I've been into 3D printing for over 7 years now.
And I've never dried filament. Occasionally, there was some stringing, but nothing out of the ordinary. Until last month.
I ordered two spools of filament from a no-name manufacturer for $8/1kg each. The packaging was poor, but that wasn’t the main issue.
The filament just wouldn’t print properly. I mean, it did print, but with a lot of stringing and defects. No matter the temperature setting, the results were awful. I even tried drying it in the oven at 50°C for 4 hours — no improvement.
Eventually, I gave up and bought a filament dryer. I got the cheapest one that has both heating and airflow — the Creality Dry Box 2.0.
Threw the spool in at 65°C for 8 hours and... it was a miracle — all the problems vanished. Flawless print quality, perfect temperature tower, and great Benchy.
It seems that all these years, many of my printing and retraction issues — especially with Bowden setups — could have been drastically reduced...
And I've never dried filament. Occasionally, there was some stringing, but nothing out of the ordinary. Until last month.
I ordered two spools of filament from a no-name manufacturer for $8/1kg each. The packaging was poor, but that wasn’t the main issue.
The filament just wouldn’t print properly. I mean, it did print, but with a lot of stringing and defects. No matter the temperature setting, the results were awful. I even tried drying it in the oven at 50°C for 4 hours — no improvement.
Eventually, I gave up and bought a filament dryer. I got the cheapest one that has both heating and airflow — the Creality Dry Box 2.0.
Threw the spool in at 65°C for 8 hours and... it was a miracle — all the problems vanished. Flawless print quality, perfect temperature tower, and great Benchy.
It seems that all these years, many of my printing and retraction issues — especially with Bowden setups — could have been drastically reduced...
Image generators have long since reached production-level quality.
The recent "nano-banana," which turned out to be Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview, marks a new level in image editing. Before it, the top models were GPT-4 ImageGen by OpenAI and Flux Kontext, but when it comes to consistency in preserving characters, they fall far behind Google’s model.
As an illustration — there’s a character named The Pupa from Solar Opposites — there’s barely any fan art of him online, mostly just screenshots from the show.
Now, with a single prompt, you can get a consistent sticker pack. I’ve got an idea for a Telegram sticker pack generator — could be pretty solid.
P.S. The model is available for free in Google AI Studio (with a US VPN) or via OpenRouter.
The recent "nano-banana," which turned out to be Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview, marks a new level in image editing. Before it, the top models were GPT-4 ImageGen by OpenAI and Flux Kontext, but when it comes to consistency in preserving characters, they fall far behind Google’s model.
As an illustration — there’s a character named The Pupa from Solar Opposites — there’s barely any fan art of him online, mostly just screenshots from the show.
Now, with a single prompt, you can get a consistent sticker pack. I’ve got an idea for a Telegram sticker pack generator — could be pretty solid.
P.S. The model is available for free in Google AI Studio (with a US VPN) or via OpenRouter.
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Section: “How It’s Made”
An engineer’s self-awareness occasionally needs nourishment in the form of knowledge about some object.
A large supermarket chain recently started giving out toys with purchases. On their own, they’re nothing special—just cubes with strange prints on them.
But they stick to each other magnetically, regardless of which side or orientation. Anyone who’s ever played with magnets or remembers basic physics knows that magnets have poles. You can’t just attach two magnets together from any side. Unless you’re very strong.
So, I took the whole thing apart—and it turned out that the corners of the cubes contained loose little magnets that simply flip to the correct side when brought close to another cube. Genius lies in simplicity.
P.S. I appropriated the magnets, even though I’ve got stronger ones lying around for crafts, and they’re dirt cheap anyway. But in the world of making, everything can come in handy.
An engineer’s self-awareness occasionally needs nourishment in the form of knowledge about some object.
A large supermarket chain recently started giving out toys with purchases. On their own, they’re nothing special—just cubes with strange prints on them.
But they stick to each other magnetically, regardless of which side or orientation. Anyone who’s ever played with magnets or remembers basic physics knows that magnets have poles. You can’t just attach two magnets together from any side. Unless you’re very strong.
So, I took the whole thing apart—and it turned out that the corners of the cubes contained loose little magnets that simply flip to the correct side when brought close to another cube. Genius lies in simplicity.
P.S. I appropriated the magnets, even though I’ve got stronger ones lying around for crafts, and they’re dirt cheap anyway. But in the world of making, everything can come in handy.
I still haven’t gotten around to making full-length videos for my YouTube channel — for now, I’m honing my editing and filming skills through Shorts.
I’ve already written here about one video — YouTube gave it a second life, generating 2 million views and 1,200 new subscribers for my main channel.
I’ve come up with a kind of personal “usefulness metric” when it comes to video content.
Torrent trackers have a “ratio” — the amount you upload compared to the amount you download. If it’s over 1, it means you’ve given more to the torrent community than you’ve taken. You couldn’t download anything if your ratio dropped below 0.3–0.5 years ago. You had to upload at least half of what you’d downloaded in order to get access to something new.
My metric is similar. I’ve been watching YouTube for over 16 years. And just that one 11-second Shorts video with the hatch has already been watched for 4,200 hours. But how can I figure out how much I’ve “taken” from YouTube?
Let’s calculate that tomorrow.
I’ve already written here about one video — YouTube gave it a second life, generating 2 million views and 1,200 new subscribers for my main channel.
I’ve come up with a kind of personal “usefulness metric” when it comes to video content.
Torrent trackers have a “ratio” — the amount you upload compared to the amount you download. If it’s over 1, it means you’ve given more to the torrent community than you’ve taken. You couldn’t download anything if your ratio dropped below 0.3–0.5 years ago. You had to upload at least half of what you’d downloaded in order to get access to something new.
My metric is similar. I’ve been watching YouTube for over 16 years. And just that one 11-second Shorts video with the hatch has already been watched for 4,200 hours. But how can I figure out how much I’ve “taken” from YouTube?
Let’s calculate that tomorrow.
I’m analyzing my YouTube watch history in today’s article.
It turns out I watch YouTube for an average of 6.5 hours a day. As for the rating — it’s 0.12, meaning I’ve contributed 12% of the amount of content I’ve consumed back to the community.
P.S. The article includes a link to the repository with the code and instructions — you can gather the same statistics based on your own data.
It turns out I watch YouTube for an average of 6.5 hours a day. As for the rating — it’s 0.12, meaning I’ve contributed 12% of the amount of content I’ve consumed back to the community.
P.S. The article includes a link to the repository with the code and instructions — you can gather the same statistics based on your own data.
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During my vacation, ants began taking over the area of the gazebo where I’m building a doghouse.
I had to evict them in an original way.
I had to evict them in an original way.
Remember the post about my GPTs for learning English?
I’ve now turned it into a Telegram bot — @positroid_english_bot. I’m positioning it primarily as a helper for Russian-speaking users.
It has the same features as the GPTs:
* You type a word — it gives you a vocabulary card (definition, pronunciation, examples, etc.);
* You type a text in Russian — it translates it;
* You type a text in English — it corrects it.
For now, it's running on the free qwen/qwen3-coder:free (literally the first free model I found on OpenRouter). It has no memory, doesn't know message history — just a bare-bones proxy, so don’t expect too much. It’s just that writing in Telegram is almost always quicker and more convenient for me than loading the bulky ChatGPT interface.
I plan to work more on the functionality, but it’s already decent as is.
P.S. I just found out that my nickname is an actual mathematical term Oo.
I’ve now turned it into a Telegram bot — @positroid_english_bot. I’m positioning it primarily as a helper for Russian-speaking users.
It has the same features as the GPTs:
* You type a word — it gives you a vocabulary card (definition, pronunciation, examples, etc.);
* You type a text in Russian — it translates it;
* You type a text in English — it corrects it.
For now, it's running on the free qwen/qwen3-coder:free (literally the first free model I found on OpenRouter). It has no memory, doesn't know message history — just a bare-bones proxy, so don’t expect too much. It’s just that writing in Telegram is almost always quicker and more convenient for me than loading the bulky ChatGPT interface.
I plan to work more on the functionality, but it’s already decent as is.
P.S. I just found out that my nickname is an actual mathematical term Oo.
Actually, the English bot runs on the basis of my universal AI bot project.
To launch your own bot, just download the binary, specify the Telegram bot API key (from @BotFather), an OpenRouter API key (or any other OpenAI-compatible provider — you can even use a local model), and your own prompt, which will be sent with each message.
By default, it works via Long Polling, so it can run locally — a server is not required.
In other words, anything that fits the task of getting a single-message response from an LLM with your custom prompt can be launched effortlessly.
The repository has details on setup, configuration, and available features.
As time and attention allow, I plan to add support for file exchange, message history, and so on. For now, it only works in single-message mode.
As for development — the project is written in Go. The repository includes full CI/CD setup instructions, how to configure auto-deploy to a server, Docker support, and all that.
To launch your own bot, just download the binary, specify the Telegram bot API key (from @BotFather), an OpenRouter API key (or any other OpenAI-compatible provider — you can even use a local model), and your own prompt, which will be sent with each message.
By default, it works via Long Polling, so it can run locally — a server is not required.
In other words, anything that fits the task of getting a single-message response from an LLM with your custom prompt can be launched effortlessly.
The repository has details on setup, configuration, and available features.
As time and attention allow, I plan to add support for file exchange, message history, and so on. For now, it only works in single-message mode.
As for development — the project is written in Go. The repository includes full CI/CD setup instructions, how to configure auto-deploy to a server, Docker support, and all that.
We've got some kind of gnat invasion in our city—sometimes they even manage to get into the apartment.
I picked up an insect trap for the occasion - it has a UV LED and a couple of high-voltage coils inside. If something conductive flies in between them, it gets instantly zapped.
Well, the LED gave up the ghost, so I had to bring it back to life.
The LED itself was soldered onto the board and was tiny - I didn’t even have a UV one like that lying around. But I did have a 12V UV strip left over from my DIY tanning setup for curing photopolymer resin.
I didn’t have a 5V-to-12V converter either (the trap runs on USB power). I considered desoldering a diode from the strip, but laziness triumphed over doing it the hard way - so I ordered a converter and stuck in a 3-diode piece of the strip.
As a bonus, here’s a demonstration using a macro lens. For the “victim” model, I used a piece of apple peel on a toothpick.
I picked up an insect trap for the occasion - it has a UV LED and a couple of high-voltage coils inside. If something conductive flies in between them, it gets instantly zapped.
Well, the LED gave up the ghost, so I had to bring it back to life.
The LED itself was soldered onto the board and was tiny - I didn’t even have a UV one like that lying around. But I did have a 12V UV strip left over from my DIY tanning setup for curing photopolymer resin.
I didn’t have a 5V-to-12V converter either (the trap runs on USB power). I considered desoldering a diode from the strip, but laziness triumphed over doing it the hard way - so I ordered a converter and stuck in a 3-diode piece of the strip.
As a bonus, here’s a demonstration using a macro lens. For the “victim” model, I used a piece of apple peel on a toothpick.