• 3 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 29th, 2024

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  • Sounds like you’ve done your research.

    A friend of mine has a Qidi X-Max 3, so I got to play around with it quite a bit. It is a beast! And apparently their support is top notch. I’m definitely going to look at Qidi next time I’m in the market.

    All that said, the Q1 is not the same class of printer as the X-Max 3. It seems like it makes some compromises to hit the price it does. If you are looking for amazing build quality or extremely large prints, you probably want to save up for something like their Plus4. But if you don’t care about those things, or don’t want to spend more, the Q1 seems like a great choice.

    As far as the polydrier goes, it seems good, but expensive. I’ve had a good experience just using my printer’s heatbed to dry filament and using vacuum bags with redried dessicants. The bags are like $1-2 each, so even if 1/4 of them are leaky, it’s still way cheaper than dry boxes. And I just collect the dessicants from my new filament spools and redry them in the microwave.

    I haven’t printed nylon, but I know you can get the cereal box dryboxes for like $7 each. If you plan to have tons of rolls of nylon, then it may be worth getting a full drying system, but for only a few rolls, I’d stick to cereal boxes.

    If I were in your situation, I’d cheap out on the storage and put that extra ~$100 towards a Plus4 or some cool filament.







  • Been using it for about five years now. I absolutely love it. But I will say some of these comments make it sound like it’s a little easier than it is. I’d say about 80% of your knowledge from Android will transfer over and just work. But the last 20% is a bit of a learning curve, and will take at least a few weeks to get the hang of.

    What I recommended to some of my friends that switched is to get the phone and mess around with it for a few weeks before you switch your sim. Then you’ll get the hang of things like alternative app stores and sandboxed play services, and you’ll figure out what you can and can’t do.

    I will say the vast majority of things do work easily because of protection compatibility mode and sandboxed play services. But there will be some things that are just more hassle then they’re worth. I find keeping a second device, like a tablet, without a custom ROM makes that stuff easier.

    And there are some things that seem impossible to get working properly, at least for me. For example, casting to a TV is basically impossible from what I can tell. Also, tap to pay, even for things like tickets doesn’t work (although if you have play services, you can use Google wallet for things with barcodes).

    Overall, it’s totally worth trying out. Just don’t set your expectations too high. You’re not getting a completely “just works” experience.

    As for other custom ROMs, I’ve tried CalyxOS and LineageOS for MicroG. I didn’t find either of them quite as good, but that was many years ago. Maybe they’ve gotten better.


  • I’ve been reading the other comments, and while people are encouraging, their comments seem a bit too “you HAVE to learn CAD.” You definitely don’t NEED to know CAD. I made basic parts and modifications in the slicer for nearly a year after I started printing, and it worked really well. However, if you are considering learning a full CAD program, I have two pieces of advice.

    First pertains to if you are working with functional parts. Then you are talking about a parametric CAD program (fusion, onshape, FreeCAD, etc.). In this case, I think it’s worth learning for you, and it’s not as hard as it seems. You say you have SketchUp experience, so I’m assuming you have decent spatial reasoning. I know someone with no tech literacy nor programming experience who learned a CAD program very well in less than a month of following tutorials in her free time. Just give it a try, and it’s a skill you’ll be happy to have.

    If you are working with cosmetic parts like miniatures and helmets, then you might need to use something like Blender. Admittedly, that can be even more challenging than the other CAD programs I mentioned. However, if you spend a few hours learning some basics from YouTube, you should be able to do fundemental things like fixing holes.

    Hope this helps. Good luck with your printing endeavors!



  • I love virtual cards. I use privacy.com for all my online stuff. Not a solution for this purpose unfortunately.

    As for your divide-it-up approach, that’s an interesting thought. I guess I’m a little concerned about signing up for several cards with several companies and several privacy policies. Feels a little weird to me, but I do see the merit in not having all your eggs in one basket.

    As far as the Apple Card and Goldman Sachs is concerned, I’m still trying to figure out which details are given to whom. Its hard to find info about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re right and it’s the same as any other card from Goldman Sachs.