Welcome to the wonderful world of people having TikTok brain.

I want to play flat games like Elden Ring same as always in third person, but have the world surrounding me in VR. Maybe there are motion sickness issues that would make that hard.

If you haven’t played any of the Lucky’s Tale games, this is basically exactly how it works. I found that when I was just starting off with VR, this type of third person thing was significantly less motion sickness inducing than first person movement, for whatever it’s worth.

Trover Saves The Universe is another similar take on that idea, if you can stand a shitload of Justin Roiland voice acting. The framework is certainly there for a fully 3D third person VR game. I agree with you that this idea really ought to have legs, and somehow it still doesn’t.

This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve read in my entire life.

If for some reason I am forced in the future to be immersed fully in some manner of dystopian metaverse in order to interact with others, I absolutely do not want my face in the virtual world to be my real face. As a matter of fact, I don’t want anyone’s face to be their real face.

I want to be sitting around that boardroom table with three anime girls, Skeletor, a guy in a samurai mask, and somebody with a horse for a head. For fuck’s sake, get creative.

Also, apparently no one is expected to have a problem with giving goddamn Google an accurate enough scan of your own face that they can use it to produce and animate a photorealistic simulacrum of you and, more likely than not, also shove this data irrevocably into their perpetually hallucinating bullshit generation machine. Has anyone fully read the fine print on this?

I’m good. Miss me with this shit by several miles, please.

The goal of your offset is not to be zero. Actually, in a perfectly ideal world that would be impossible because it would result in your nozzle touching and dragging along the surface on the first layer. Your actual final Z offset figure will be arbitrary based on the vagarities of your particular machine including the total overall length of the nozzle and thickness of the build plate, etc.

The actual goal is to achieve an accurate first layer which results in a thickness of 0.2mm or whatever your first layer’s height is, with minimal inaccuracy. You have to set the offset of the nozzle from the plate via Z axis adjustment such that there is a (literally) paper-thin gap between the tip of the nozzle and the plate. That doesn’t mean just setting it to zero. If setting it to zero actually worked, there would not actually be any reason to calibrate it…

Wiping the bed with alcohol doesn’t really remove any contamination from its surface, it more or less just moves it around. Wash it thoroughly with dish soap and running water as others have suggested and give it a real good rinse afterwards. The goal is to get oils and other contaminants off of the surface and to wash them down the drain, whence they will trouble you no more.

Let me translate this for everyone: “Oh crap, our plan of discouraging competition by dumping devices onto the market at a loss didn’t work. Now we’re scared of Valve.”

You, uh, didn’t turn multiplayer off in your options, did you? That setting doesn’t follow your account around, it’s per machine.

I leave it off on my laptop because it causes the Space Anomaly to devolve into single-digit frame rates when other players are present and rendered, especially when docking.

Note that this doesn’t prevent you from seeing other players’ bases, nor impact the ability to see people on your friends list or their status. Your game will still connect to the servers if it can. It only prevents other players’ keisters and ships from being placed in your universe.

Task Manager is launched by the listener in winlogon if you use the Ctrl + Shift + Esc method though, right? I’m pretty sure you can still launch Task Manager, and from there attempt to relauch Explorer, even if Explorer is borked or not running. You’d just have to know how to do that and that you can.

That’s what I always do when Explorer’s ears inexplicably catch fire and I’m either too lazy or too naively hopeful to reboot.

For anyone following along at home, Windows Explorer is also responsible for displaying the start menu/taskbar. In the example in the article there’s something else funky going on inside Explorer, though, because the taskbar and even the desktop icons are all there, it’s just not rendering correctly. (Explorer is also responsible for showing all of your desktop icons.)

Who wants to be the first to martyr themselves getting turned into Swiss cheese after firing the first shot? Is it you? Why not?

That is your answer.

I’ve never retrobrighted anything because I always had a hunch this would be the case. It turns out I was vindicated. We all know full well that oxygenation is one of the things that deteriorates many materials, including embrittling plastics, and what you’re doing with this stuff is literally just oxygenating the shit out of your plastic in order to bleach it.

For stuff that I’ve really cared about de-yellowing, I’ve always just cleaned it thoroughly and painted over it. This has the added bonus of the paint being an additional protective layer rather than a destructive chemical reaction inflicted on the material itself. Sure, it sucks that you also paint over any logos printed on it or whatever, but you can recreate those with stickers if you really care. I figure that if anybody can’t identify what an NES or Dreamcast or something is shaped like, even without the logos on it, they’re probably not invited to any more of my parties anyway.

IP Over Avian Carriers.

If you have more than one toolhead you’re not limited to just ramming different colors of the same material in there, either. You can run otherwise incompatible filaments that even require different temperatures from each other in the same print. Plus the ram-cut-and-purge brigade rarely work well with soft materials like TPU.

Multiple toolheads is the way to go if you actually want to get work done and not just slowly poop out multicolored low poly Pikachus, or whatever.

The PSVR2 is mildly interesting if paired with the PC adapter, but you couldn’t get me to possession of a Meta Quest even if Facebook paid me $300 to take it off their hands. I don’t even want the fucking thing in my house. I have a similar opinion of the Bytedance/Pico units. The force behind them just isn’t trustworthy, even if they did sell the damn things in the US.

Here’s another vote for sticking with my existing rig until the Steam Frame comes out.

“Calls.”

There’s only one call, and it’s coming from Tim Sweeny at Epic. It’s just more of his usual yelling at clouds, because he’s got a pathological hate-on for anyone else who runs a storefont, including Apple and Google but especially Valve. He hasn’t made any positive contribution to the world since about 1998, and at this point we can all safely discard his opinion with nothing of value being lost. He wants to allow AI slime on his own platform because he thinks it’ll make him free money, but maybe he ought to worry about the smell coming from his own house before he goes around trying to dictate at others how they should run theirs.

I’m more of a Magnetbox bird, myself.

Ah. Like this?

Whoppsie-doodle, that’s one’s actually how bad actors farm shitloads fraudulent clicks to boost spurious news articles, manipulate search results, and spam political propaganda at social networking sites. My mistake!

Who’s “hoarding” all the devices now?

If your bed is physically tilted and you’ve ensured it’s flat (it seems that you have), you will probably want to manually adjust its straightness relative to the X/Y plane. Or perpendicularity. Is that a word? You know what I mean.

There are four locknuts on posts on the underside of the bed and if you remove the steel build sheet on top you’ll see the heads of the four screws on the other ends of these. There are probably myriad ways to measure its straightness, but Qidi recommend just manually moving the head around and using the textured nozzle offset sheet the printer came with to ensure that the gap is more or less consistent with the tip of the nozzle in the various extremities of the bed. You could also use a feeler gauge for this purpose if you were feeling frisky or wanted something more durable. You’ll want to do this with the bed at room temperature, so that rising or falling temperatures won’t be muddling your results via thermal expansion.

With the locknuts loosened, you can screw the four corners of the bed up and down slightly using the screw heads on top. These are the four screws closest to the corners. Be sure to hold the screw heads in place when you retighten the locknuts beneath, otherwise the act of tightening them will probably also turn the screws slightly and mess up all your hard work. Turning the screw heads clockwise lowers the bed, and turning them counterclockwise raises the bed in that corner.

Do not attempt to auto-home the print head or run a mesh level job without the steel sheet attached to the bed. The probe relies on the presence of the steel sheet and you will drill the nozzle into the magnetic surface of your print bed if you do. Just grab the print head to move it around in the X/Y plane and leave its jog controls alone. Only jog the bed itself.

Qidi have a video detailing this here. Yes, it’s just an MP4 plonked on a Google drive and no, I don’t know why they didn’t just post it you Youtube or something. They seem to distribute most things by just sticking them in a Google drive folder. You get used to it, dealing with Qidi.

I had to go through this rigmarole when I replaced the heated bed a while ago, which Qidi are not keen to tell you in advance. When I just slapped the new part on there as advertised I wound up with one corner of the bed tilted near as makes no difference to a full millimeter below the presumed plane of the Z axis and the other corner maybe 0.5mm above it. Somehow with mesh leveling this more or less still worked, but it’s much improved now that I’ve actually done it right… ish.

What I have now is this:

Look, it’s not exactly an ideal Euclidean plane or whatever the hell. But 0.2228mm from one corner to the other? S’okay? S’alright. That’s little enough that the mesh can compensate for it.

In case anyone is wondering, the mesh leveling appears to use a 9x9 grid. I thought it would be 10x10. I was wrong. That’s only 81 points of measurement which means that vagaries could theoretically fall in between the probed points. It’s not likely these will be Earth-shakingly severe, because the steel surface plate isn’t exactly tinfoil and it’s only so flexible to begin with. And here’s another dumb tip for your travels while we’re at it: Make sure there’s no crap stuck to the backside of your steel plate, or trapped between it and the magnetic base. Scraps of black filament are what get me, because they’re hard to spot. But they’ll cause you no end of grief.

There are several things you could do in that regard, I’m sure. Configure your services to listen only on weird ports, disable ICMP pings, jigger your scripts to return timeouts instead of error messages… Many of which might make your own life difficult, as well.

All of these are also completely counterproductive if you want your hosted service, whatever it is, to be accessible to others. Or maybe not, if you don’t. The point is, the bots don’t have to find every single web service and site with 100% accuracy. The hackers only have to get lucky once and stumble their way into e.g. someone’s unsecured web host where they can push more malware, or a pile of files they can encrypt and demand a ransom, or personal information they can steal, or content they can scrape with their dumb AI, or whatever. But they can keep on trying until the sun burns out basically for free, and you have to stay lucky and under the radar forever.

In my case just to name an example I kind of need my site to be accessible to the public at large if I want to, er, actually make any sales.

I wasn’t going to type that many commas for the sake of brevity, but it’s 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 possible addresses. I.e. 2¹²⁸. So yes, I do.

I consider 96 orders (in binary, anyway) as “multiple.” Wouldn’t you?

Almost certainly. There are only 4,294,967,296 possible IPv4 addresses, i.e. 4.3ish billion, which sounds like a lot but in computer terms really isn’t. You can scan them in parallel, and if you’re an advanced script kiddie you could even exclude ranges that you know belong to unexciting organizations like Google and Microsoft, which are probably not worth spending your time messing with.

If you had a botnet of 8,000 or so devices and employed a probably unrealistically generous timeout of 15 seconds, i.e. four attempts per minute per device, you could scan the entire IPv4 range in just a hair over 93 days and that’s before excluding any known pointless address blocks. If you only spent a second on each ping you could do it in about six days.

For the sake of argument, cybercriminals are already operating botnets with upwards of 100,000 compromised machines doing their bidding. That bidding could well be (and probably is) probing random web servers for vulnerabilities. The largest confirmed botnet was the 911 S5 which contained about 19 million devices.