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IMALlama

@ IMALlama @lemmy.world

Posts
17
Comments
496
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • What cheap-ish bulk items would you buy for yourself and your home before an economic depression?

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  • I am not sure that I completely understand your premise. Products are generally available during a depression. The best financial course of action today is to save money... unless the dollar becomes devalued too, which will make imports more expensive.

    In terms of finances, doing things to lowering your fixed monthly bills is always a good idea - looming depression or otherwise. Since you're in Texas and you're all engineers, perhaps look into solar and/or battery storage for electricity? Do the math first obviously. A small(er) garden can help save some $$ but you have to be careful how much you spend on it.

    If you're coming from the perspective of wanting to provide value to your family, simply helping out around the house (cooking, cleaning, etc) and taking on projects you've all been putting off will probably go a long way. Your labor might not be cheaper than a builder's now, but... Doing home repair/improvements, landscaping, building an out-building, building some outdoor shade, etc could be really appreciated.

    If you're looking to earn some $$, farming seems fairly depression proof, but should a depression hit people won't be buying cash crops. Relative to labor input farming will likely not be very lucrative. Starting a side hustle/business might be a better option. It seems like the demand for repairing basically everything would go up. People will also be looking for cheap local distractions.

    The YOLO option is to buy a ton of imports from a country you expect will have their currency strengthen relative to the dollar and then sell those items once the cost of them goes up, but this sounds super risky.

  • What cheap-ish bulk items would you buy for yourself and your home before an economic depression?

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  • It's good to hear that you have equipment already. If the wooded areas of your property have been that way for a while, odds are the soil in that area is pretty good. Granted, clearing the trees could take some work.

    Before buying anything I suggest focusing on your goals and planning. If you're more on the hobby vs commercial side of the spectrum I suggest starting small. Our garden is only 175 square feet of beds and pots, but it greatly reduces the amount of produce we buy during the summer and fall (yay zone 6).

    I have another idea, but am going to break it out as a top level comment.

  • What cheap-ish bulk items would you buy for yourself and your home before an economic depression?

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  • If you're thinking about growing anything start considering:

    • Your goals. Are you looking to sell some/all of your crop? Is this meant for sustince? A supplement to groceries?
    • Land management. Do you want to let fields go fallow? Rotate crops? Grow cover and/or summer/winter crops? Till or no till?
    • Equipment. Do you need to buy anything to help with maintenance, plowing, planting, harvestint, or processing the harvest?
    • What you intend to grow. Do you want a few main crops? A ton of verity? Do you care about how easy it is to store? How do you want to balance calory density, nutrition, and flavor? Are you looking for single year or multi-year crops?
    • What grows in your zone?
    • Layout. How are you going to layout the planting area(s)? Do you need to worry about fencing? How about irrigation? Do you care about containing crops and/or weeds?
    • Required inputs. Things like water, fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide, etc. You will want pest and fungicides even if you're going organic

    Note that all of the above are strongly interrelated.

    We have a decent size fruit/veg garden that's mostly annuals. Despite having done this for 10 years, the last thing on my mind for the next season is whether or not I should buy fertilizer now.

    A final suggestion: go in open eyed to the amount of effort this will take. The amount of labor required by our garden follows a boom and bust cycle. On some weeks I'm out there once for an hour. On other weeks I'm out there multiple times a week. If you're not able to devote continual time to the garden then your crops, and yeilds, will suffer. Harvesting and processing is time consuming and is greatly influenced by what you grow. Doing something with perishable crops before they go bad can also be a challenge. Even with 40 sq ft of raspberries our family of four can't keep up so we have to jam/can/freeze them or turn them into compost. The same is true of tomatoes and a bunch of other produce - especially if you plant crops that actually taste good and you pick them when ripe.

  • Bose open-sources its SoundTouch home theater smart speakers ahead of end-of-life

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  • For passive, and even now some active loudspeakers, very much so.

    Links for passives: https://sites.google.com/site/undefinition/diy https://www.zaphaudio.com/ https://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/speaker-kits/ (etc)

    Active speakers are usually things like this and use commercially available parts with commercial software. But if you want you can build a DIY DSP and DAC and DIY amplifier. Note that there are tons of other designs for both available.

    The DIY audio community is very vibrant. There are tons and tons of forums collaboratively iterating. You can build DIY headphones and DIY headphone amplifiers. Hell, you can even build DIY speaker drivers.

    Anything I missed was not an intentional omission, lol.

  • ffmpReg: a complete rewrite of ffmpeg in pure Rust

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  • There's not a great answer to your question and the 'right' choice is going to be situational. The reason to migrate to Rust is simple: fewer possible bugs should reduce maintenance costs. Whether or not migrating functionality between languages makes sense is another can of worms. Is there enough documentation to avoid the nuanced edge cases that are handled by the current solution's code? Is this a simple port, does it only need interface compatibility, or should a larger area of code be modified? If the code is shared how does the rest of the team feel about the potential language?

    I do not know what happened re: drama among Linux maintainers but I seen rumblings about it on Lemmy.

  • ffmpReg: a complete rewrite of ffmpeg in pure Rust

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  • Rust is spiritually fairly close to C/C++, but with modern convenances like memory safety and ease of concurrency. It compiles somewhat slower but it's compiler errors are more friendly IMO. Rust can be as fast as C++, is also cross platform (eg windows/Linux/Mac) and scales up/down from IoT device level to desktop to seerver applications. If you're going to be writing a lower level app Rust is a good language to look at, but you can also write GUI applications in Rust too.

    Here's a decent overview

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • That makes a certain amount of sense if you're in the northern hemisphere where it's currently winter. Odds are local bell pepper production is down, if not completely stopped, thanks to the cold. This will be true of all produce, although stores will offer loss leaders like bananas. Hardier produce (apples, potatoes, carrots, etc) will have smaller price fluctuations.

    In general, processed food will cost more than its unprocessed counterpart. It's true that some "healthy" food can be expensive, but you can still save money and avoid the salt and fats in processed food by buying low cost one (or few) ingredient inputs like dry beans and grains, in season fresh fruit/veg, canned/frozen veg, etc.

  • Where to start if I wanted to try making my own drawing program?

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  • Monochrome just means "a painting, drawing, or photograph in a single hue." But I think their intent was trying to describe an absolute minimum editor. Think Microsoft paint with the pencil tool but it only draws a single pixel per click.

    Their list of things is fairly reasonable and will result in a fairly long main quests arc. Example. Depending on your familiarity with these items, as well as your familiarity with rust, it could keep you busy for a while in a non-throwaway way.

    I wonder if part of the reason you're running into a wall is because you're asking what could be one of many different questions and haven't provided many hints to help infer intent.

    For example, you could be asking "how do I write a Rust application with a GUI if Rust doesn't provide out of the box GUI functionality?" In the case you'll need to use one of the many GUI libraries that are out there. These will let you do screen layout, add buttons, etc.

    You might also be asking, "am I going to have to build my own UI elements, like buttons and menus, from scratch?". The answer to this is no, unless you want some kind of new/novel UI element. For example, I made a checked list box item in C# about 8 years ago. All the GUI libraries will provide mechanisms to declare and position things like menus and buttons. They'll also provide hooks to let your application know the user did a thing.

    Finally, you might be asking about how to actually draw/render the picture portion of your graphics editor. The GUI library you choose will significantly impact this. Example. Example. Example. Note that these may or may not be good choices to use.

  • More pixels

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  • That read like a mix of "enough with pixel density", smaller sensors are actually really small and don't expect a ton out of them, and a clear the need for better marketing units. Unfortunately, consumers gonna consumer.

  • Switching out most of the toolhead stack on a Voron 2.4, anybody know if these options work together?

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  • A quick search turned up an "official" CNC mount for cartographer and stealth burner. There are also instructions covering another mount, but I didn't spend much time looking at them.

    If you're comfortable with CAD it shouldn't be hard to model a mount that uses the klicky attachment points on the stock SB carriage. I found an existing model that looks like it does exactly this.

  • Switching out most of the toolhead stack on a Voron 2.4, anybody know if these options work together?

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  • Not to ask the dumb question, but if your main pain point is tap why not just swap tap for cartographer or even klicky? Klicky, combined with Klipper Z Calibration has been pretty reliable on my build and gives me a very consistent first layer.

  • Why I Think Valve's Retiring the Steam Deck LCD

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  • I have an Asus Ally X and am in the same boat. I'm pushing 40 and have kids, so time is fairly limited. I have not purchased a new AAA game in quite some time. Honestly, before I bought the Ally X I wasn't gaming much at all. Now that I have the Ally X I'm playing through my game collection again and basically everything in it is 10+ years old. I'm currently playing through borderlands 2, which came out 13 years ago.

    One I wrap this up I might pick up Selaco. I bought it nearly a year ago but have been holding out for the story mode. I'm considering finally giving cyberpunk 2077 a try, but that game came out 5 years ago.

  • Extreme colour change from stress

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  • I've seen that a ton with injection molded plastic, but I don't know if I've ever seen that happen on a printed part before. My prints usually break before deforming enough to get discolored.

  • I'm doing something wrong; can't print this PETG

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  • Good to hear! The only PETG problem I ever had problems with was an opaque white. Evidently it takes a decent amount of additives to get it to be both opaque and white, which can impact printability.

  • I'm doing something wrong; can't print this PETG

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  • Sorry to hear that. The only thing that comes to mind is potentially print speed. Your first layer is probably pretty slow. Are your subsequent layers much faster?

  • I'm doing something wrong; can't print this PETG

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  • Did it look more solid or did print quality basically remain the same?

  • I'm doing something wrong; can't print this PETG

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  • How can you tell it’s under extruded?

    IMO this is the same as any other hobby. Print enough and you're likely to run into under extrusion at some point. Similarly, I can tell if doughs and batters needs more liquid or more flower by look and touch thanks to making a ton of pizza crusts and pancakes.

    If there’s some clear sign of under extrusion it might be useful for my reference doc I use when trying to troubleshoot failed prints.

    The first photo in the album looks like 'classic' under extrusion. The layer lines are largely intact, but way less material that is necessary for a solid print is present. The print has better and worse areas, which usually indicates a clog. Combine this with the fact that PETG will clog if you use too much retraction and a user that's new to PETG and retraction seems like a good place to start troubleshooting.

    As for helping your guide, simplify3d hasn't been a 'cool' slicer in quite some time but they have a decent print quality guide that names a bunch of failure modes. Ellis' print tuning guide is the best one I've come across.

  • I'm doing something wrong; can't print this PETG

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  • PETG isn't very tolerant of too much retraction. Given your fine first layer I suspect you're developing a clog as the print goes on, which would result in under extrusion. Turning retraction completely off will make it very easy to rule out as a possibility.

  • I'm doing something wrong; can't print this PETG

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  • You're severely under-extruding. This may sound weird, but try a warmer temp tower without any extrusion. You might be developing a clog mid print.

  • Snapdragon X1 Elite Linux laptop cancelled due to performance concerns — Linux PC maker says Qualcomm CPU is ‘less suitable for Linux than expected’

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  • I'm not an Apple fanboy, but arm based processors seem to be working out fairly well for them.

    I own an Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, which was one of the OG snapdragon x laptops released a (two?) and a half year(s) ago. It took a while for folks to get Linux to run on them and there's enough of a barrier to entry that it's still not very common. Most of the initial hurdles were due to Qualcomm bootloader shenanigans.