High School DxD

I made it farther (5 episodes) than I did with Senran Kagura (2/3), only because the fan-service was so overwhelming and badly done that it was funny, particularly the completely out-of-character stripperific ED animation. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to make the show watchable, especially given how annoying Our Hero is. But what really killed it for me was Sailor Goon showing up in episode 6; pick a direction, guys.

Apple

They’re really working hard to make Microsoft look like a well-run company with a solid operating system and decent QA. Surprisingly, so is Microsoft.

Corona-chan

The masks coming off, and I don’t mean the sneeze-guards people have been forced to wear for most of the past year.

Google/Twitter/Facebook

Well, they’re not serial killers. Pretty Sure. Okay, kinda sure. Maybe?

LinkedIn

They haven’t completely lost focus on being a professional networking tool, although they sure have buried it under a mountain of irrelevant social-network/data-harvesting/certification bullshit. And they accidentally helped a new job get me last year.

DirecTV/AT&T

Their efforts to fraudulently extract money from former customers probably aren’t felonious. If only because they have really good contract lawyers.

Democrats

They’re not all career criminals. I mean, there’s Tulsi Gabbard, who I disagree with on almost every issue but am willing to trust when it counts because she actually likes America.

And, um, give me a minute, I’m sure I’ll think of another one.

Boonie Dungeon

Not watching, but spotted an interesting review of the original light novels, where someone commented that they found it rather offputting that the author kept laughing at his own jokes. That explains a lot, actually.

(and, no, most fan-artists aren’t watching this show, either)

Wet season, dry season

Yup, there’s nothing on. This season is so weak that I’ve started watching the uncensored version of High School DxD on Funimation. So far, the only two female characters without giant gag boobs are the kitten named “Kitten” and the white girl named Asia. Their figures would be spectacular for real-life high-school-age girls not named “Ai Shinozaki”, while the bowling balls the rest of the girls are attached to should leave them all crippled with pain, even with demonic powers keeping their permanently-stiff nipples at unnatural angles. Dunno how many episodes I can keep this up for…

(I had to go looking for this, because out of more than 25,000 saved Pixiv pics, I didn’t have a single one from this series)

Coming soon…

Next season, the only things that look watchable so far are That Slime Spinoff and the long-overdue Zombieland Saga: Revenge.

Unrelated, you’ll never guess what Apple did!

…unless you guess that they locked my account again with no explanation.

Surprisingly, I’ve only had to log in once on each device to restore functionality. So far.

Speaking of Evil

Remember when I canceled DirecTV in November and returned my equipment the same day, only to have them try to bill me for it at the beginning of January? Remember how I pulled out my carefully-saved receipt and read the confirmation number over the phone to a rep who confirmed that it was received and the bill would be canceled?

DirecTV doesn’t. They just tried again. Really, really glad I removed my credit card from the account before I called them last month.

30 frustrating minutes later…

It only took about five minutes of ads from a company that’s trying to rip me off for $150 to get through to a human, who agreed that yes, this should have been fixed last time, but I was talking to the wrong department, and needed to talk to the warehouse to confirm that the equipment I had a return receipt for actually arrived.

I pointed out that the fact of my receipt and its presence in her system made it Not My Problem, but she insisted that since it wasn’t a billing issue, she had to transfer me to the warehouse rep. She couldn’t give me a reference number or a direct phone number, but happily waited on hold with me to ensure I was correctly connected and the call was not dropped. Sweet time-waster for someone paid by the hour, says I.

After fifteen minutes of increasingly hard-to-understand ads, I was finally connected with someone who I could not understand at all. Not because of her accent, because approximately 50% of the voice packets were missing. Fortunately, she could hear me just fine, so I could give her my callback number. Unfortunately, it took another several minutes for her to convey the message that she couldn’t disconnect and call me back until I hung up. Yeah, whatever.

To my surprise, she actually did call me back right away on a clean line, confirm that the ticket was being escalated, and give me a reference number and approximate ETA: 10-15 business days.

Joy.

Sticktoitivity

Accepted wisdom is that the maximum practical layer height for a given nozzle size is ~80% of its diameter, or 0.32mm for the common 0.4mm nozzles. I was tinkering with Cura’s adaptive layer height feature (which does not offer the customizability of PrusaSlicer’s, and is hidden away as an experimental feature), and it happened to generate some layers all the way up at 0.4. So I figured, what the hell, let’s try it on something that doesn’t have to be sturdy, and that would still work just fine if the top half fell off. Or even the top 2/3.

Turned out just fine, with some very light stringing on the inside of the tube that was easy to shave. Fits nicely, too. I’m sure there are plenty of models where 0.4mm layers wouldn’t work, but it’s a time-saver when it does.

(and, yes, if I want to really speed things up, MicroSwiss does make 0.6mm and 0.8mm nozzles for the 3D45, as well as replacement 0.4mm ones; all of them are also rated for abrasive filaments, something I’ve had no reason to try yet)

Related,

My miter box cam pin has finally been indexed on Thingiverse, and shows up both in searches and in my profile. It took two months.

Found a Zorkmid

Well, printed one, anyway, as a Cura test. Came out pretty decent, printed on edge on a raft.

No pie for you!

Corona-chan apparently took down the local Pizza Hut a few weeks ago. Permanently? Still showed as closed on Friday night at dinnertime. If I wanted good pizza I’d make it myself, but first I’d have to go buy pepperoni and cheese. I tend to order from PH if I don’t want to go out, because it’s better than Domino’s, half the price of Round Table, and won’t make me sick like Mountain Mike’s does.

No cut for you!

The local chain haircut joint was shut down by the governor (again) at the beginning of December, and despite him opening things back up a little in a likely-futile effort to stop the petition to shitcan his l’il-dictator ass, they haven’t reopened yet. It looks like their location in Seaside is back online, and I know the folks from the Salinas shop were working shifts over there, so maybe I’ll make the 20-mile drive today or tomorrow.

No kids for you!

Episode 4 of That Spider Show was a bit more interesting, because it didn’t advance the B ArkArc.

(spider is unrelated)

No shows for you!

I haven’t found anything else worth watching for days. Last thing I managed to make it through was Matt Smith’s final arc in Doctor Who.

Amusing Note

Shady web sites that redirect you to malware are still using the “your Flash Player is out of date” con. And it probably still works about as well as it ever did.

This Just In

Remember the “insurrection” that Trump supposedly incited with his speech, that was used to take down Parler despite being coordinated on Twitter and Facebook? Y’know, the one where police opened the doors to let protesters into the building before killing an unarmed woman who wasn’t threatening anyone? The one where they found pipe bombs that the FBI just revealed were planted the night before?

Stream No Evil

The Disney+ streaming service is protecting children from Disney movies. Another way to protect them is to cancel Disney+ and go back to buying DVDs. And, y’know, parent instead of leaving them alone with a remote and a megacorp deciding what they should watch.

Amazon “recommendation” roundup

I’ve got a lot of mice and laptop stands around the house, but I’ve never really thought of them as “decor”.

FYI, police are not generally well-disposed toward people who carry spiked “keychains”, which are in any case more of an urban-defense thing than “hunting & fishing” accessories. And how many people actually need to color-coordinate their stabby-sticks with their wardrobe?

“They are gardeners and carpenters. They are not tomato-men.”

While there are occasions where I would agree that pom-poms constitute appropriate apparel for women, I don’t think I should be the one buying them, even as gifts. It’s really more of a gift for me.

I can at least understand how they ended up here.

This one strikes pretty close to home, because I was just about to run out of the stuff, and Gevalia seems to still be struggling to deal with Covid-induced coffee distribution issues. There are people trying to scalp their K-cups on a number of sites, and pretty much every local store that carries them hasn’t restocked in months. I’ve had to redo my monthly subscription several times as the different SKUs come and go. I wasn’t sure that I’d be getting any this month at all until yesterday morning, and it wouldn’t be the first time that Amazon marked something as “shipped” that wasn’t really, really on the way.

Fingers jittery and crossed.

Update: 1 out of 3 is bad

My Gevalia k-cup order arrived, but while the box was the correct size, it was suspiciously light. Opening it revealed that my 3-pack had been reduced to a 1-pack. Sadly, the amount I was charged was not reduced to match. Amazon does not offer a “hey, you sent the wrong stuff” button, just a “return or replace” button. Not even a “hey you shipped me a box of lightbulbs in just a padded envelope” button, which also happened today, although those at least work.

Update: Yes, we have no more coffee

Since the only option Amazon offered me was to return the undersized coffee shipment, I did so, selecting the “missing or broken parts” reason, with details in the comment. Their new system determined that it’s not worth it for them to have me mail them back, so they’re refunding my money but letting me keep the partial shipment.

The only ones in-stock at Amazon are $20 for 6 k-cups, so I have about two weeks to find another source for the stuff.

Ah, coffee!

Found an Amazon marketplace dealer whose price for 3 6-packs was only moderately extortionate, and which became reasonable when I factored in the cost of the 12-pack I got to keep out of the return. Hopefully with the remarkably-sudden nationwide discovery that lockdowns are bad, supplies will stabilize in time for next month’s shipment.

On CallCallCallCall

Yesterday was the beginning of my first week of on-call since I started the new job at the end of August (pause for hysterical laughter at the thought of only one week at a time). When Baby’s First Alert went off, PagerDuty simultaneously sent email, SMS, a push notification, and a phone call; it sounded like my phone was having an audiogasm. My first priority was trimming it to one alert at a time.

And, yes, one of the Nagios errors I’ve been paged over was a log-scanner that flagged an unfamiliar error message. It turns out that “X dose not exists” is a surprisingly popular typo, in a variety of contexts.

Technically not a lens!

Despite the high risk of higher taxes this year, I decided to stretch my no-new-cameras-or-lenses rule slightly to buy a Nikon-to-Sony tilt/shift adapter. +/-10mm of shift, 10° of tilt, and 360° of rotation with click-stops so you can use them in any direction. It’s not a true view camera adapter, but it also doesn’t cost $850 and weigh considerably more than the camera.

A quick test with my really old Nikon 35mm f/2.8 and 50mm f/1.4 allowed full movements with no vignetting on my A6500. It’s something I’d only pack on days where I was planning to visit a castle (or if I ever made it waaay out to the Yamato museum in Kure to get some pics of the 1:10 scale model), but it does something software simply can’t.

(and, yes, there are half a dozen 3d-printed tilt/shift adapter designs out there, but most of them have the wrong mount on one or both sides, and are clunky and/or hard to print. Also, I’m not really willing to trust my lenses to their design skills. I’ve had a camera fall four feet onto concrete due to a defective strap; trusting a 3d-printed connector seems worse)

(and, yes, my current straps are very sturdy)

Also not a lens!

Somewhere I have a very nice pinhole adapter for my 4x5 camera, which would be great if I had a darkroom, or a high-end digital back. Since I don’t, I was idly looking at the various body-cap adapters, which range from actual body caps to nicely-made adapters that take lens caps and filters.

That Amazon listing didn’t include the effective aperture size, which is kinda useful information, so I went to their official site, and the very first sample picture from the product was:

Because nothing says “infinite depth of field” like a giant replica of a masturbation device.

Monster Girl Doctor

Sometime last year I read the first two light novels for this and lost interest, so the anime wasn’t high on my list. After idly watching the first few episodes, I’m not terribly interested in more, unless they focus on the cyclops girl Memé.

Someone has work-in-progress configs on Github to get the current version of Cura to work with the Dremel 3D45. The basic functionality is there, but there’s no network or camera support, and the output quality is… poor (way too much retraction and stringing, and big gaps in pin-like elements). I’m happy with PrusaSlicer for now, but it’s nice to see someone working on more options.

Incidentally, I took a look at how Dremel got the network printing and webcam support into their customized old version of Cura. They heavily edited the UltiMaker 3 script to use their API, but it looks like they never got any kind of network discovery working. It would be faster to write a new Python plugin than to try to modify the current version of the UM3 code, especially since I’ve already got a working Bash script.

Quality update!

To no surprise, replacing the 6.5mm retraction with the 2-3mm that Dremel had in their version of Cura significantly improved the results. I can now do head-to-head comparisons between Cura 4.8 and PrusaSlicer 2.3, to decide which one handles specific parts better.

For my babydai koma, I find the overhang+supports quality unacceptable in both, so I’ve added some 0.5mm-wide manual supports to the model that can be easily snapped off. This forces both slicers to treat them as bridges, which significantly improves the results. And cuts the print time and filament use a bit.