While I can't directly compare with BambuLab print results, the prints I get out of my Prusa Core One with current Firmware and Slicer are stellar and surpass even the prints of my MK4S (that being a benchmark in Quality in my bubble of the Internet).
> [...] but they may wish to take down their handbook lest they capture the interest of law enforcement agencies [...]
I wonder if I'm oblivious to some kind of sarcasm in your comment, because if I take what's written at face value, it sounds like you advocate for not getting caught in favour of not actually doing the criminal thing.
I’m not implying that. I’m hopeful they’ll take down their handbook so that others don’t follow in their footsteps. I also wish for their business to cease operating.
In a country like Denmark your labour chances and universities are better in average than in mine, Spain. It looks like nowadays everything is suffering, exploited or something.
I lived for almost 12 years in Asia, mostly in Vietnam, but also in Singapore. Seriously, the concept of miserable that we have in Europe has become (at least according to my perception) something like "I do not like it, so it is ok to go get the money from a museum, to get social helps, to blame the politicians about the labor market... whatever". I think that is not honest at all most of the time.
The average local in Vietnam lives in much harder conditions actually. I do not mean we should live like them. But be aware that most people in the world live like Vietnamese, not like Danish, in average.
I see a lot of people mentioning Fairphones not being on par with phones by multi billion dollar companies.
This citicism is valid. But I think it leaves out a lot of the overall picture.
I have a Fairphone 3, and so far it survived being dropped into the bathtub (being submerged for a sec), being dropped on hard floors several times and being stepped on (screen got cracked, but it still works).
Like with the Fairphone 2 I had before that, I'm able to do repairs (part replacements) on my own with minimal effort. It gets support for years.
I have it running /e/ OS (terrible name) without Google Services and while that's not Graphene OS, I vastly prefer it to Google Android.
For me having minor frustrations with Wi-Fi is well worth having a less-unfree and more-ethical phone.
I use the Deluge to learn music theory, synthesis and a bit of composition and it's so much more fun making music in the garden than to spend another hour sitting in front of the computer.
Synthstrom Audio seems committed to support this device for years to come: they sell spare parts, organize upgrades to newer hardware versions (some more cosmetic, recently though a screen replacement from 7 segment LED to OLED display), offer "refreshment" (new silicon pads, potentiometer and encoders).
Things I hope can be implemented:
* Smooth scrolling: currently Deluge only scrolls in increments of a whole "screen", e.g. 16 steps with a step being anything from a few bars down to something like 256ths of a whole note. This makes it hard to follow and awkward to edit pieces that are not in 4/4 time signature.
* "Accidentals" in scale mode: currently every row displays notes of the same pitch. Deluge allows arbitrary subsets of the chromatic scale (as long as it's at least 7 notes) to form a scale, and in "scale mode" rows for notes not in that set remain hidden. To "escape" the scale one has to switch to "chromatic mode" (a row for every note on the chromatic scale) or to create a new scale by adding notes to rows not in the current scale in chromatic mode. With only 8 rows that means that not even a single octave fits on the screen any more. I hope that something like accidentals can be implemented where the sharpened/flattened notes would simply show up in a different color on the row of the scale note, akin to the use of accidentals on staff notation.
* Support for microtonal scales
* A master compressor
All in all the Deluge is a wonderful piece of gear and I wish Synthstrom Audio well. I really hope going Open Source will benefit their business as much as customers are going to benefit from this.
Are you aware of any hw sequencers that already have microtonal scale support? It's something I'm keenly interested in, and one of my synths (Korg Monologue) has built in support, but the others don't, would be nice to be able to drive them all in the same tuning externally.
I'm not aware of any HW sequencers supporting microtonal scales. If you're talking about MIDI sequencing I don't think that's baked into the standard: As far as I know, MIDI doesn't have a concept of scales or tuning. Notes are sent as values ranging from 0 to 127 and it's up to the receiver to interpret that - usually by assigning equal temprament notes to these numbers (this is, I assume, how the Korg *logue synthesizers implement their scales - by interpreting the note values differently)
Things may improve if MIDI 2 ever becomes widespread. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
When sequencing monophonic sequences, one might be able to work around this by adding a MIDI processor into the signal path that prepends certain pitch bend messages to certain note values - but I can't say for certain how well this work, I never tried it.
Here's a link with some ideas (and scripts) to implement microtonal synth voices with today's firmware version of the deluge:
Thanks for your insight and the link! I know very little about the hardware side of things but am pretty familiar with microtonality in DAWs and soft synths.
You're correct, MIDI is very primitive in its support of microtonality, and afaik MIDI 2.0 improves it only a little: the general solution in OG MIDI is to have it send pitch wheel messages along with the note to bend it to the correct pitch, but it's limited in precision, and prevents you from using the pitch wheel for other purposes. You can do it polyphonically, but only by assigning each note in the chord its own MIDI channel, which limits it to 16 simultaneous notes.
MIDI 2.0 doesn't directly support remapping to different EDOs or tunings or anything like that, so microtonal support is still a kind of hack, but it does at least have a dedicated pitch adjustment parameter now in the note on message, with a higher precision, which is separate to the pitch wheel message - so you can use both. Still clunky but it's better.
There's also various standards for OG MIDI like MTS (MIDI Tuning Standard) or MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) but it's very rare for HW synths to support these, and even soft synths that support them are few and far between.
I guess probably the most straightforward way of doing microtonal hardware sequenced synths is by using modular synths, funnily enough - none of these digitally quantised note values there! I just read the Cirklon sequencer, for example, support the MTS standard to store alternate tuning and can then output CV to modulars based off those tunings directly.
I work at a place that has to do animal tests (mostly on mice and fish) to understand and cure diseases.
Colleagues working with animals tell me there's strict restrictions on conducting these tests, everything has to conform to animal protection laws and ethics requirements. If tests aren't deemed necessary, they won't be conducted.
This makes me wonder about the necessity and suffering/benefit ratio of "surgically plac[ing wireless accelerometers] on the rats", especially since the image processing already seems to provide insight.
I've had both: a bad colleague who went dancing while we were struggling at 23 PM in the data center for a government project, and a really shitty PM whose incompetence ruined a lot of people personally. Both can have adverse effects on people, although a bad boss in an otherwise sane environment would probably strengthen the group for being perceived as an external "enemy".
That has not been my experience with a bad boss. They do things like play favorites and create a culture where people are competing rather than cooperating. Even if they are just shitty to everyone equally I find it far easier to deal with a bad colleague than a bad boss.
> a bad colleague who went dancing while we were struggling at 23 PM in the data center
If that's your definition of a "bad colleague" I would be a little concerned. There are situations where it may be necessary to do that struggle, but in my experience there are far fewer than you think, and people often fall into a trap of competing to be the last one standing rather than actually doing good work. If you're struggling in a data center at 2300 you may well be doing more harm than good and going home to sleep (or dance, or whatever you need to refresh yourself and come back focused...) is often a better choice.
