect to community1@c.com (I'm thinking automatic linking could be a feature mods could turn off and on for highly curated communities), and if c.com shuts down or defederates with one of the two, user1@a.com and user2@b.com would continue to be able to talk through their federated network.

Another method would be something more like hashtags for root stories, but I don't know how server-server links would be accomplished under a platform like lemmy, kbin, or lotide. I don't know how hashtags migrate on mastodon type software and how that migrates. In that case, it might be something like peertube where a network is established by admins (or users, I don't know) connecting to other servers manually.

Finally, I think you could implement the metacommunity without changing the entire fediverse by having the software auto-aggregate metacommunities. You could create a metacommunity community1 on a.com that would then automatically aggregate all posts on communities called community1 on all known servers. The potential downside of this is you could end up with a lot of noise with 100 posts of the same story, I haven't thought much about how you could handle duplicates so you could participate but wouldn't have 100 similar posts. In this case with respect to how to handle new posts, each metacommunity would be a local community and new individual posts would be posted locally and federated to users on other metacommunities. If metacommunities of this sort became the norm, then the duplicates problem may be solved organically because individuals using metacommunities would see the posts on other metacommunities and wouldn't bother reposting the same story, much like how people see a story and don't repost in individual communities.

One big problem is scaling, doing something like this would definitely be a non-trivial in terms of load per community. Right now if one person signs up to one community, they get a lot of posts from one server. Under a metacommunity idea like this, if one person signs up to one community, they get a lot of posts from many, many servers. lemmy.world has 5967 total instances connected to it, and 2155 instances running lemmy, lotide, kbin, mbin, or friendica that could contain similar types of community, that's a lot of communities to follow for the equivalent of one single community, especially if some of the communities in the metacommunity have a lot of traffic in that community. You'd have to look at every known server to first see if it exists and second if it has a community appropriate for the metacommunity, and the metacommunity would have to routinely scan for dead hosts to remove from the metacommunity and live hosts that may start to see an appropriate metacommunity has been created.

I'm sure there are other solutions, but I'm just thinking of how things work within my current understanding.

Of course, for some people, the problem is one they don't want solved because it isn't a problem in their view (and that's a legit view even if it's one I'm not really amenable to). Some people prefer smaller communities, or want tighter control over their communities. For servers or communities that don't want to be brought into a metacommunity, it seems like some sort of flag to opt-out (or opt-in as the case may be) should be designed in -- I'm thinking something in the community description like a textflag NOMC or YESMC that server software would be designed to respect.

With respect to moderation, It seems to me that you could have a variety of strategies -- you could have a sort of default accept all moderation where if one instance moderates a post other instances take on the same action, or whitelist moderation where if one instance or one set of moderators on a whitelist take an action then other instances take the same action, or a sort of republican moderation where if a certain number of instances take an action then other instances take the same action, and probably an option for individual metacommunities to only accept moderation from the local community the original post came from. I suspect you'd want a choice in the matter per metacommunity instance on a server.

Anyone who knows me knows that I've been using next cloud forever, and I fully endorse anyone doing any level of self hosting should have their own. It's just a self-hosted Swiss army knife, and I personally find it even easier to use than something like SharePoint.

I had a recurring issue where my logs would show "MYSQL server has gone away". It generally wasn't doing anything, but occasionally would cause large large file uploads to fail or other random failures that would stop quickly after.

The only thing I did is I went in and doubled wait_timeout in my /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf

After that, my larger file uploads went through properly.

It might not be the best solution but it did work so I figured I'd share.

https://youtu.be/gNRnrn5DE58?si=VTrpcfDDDukItwCH

It's an older video, but I really enjoyed it and found it really thought provoking. Precision is something we take for granted but as this video shows it's something that was incredibly difficult to get to where we are.

Apparently it's been out since June and I just never realized, but there's a new pfsense out.

https://www.netgate.com/blog/pfsense-2.7.0-and-23.05

Not exactly timely, but I bet I'm not the only one who easily forgets about that particular thing. Most of my stuff is set to autoupdate so I tend to forget.

The upgrade downloaded a large number of packages, I think about 160, during which network connectivity continued to function. After downloading, my router PC reset, and that first boot after the upgrade took quite a few minutes. I ended up running the 90 second timer out after which it reset to 20 seconds a number of times. I was just about to start digging for an HDMI cable to see what when I heard the router beep and my internet came back. Perfect upgrade, didn't need to fix anything afterwards.

So both lemmy and lotide were having big problems where they'd get totally overwhelmed, especially once I started federating with huge instances. At first I thought it was because my servers aren't very powerful, but eventually I got the idea that maybe it's because it can't keep up with federation data from the big instances.

So I decided to limit the connections per IP address. Long-term testing isn't done yet, but so far both my lemmy and lotide instances aren't getting crushed when they're exposed to the outside world, so I think it's helping.

In /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, under the http section, I added the line "limit_conn_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=conn_limit_per_ip:10m;"

Then, in my sites-available folder for the services, I added "limit_conn conn_limit_per_ip 4;" or something similar. Both lemmy and lotide have different sections for ActivityPub and API, so it appears I can limit the connections just to those parts of the site.

It's only been a few days, but whereas before both instances would die randomly pretty quickly once exposed to the outside world, now it appears that they're both stable. Meanwhile, I'm still getting federated posts and comments.

I have a feeling that there's a lot of history that will be uncovered in Africa, particularly as many countries on the continent get richer and have the resources for stuff like archaeologists to learn more about the past.

In my recent history kick it was really frustrating the black hole of African history (besides the egyptians, obviously). But we're learning more about stuff like Ethiopian civilization, and obviously Great Zimbabwe, what else is out there buried waiting to be found?

https://www.livescience.com/47311-antarctic-insect-smallest-genome.html

https://invidious.fbxl.net/watch?v=oK1UgqHz7_U

A relevant passage from The Graysonian Ethic: "In a lot of ways you do not realize, the human race is entirely defined by our biology. Many of your deepest-rooted fears and ambitions are written into your blood, in a library that was passed down by millions of generations of successful creatures going all the way back to the single celled organisms that first spawned within the primordial ooze."

https://invidious.fbxl.net/watch?v=i70wkxmumAw

Good science is humble, and is often wrong, and admits it. This is a really cool story about that.

https://m.jpost.com/science/article-715147/

The Saccorhytus looks somewhat like a spikey jelly bean with pursed lips and is described by the University of Bristol as "resembling an angry Minion."

https://lotide.fbxl.net/api/stable/posts/11405/href

This is a little project I worked on over the weekend once I realized that my Wii mini, which I previously didn't think could be very useful for me, could be set up with the homebrew channel using the bluebomb exploit.

I own a nes mini, snes mini, and playstation mini, and they're all neat toys, but the problem with all of them is that I can't really use them in my living room. The TV is mounted on the wall fairly high up, and I don't have a shelf or anything, and I don't feel like running 100 feet of USB cables all over the place just because I might want to play some super nintendo games once a year.

The Wii was a nice solution by itself. It's small, and you can plug a classic controller into the wiimote so you can play games wirelessly and tuck them into a basket for the 364 days you're not playing wii games.

The Wii mini is different from the Wii in that it's a much simpler device. It doesn't have an SD card slot, it doesn't have a wifi transciever, it can't use Ethernet at all in its unmodified form. Also, the device doesn't have a frontloading DVD drive like the wii, instead it has a top loading DVD drive like the original playstation, so you can't just simply bolt it to the wall with a piece of wood or strap or plastic like you could with a Wii, because you won't be able to open the DVD drive. Being able to run homebrew was the final straw that made the project viable and interesting.

My solution ended up being very simple: The sides of the wii mini are at an angle and come to a point. I measured the dimensions of that angle and created a wall mounted bracket, then printed 3 of them in PLA.

A standard Wii has many mounting brackets available since the Wii was the most popular game console of that generation, but the wii mini was a last gasp and so it isn't really popular and there aren't really options out there, so this is a perfect solution for home manufacturing.

I realized that the tolerances required to hold the wii mini using these was extremely tight, so I used a piece of lined paper to create a template by putting the Wii into its mounts sitting on the table, then I used a felt marker to mark drill holes. Even so, it wasn't as precise as I'd hoped, and I also had an issue with the anchors I used. I've used plastic screw in anchors on a few other projects and it wasn't a problem, but these anchors absolutely hated my living room wall, so that became way more complicated than I would have liked. It does work, but it's not perfect.

If I were to design something like this again, I would remove the requirement to perfectly mount the anchors by printing a piece of plastic holding the three pieces in the exact spot so I didn't need to mount them perfectly. I would probably try to make it a hangable holder so I could just put a couple hangers on the wall and hang the wii holder off of it rather than try to drill securely into the wall.

Regardless, it does work as you can see, and I'm happy enough with the results. My favorite prints are the ones that quietly become a permanent part of my life, and this is a great example of that. The Wii is being held behind my TV, hidden but accessible.

This guy does a lot of neat stuff. I watched a few electric bike videos he did where he tried building e-bikes with various features.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hid9bDnSeok

He had an idea that the one technique would be better for the disk, but he had no idea how much better. Really surprising results.

https://invidious.fbxl.net/watch?v=yMrieQoErcQ

It turns into an ad at the end, but the fundamental stuff they talk about beforehand is a really interesting and easy to understand summary of a fundamental issue with tightening bolts on a flange.