Who Let the Magic Smoke Out?

What we cover

• Alex’s overnight homelab failure and the dangers of a single point of failure
• High availability vs. disaster recovery: how much redundancy does a homelab actually need?
• Bambu X2D, Snapmaker U1, and whether Prusa can still compete (or has closed source won?)
• Power banks in 2025: travel companions, UPS replacements, and why the screen matters

We kick off the episode with Alex sharing a cautionary tale about his MinisForum MS01 PC dying unexpectedly, taking down his Home Assistant, DNS (this time it wasn’t DNS, we swear!), and reverse proxy along with it — sparking a broader conversation about the line between home lab and home production. We discuss strategies for high availability versus simpler disaster recovery, the value of keeping smart home automations additive rather than replacing physical controls, and the discipline required to maintain proper separation between prod and test environments.

We also talk about 3D printing, covering the newly announced Bambu X2D and its surprisingly aggressive $899 price point when compared to the pricing of the Snapmaker U1, the ongoing tension between Bambu’s closed ecosystem and open-source alternatives like Prusa, and a brief tangent on legislation around 3D-printed firearms.

We wrap up with a quick discussion on high-capacity power banks, particularly their usefulness for travel and potential as UPS replacements during power outages.

Topics: homelab, Home Assistant, high-availability, disaster recovery, Proxmox, self-hosting, 3d-printing bambu lab, snapmaker, prusa, power banks, minisforum

Links

• https://techhub.social/@ironicbadger/116404039086155625
• https://bambulab.com/en-us/x2d
• https://www.snapmaker.com/snapmaker-u1
• Anker Nano Power Bank, 10,000mAh: https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Portable-Charger-Compatible-MacBook/dp/B0C9CJKCH3

Transcript

Alex: Welcome into episode four of Bitflip, the podcast where we talk about the pragmatic side of infrastructure and the wider conversation around technology. I’m your host, Alex. 00:00

Adam: I’m Adam. 00:09

Geoff: I’m Geoff. 00:10

Stephen: And I’m Stephen. 00:11

Alex: Indeed you are. Thank you, gents. Good to see you all again. Adam’s made it back successfully from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, from Portugal. How was Portugal good, sir? 00:12

Adam: Portugal was like a trip home, actually. The climate is almost identical to Santa Cruz, California. Wonderful trip. Fantastic to be able to hang out with the team and get that face-to-face in meat space time together. So it was a great trip. 00:21

Alex: You Californians just love a good surfing destination. That’s all it is, right? 00:38

Adam: We did have a surf day. You are correct. And it was fantastic. 00:43

Alex: Well, I had some fun whilst you were out. My Minis Forum MS01 decided to light itself on fire. I’m going to show it on the stream right here. I’m going to get my little TikTok pointy stick, otherwise known as an Apple Pencil. And look, look at this. There, 00:49

Geoff: Oh, look, you let 01:03

Alex: look. 01:04

Geoff: the magic smoke out. 01:04

Alex: Look at the state of this. This is the Minis Forum MS01 and this was, I bought it on sale last year for $420 I think. It’s the i5 version. I got it as a bare bones kit back in the days when DDR5 RAM was still affordable. I paid $212 for 96 gigabytes of DDR5 RAM to go in this thing. Trouble is, I woke up yesterday morning or the day before, and my home assistant was offline. 01:05

Geoff: Oh, 01:37

Alex: My 01:38

Geoff: no. 01:38

Alex: DNS 01:38

Geoff: Oh, no. 01:38

Alex: was offline. And I knew something was up because it got to 7.01 and my blinds normally go up and nothing happened. And then I pushed the little Zigbee button next to my bed, nothing happened. And I’m like, oh god, here we go. So you pull out your phone, have a look on SSH, bleary eyed, you know, been awake for eight seconds. All right, that’s odd. My Proxmox cluster’s unhealthy. What’s going… Oh, dear. So, went down to the basement, pushed the power button on the front of this thing. She’s dead, Jim. 01:38

Adam: Bob’s your uncle. 02:12

Geoff: Oh, 02:15

Alex: It’s no good. 02:15

Geoff: no! 02:16

Alex: I’ve heard about the reliability of these minis forum devices being a problem for a while. I’ve yet to experience personally a failure of these things, but… Yeah, it’s gone. It’s toast. So I’ve opened an RMA with Minus Forum and it remains to be seen. We haven’t replied yet. It’s been a Torah day. So I guess we’ll see how that one turns out in the next episode. 02:16

Geoff: Yeah. I’ve always wondered about the reliability of those things. I mean, I have a B link that my wife uses or desktop thing, but I don’t know. I’ve, I’ve definitely seen a lot of people posting about how things have just died because they’re relatively cheap components. 02:43

Alex: There was a recall, I’m learning on the MinasForum subreddit, for a certain serial range to do with some bad capacitors or something. Anyway, if you look at what lit on fire, it had a pretty good little 03:00

Geoff: you 03:13

Alex: party on the way out. I’m thinking about replacing it actually with, I’ve got a cluster of three M720Qs that I just use to mess about with for like Kubernetes stuff and like a home lab situation. And this leads me nicely into a conversation to talk to you guys about when did you realize you actually are running production services in your home lab and how did you deal with it? 03:13

Stephen: Honestly, I think as soon as I automated the lighting that I rely on every evening for my house, that’s when I couldn’t have that service anyway on my lab environment. Because at any time you’d make a change and then things go very, very poorly, all of a sudden, just like your situation, your lighting stops working. And I think a big part of all this is that you have to have the, significant other on board with all of your fiddling and if the lighting’s working he or she is very happy and then if the lighting stops working and they’re pressing the zigbee button and they can’t get light and then then you’re kind of up the creek right and so yeah if you start relying on it i think production environment for your own house 03:41

Alex: And you can build it such that you have a production-grade situation. So I’m thinking what I’m going to do is get three of these. As I said, I’ve got the M720Qs in the closet just to my left over here. But they’re getting a bit old now. They’ve got eighth-gen i5s in them. I guess they’re fine. They use DDR4 memory, which is still reasonably affordable. in the grand scheme of things. But I was looking at the different Lenovo models that are available, and the M90Q stood out to me, the Gen 1, because that is a 10th gen i5, which is something like 60% faster than the 8th gen for single raw threaded performance. But you can also, it’s got an uprated cooling solution in it. So the 720Q will only take a 35-watt CPU. but the M90, there’s a lot of model numbers here, the M90Q will take a 65 watt TDP CPU. And so, you know, you can just, you can put a lot more juice through this thing. And I am always a firm believer in overbuilding and under utilizing some things that it’s running at like 40, 50% max, like on the daily. Okay, it will still spike. And you know, if I’m compiling something in Home Assistant for, ESPHome, that’s probably the most often I do something that actually wants some CPU horsepower outside of messing around with AI, which I’m not doing in production anyway. That’s always going to use the framework desktop for that and just mess about in the lab for that. But for production, it’s got to now, these are the eight simple rules for my teenage home lab. It’s got to be highly available. So if Home Assistant, if the node it’s on goes down, it has to have a backup no more than a few minutes or maybe an hour old, move from node one to node two, bring itself up and self-heal. So I’m going to have to sort out things with VIPs. I’m going to have to sort out things with highly available modes and Proxmox clusters, which I’ve avoided till now. I’m going to have to have an external storage node, TrueNAS maybe. I don’t know. But it’s going to be a whole thing. And we’re going to get onto ZFS later on, so I won’t talk too much about ZFS. But I think that’s going to be the hero of this story. 04:33

Geoff: I don’t know. I mean, I actually had an interesting failure this past week because I decided that there was a subreddit and the self-hosted one about Docker security and things you could do to kind of make your home lab more secure. And one of the things was Docker networks and kind of isolate everything. And so I went through and I gave a bunch of containers, their own separate Docker network. rolled it all out and then realized I was having an issue where one of my LXC containers couldn’t reach MQTT on my home assistant, home automation LXC. And it was really weird. I couldn’t figure out why that one when all the other ones are kind of similarly configured and turns out there was an IP conflict. And so I fixed that problem. But then in doing that, I somehow overwrote my databases So like I went and this is all like one o’clock in the morning and I realized that my databases had gotten corrupt and nothing was working. And so I got into bed and realized homeless, you know, I had similar thing. Home Assistant wasn’t working. I’m like, why is the Home Assistant not working? Try to go into Bitward and Bitward won’t let me log in. Why is Bitward not letting me log in? realized, oh, I had done something with the database. And so I had to do a backup and restore. Honestly, that’s one of the first major fails. It was completely self-inflicted that I’ve had in. I’m going to knock on wood here because I’m going to curse myself in a year and a half, two years. I mean, I see the idea behind high availability, but it always just seems like a luxury, not a need. 06:54

Adam: I actually have an interesting question for you guys, and that’s, we’re talking about high availability from the perspective of home assistant and such, but… I’ve always come from the perspective of being additive with automations versus relying on them. So in your setups, is there, I kind of remove the single point of failure and that all switches will still remain working. Yeah. Critical systems will go back to the good old, you know, manual push the button turns on type of function. Is that different for you? 08:26

Alex: That doesn’t help 7am Alex who’s lazily lying in bed wishing his blinds would go up though. I still have everything. I mean, last year we listed the house to try and sell it. Nobody bought it, so I’m still here. But I used to have a bunch of Shelleys in the walls, a bunch of Zigbee stuff. And it was great because they still worked. The actual analog switches still worked. The blinds I can walk up to and I can reach above my head and push the button on the physical thing because of the IKEA trod through blinds. But, you know, I’m a huge believer in the additive way of working too. You’ve got to keep… Basically, if you have to explain it to your mother-in-law when she arrives… It’s not good enough. And there was an incident, I think I referenced this on Self Hosted years ago, where this was my first iteration of home automation, where mother-in-law was staying in the guest room, and she was like, okay, Google, turn off the lights, and nothing happened. And after the fourth time, she was like, okay, Google, turn off the effing lights. 09:00

Geoff: And all the lights in the house went off? 10:09

Alex: And I’m like, yeah, okay, this UX pattern is broken, isn’t it? So I actually don’t have any voice assistants in the house at all these days. I find them to honestly be just really annoying. And I rely very heavily on actual automations and motion sensors and presence and stuff like that. That’s much more reliable, I’ve found, than issuing commands that you’ve remembered to bark at the thing when you leave the room or whatever. 10:11

Geoff: I’m similar. I have a bunch of Google homes, but I mostly use them as speakers for like, you know, announcements and things like that. I don’t actually use them for voice commands. The only real voice commands I do is I have a home assistant PE sitting, you know, voice PE sitting in the kitchen. And I use that to tie into any list for grocery shopping. So you can say, Hey, you know, okay, Naboo add eggs to the grocery list and it’ll do that for me. Um, just cause that’s sometimes a lot faster than pulling out the phone and typing. But other than that, yeah, I rely more on automations, like motion sensors and, um, millimeter wave for like tracking when they’re in room and not turn the lights on or off stuff like that is a whole lot more effective, I think, than voice control. 10:36

Alex: So what does your home production look like, Adam? I’m curious. The difference between your home lab and your home prod. Tell us about that. 11:21

Adam: I don’t think I’m probably the best example of that, frankly, but I will get there. I have plans. 11:29

Alex: Well, then we need to work on you. We need to stage an intervention. 11:36

Adam: We do. I have been very busy building out at work some server equipment that I intend to install into my rack, and then I’ll have some proper separation. I’m actually going to take it a step forward. I’ll talk about my plan real quick. I’m going to have a very beefy prod server at some point in the near future. And. 11:40

Alex: That wouldn’t happen. And by the way, just full disclosure, Adam works for Unraid. So this is not sponsored. This is not a paid mention whatsoever. But just so you all know, completely transparent, Adam works for Unraid. 12:05

Adam: Correct. 12:17

Alex: But he is in charge of the project for that new box that Unraid just announced with 45 drives today. So I’m imagining you’ll get one of those in for at least testing, right? 12:18

Adam: Permanent testing. Yes, that is for sure happening. 12:29

Alex: Permanent 12:32

Adam: So 12:32

Alex: testing. 12:32

Adam: that’ll be the new prod. And then my previous, my Franken mini, as I call it, which was previously running TrueNAS, now running Unraid, will become my backup server. And the step further that I was saying is that I will have a test server that is purely, I can do whatever I want. I can break it any which way because, and that’s a little excessive. Let’s just be clear. That is because of my job and because, of who I work with and we actually want a dog food thing. So 12:33

Alex: But that’s the entire conversation here. That is, you’ve got a bunch of services that you rely on, additively or not, and then you’ve got a bunch of things you want to screw around with. Like you’ve seen this interesting project on Hacker News or whatever, and you think, oh yeah, I’ll take a look at that. And so it’s like, where do you run that stuff? Or where do you try out a new vert? So it’s like when Incas OS comes down, you’re like, well, that looks interesting. I’m going to try Incas this weekend over Proxmox. Well, I don’t want to take my production stuff offline. but I don’t mind wiping my spare laptop that’s got, I don’t know, an old ThinkPad from 10 years ago and throwing that and turning that into a server or something. There’s all sorts of different things that you can call a server, particularly in the lab space. And Stephen, I know that you have this beautiful, beautiful MSP grade data center room that you, I’m sure, host many of your services out of. What does the split look like between your data center room and your house? 13:03

Stephen: you’re gonna hate this, it’s gonna be funny. So what I do, I should back up a bit. When virtualization started, right, the thing that you did was try to figure out how little system resources every single VM can have, but still functioned fine. So you had people running very low amounts of RAM on Windows that required like eight gigs or whatever, but you kept taking it away until it broke. And so I’ve just kind of always done stuff like that. My production environment is just a Raspberry Pi, like the latest one. And then I have 14:05

Alex: So 14:44

Stephen: a cluster of Dell 14:44

Alex: you think 14:45

Stephen: servers 14:45

Alex: I’m going to hate the Raspberry Pi just because it’s a Raspberry Pi? 14:45

Stephen: No, 14:48

Alex: Is that 14:48

Stephen: I think 14:48

Alex: what you 14:48

Stephen: I’m 14:48

Alex: think? 14:48

Stephen: saying that you’re going to hate the situation because like I have this wonderful rack of Dell servers and a cluster for proxmox for production and all that. But at my house, literally any of the core services that I can’t have go down just runs on a Raspberry Pi. Now with your experience and things burning up and letting the smoke out, I’m considering adding two additional pies and creating some sort of a cluster, but 14:48

Alex: Yeah, so what would you do for that? So what’s the OS situation on that pie right now? 15:14

Stephen: Oh no, I’ve not thought that far forward, but I have to figure something out now, because I figure, if it happened to Alex, why can’t my little Raspberry Pi blow up in the smoke? 15:18

Alex: I know, yeah. Actually, I think it’s one of those things that has to happen to you for you to fully appreciate a single point of failure and just the impact it can have. Because my DNS went down, my home assistant went down, my reverse proxy went down, my tailscale exit node, subnet router node went down, a couple of things like your American tailscale proxy node went down. Tons of stuff that just normally hums along in the background, it’s just suddenly gone. And you’re like, huh, well, the only way I can get that back now, because I didn’t have any backups of that stuff, it’s all configured as infrastructure as code, so there’s no data loss. I’m not really worried about that because Home Assistant backs up to the cloud and all that stuff to Nextcloud, actually. But the actual VMs themselves, you know, there’s… There is some cost to recreating them, even though they are captured in source control. So lessons learned. Time to build a cluster. Time to do some highly available stuff and mess about with servers. What could be more fun than that? 15:29

Geoff: More show content for us. 16:41

Adam: An additional aspect to all of this is the discipline required of setting. You can set up HA, but if you start putting things in a test environment, you don’t put it in the right spot. I talked about having three tiers even, right? Fraud, backup, test. But there’s that slippery slope of, oh, I got it working over here. And then I leave it working over there a little bit too long. And now it’s test is now production. So that’s the other kind of 16:43

Alex: Yeah. 17:09

Adam: key factor to this. 17:09

Alex: Yep. We’ve all been there. 17:10

Stephen: So there’s a bit of news. The Bamboo X2D has released. Alex, do you already have one of these? I know that you buy every model. 17:13

Alex: I very nearly insta-ordered the Bamboo X2D, I will be honest. But late last year, I sold the X1 Carbon I had at the garage listener sale that happened last summer. And so I was 3D printerless for six months. And it sucked. As someone that’s had a 3D printer in my life now for six, seven, eight, maybe nine years. Yeah, gosh, it must have been, it was a Creality CR10 was the first one I had. So we’re going back a bit. for all my drone racing parts. Not having, you know, the number of tiny little problems you have around the house, you don’t realize, you’re like, oh, I’ll just whiz off a quick print and I’ll just, I’ll print the kid a stupid little knick-knack as a reward for doing well in her violin recital or whatever it is. And you’re like, oh, I can’t do that anymore. Or I need a little gasket to go inside my electrical box or whatever it is. So when I saw Bamboo announce the X2D this week with dual nozzles in the same footprint as the X1 Carbon, I was like, holy moly, that’s going to be expensive. And then I opened up the press release and it was $899 with the AMS. 17:23

Stephen: It’s pretty good. 18:32

Alex: What? That sounds insane. The X1 Carbon, if I recall, was like $1,300, $1,400 or 18:33

Geoff: It was $1,400 18:40

Alex: something 18:41

Geoff: with the 18:41

Alex: like 18:41

Geoff: AMS. 18:41

Alex: that. 18:41

Geoff: Yeah, it was stupidly expensive. But I think Adam, you know, Adam, do you even have a 3D printer? I’ve 18:42

Adam: I don’t. 18:47

Geoff: been curious. I can see one in Stephen’s background. I know Alex has got one, but do you have one? 18:47

Adam: This is why I had questions. So it seems like the battle is over and Bamboo has won. Are 18:51

Alex: Yeah. 19:01

Adam: we still Prusa fans? It just seems like that’s a thing, right? Every piece of media I see is Bamboo, Bamboo, Bamboo. What do you guys think about that? 19:01

Alex: there is an element of they have the bigger marketing budget. That is true. But objectively, so over my lifespan of, this is Alex’s personal experience, this isn’t gospel, but it’s like I went from the Creality CR 10, which was I had to watch every single second of that thing’s first layer to make sure that every, to make sure that The glass mirror that I had to go to Ikea to get that was flatter than the actual piece of warped steel they shipped was flat enough for this thing to even do a first layer, and then I was messing about with painter’s tape on the glass. It was a nightmare, honestly. I don’t even know why I stuck with it, but it was really fun when it worked. Then when I emigrated, so this is 2018, I bought myself a Prusa Mark III because that was, at the time, the pinnacle of what was possible. Open source, RepRap, basically they used printers to print the parts to make more printers was the whole idea behind Prusa. And I think Prusa took that idea to its logical conclusion. They took it as far as they possibly could. They had print farms out the wazoo printing hundreds of thousands of parts a year. And then Bamboo came along, Bamboo Lab. And they were founded by a bunch of ex-DJI engineers, and we all know how good DJI drones are compared to anything else in the drone market. And they just applied a lot of that same engineering nous and know-how, and they recognized the same thing that DJI did. The hardware actually isn’t the important part. I mean, it is, but it’s like it’s comparing a Tesla, for example, to any other electric car. Like there’s just a golfing class of the software. And I’m going to trigger Geoff here because he has the IONIQ 5. And I have a Model Y. And it’s like, okay, I don’t mean to trigger anybody with that, but it’s like there’s just such a gulfing class between the way in which bamboo approaches the problem space of 3D printers with a software-first, user-centric kind of They compromise on your ability to tinker, and they compromise on your ability as a user to repair it. And these are all the things that I, as an open source advocate, should hate. Same with the Tesla. I should hate that car because it’s closed. It’s proprietary. I can’t repair it as easily as any other car. And yet, as a customer experience, as a consumer experience, That printer, I have the H2C downstairs, just prints first time, every time, in seven colors, does whatever I ask of it, and it is absolutely bulletproof. And as a customer, you can’t ask for better than that. 19:10

Geoff: Well, yes, I have a bamboo P1 as for those who are watching, it’s right there in the corner and I love the hell out of it. I mean, I’ve got, I think I just looked, I’ve got about 2,800 hours of printing time on it. I mean, I’ve had it for two years. It’s amazing. And when bamboo announced the P2S, what, like two months ago? Nah, they announced it in like November. I was looking at it in November. 22:02

Alex: Yeah, the PTOS looks like a good printer, too. Like, it’s… 22:30

Geoff: It does, but here’s the interesting bit. The pricing on the X2D basically makes the P2S almost irrelevant. I mean, it’s $100 more to go from the P2S to the X2D. And you get the dual nozzle, which caveat with the dual nozzle, the second nozzle is only meant for support filaments. It’s not meant to actually be a true dual nozzle, you know, multicolor printer. So that, but it’s also got a heated enclosure. So it’s got a whole bunch of stuff, which for a hundred bucks more really isn’t that much more. But, you know, going back to your point, Alex, about, you know, Prusa kind of losing it to bamboo. I’ve been eyeing the Snapmaker U1. This thing has been on Kickstarter. I think it was like the third most successful Kickstarter. It’s got four print heads that can switch out, you know, so you can get four colors really, really easily. And it’s only 850 bucks. 22:33

Alex: And I think that’s why the X2D was priced at $899. Without the U1, the X2D would have been $1,000, no question, 23:33

Geoff: If 23:41

Alex: in my 23:41

Geoff: not 23:41

Alex: mind. 23:41

Geoff: more, I mean, I would think it would probably be because the pricing, let’s go through the, to the, you know, they’ve got the A1 Mini at about 290, 220. They got the A1 at 300. They got the P1S at four, the P2S at 550. And then the X1 was at 1,000. Then there’s a gap between the X2D at 600, we’ll say 650, and the H2S at 1250. So there was a nice big gap they had. They could have easily slotted the X2D at 11, 1200 and not have much of an issue. I agree that I think the Snapmaker had to lower their price in order to, or Bamboo, because the Snapmaker caused Bamboo to lower the price. 23:41

Alex: Yeah, I think so too. They’re flooding the zone. They wanted to make sure there was a laptop. It’s like the same playbook Apple did, isn’t it? They used to have one product or two products that were at certain price, and now there’s literally an iPhone every $100 increment from cheap to expensive. Same with the printers. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Prusa, and I do feel sorry for them in a way, because a lot of the technologies that Bamboo used were stuff that Prusa pioneered, and because it was open source, Bamboo got all of that R&D for free. Flip side, Prusa built their company on open source 10 years ago. And so they benefited from the RepRap stuff, and they exist because of open source. And so Prusa, Joseph Prusa, the guy that sits atop the company, went out on a public forum a while ago talking about how this has been a problem for the company. And I do sympathize, but at the same time, this is a cake-and-eat-it type situation. You can’t have all the benefits of being rep-rap on open source and open hardware tattoos on your arm and all that kind of stuff. And then also complain when people are taking those open source contributions and improving on them and innovating and Instead of doing 3D printed parts, they’re doing injection molded plastics and able to mass manufacture these things, presumably for much cheaper because they’re in China versus the Czech Republic. I think it’s Czechia. 24:28

Geoff: Yeah. 26:07

Alex: So, you know, it just, you know, bamboo. They’ve kind of cleaned up. 26:09

Geoff: One more thing about the open source you mentioned, though, Alex, is I found this also interesting about the Snapmaker. It runs Clipper as the whatever the software actually run the printing. And then it also uses you can use Orca Slicer like open source. You don’t have to use bamboo stuff because that is the one thing I don’t like about bamboo. I have kept my P one S cause I know they made a whole thing about locking down the cloud and the API. Like I’ve kept mine on the last version of the firmware before they locked all that stuff down and, you know, did 26:14

Alex: Yeah. 26:46

Geoff: the whole thing. Um, 26:46

Alex: It’s a worry, particularly with the legislation that I don’t know if you’ve seen coming to try and legislate any 3D printed firearm components. I mean, is that even really actually a problem? 26:50

Geoff: Yes, actually, yes. 27:03

Alex: Is it though? I mean, I know 27:05

Geoff: I’m near Philadelphia, and Philadelphia has a large problem of these ghost guns that people will print that law enforcement can’t track. I mean, it is an issue. 27:08

Alex: But there’s more guns in America than people anyway. 27:19

Geoff: That I’m not going to disagree with you on. 27:23

Alex: Not to say that there isn’t a wider issue to talk about around guns. My point is more that this is something that it’s like the won’t somebody think of the children angle. It’s the CSAM angle of invading privacy, or in this case legislating what you can or cannot print with your own 3D printer in your own house that you’ve paid for with your own hardware. So today it’s guns, but how long in a few years before we can’t 3D print something that happens to look like some kind of copyrighted work? You know, we’ve all seen the success that is the YouTube copyright strike system. 27:25

Adam: Now, to be fair, though, most kids aren’t going to go into the garage and start milling a firearm, right? People, kids in high school could absolutely go on their computer and start 3D printing out these sorts of parts. 28:00

Alex: And those that want to make those sorts of parts are not going to be running printers with firmwares that prevent them from doing that. We’ve already seen Clipper has been around for a decade plus. What is the point? And it’s corporate control, I assume. It’s some kind of centralization move. It’s some kind of, I don’t know, we can’t let the people have too much fun type. I don’t know. There’s too much of that going on in the world these days. At least I think we can probably all agree on that. 28:16

Geoff: I mean, not to go off topic, but I mean, the whole speaking of CSAM and, you know, the age verification stuff that I think is a lot more of a, you know, think of the children kind of a thing. I do think there is a real concern there, but I agree with you that the way that they’re going about it is not the correct, and I don’t know the answer. I just know that there is an issue, and I don’t know what… The whole point of 3D printing is it is completely open, and if someone wants to do something, they’re going to find a way to do it. So I agree, but I don’t know. There needs to be something done. I just don’t know what it is. 28:46

Alex: What is your argument? 29:23

Geoff: I don’t know! 29:24

Alex: Oh, dear. Yeah, I mean, it’s a tricky topic, isn’t it? I mean, because of the nature of firearms and stuff like that, obviously, it’s a fairly charged conversation right from the get-go. And I mean, I don’t have the answers either. But anyway, back to the X2D. It’s pretty cool. Are you going to replace your P1S with one? 29:28

Geoff: I’m seriously thinking the Snapmaker. That’s where I’m kind of struggling right now because 29:51

Alex: Oh. 29:55

Geoff: the four color thing, I don’t do a whole lot of like, again, I print PLA and I print PETG every now and then a little TPU. I have never gone ASA or ABS just because I don’t want to have to deal with the fumes. So the 29:55

Alex: Yeah. 30:10

Geoff: fact that it’s not enclosed, the fact all that stuff is not really a concern to me, but I like the multicolor stuff. So… 30:10

Alex: I will say until you’ve had a printer that has more than one nozzle available to you. So you’re printing a PETG model with supports. You do the supports in PLA, and they just 30:17

Geoff: Oh, 30:29

Alex: snap 30:29

Geoff: yeah. 30:29

Alex: off with the lightest of touches. It is glorious. 30:30

Geoff: Steven, what are you going to? Are you going to upgrade yours? 30:35

Stephen: Honestly, so I really do like the idea of being able to use the multi filaments to be able to do easy breakaway and everything. And I do think it would open up a world of options for me to print other things that physically look better, right? Like right now, if i try to do multi-color the waste is just really not worth it i have tried some stuff but then you look at the the shoot out the back and it’s just like you swear that there’s more waste filament than what actually went into the thing so i only did that a few times right like the ams for me is is actually i just have a bunch of one color in it and then it just auto goes on to the next the next uh spool right but So will I upgrade? I’d love to, but I don’t know that I need to because my X1 Carbon is just pretty much flawless in what it does. And the things I print are really only one color. And so maybe… 30:38

Alex: But think of all the things you could print for the kiddo. 31:39

Stephen: I do. And I agree. I made these lovely little rocket ship coat hooks. But I just printed the different parts in different colors. And so it didn’t have to be multicolor on the same part. So it worked out fine for me. I think that it’s a lovely thing. But the biggest thing is that ability to have the supports that break away instant. I think that for me is almost better than the actual color. 31:42

Geoff: I don’t know. Go Google the Snapmaker U1 test print. It is a little dragon that is red and yellow, and it is so pretty looking. 32:08

Stephen: But are you willing? So I’ve never looked into that company in 3D printers. Is that their first foray into 3D printers? 32:19

Geoff: No, it is their second or third, and people… It was a Kickstarter… It did really, really well. They have been shipping the Kickstarter models. People have them in their hands now. And like they’re actually starting to, I think they actually just made it available for actual ordering. And from what I have been able to tell that they’ve actually been doing firmware updates and they’ve been able to keep on top of some of the bugs and issues. So it looks like it is a somewhat decent product and not just a fly in the pants. 32:26

Stephen: right so like my thing is is that my printer and i waited a very long time to get into 3d printing i didn’t want the printer itself to ever be a hobby i have enough of those i need it to be a tool right and so i waited a long time i bought the one that i did after you know alex is up there praising the you know x1 carbon And honestly, it’s been fantastic. I don’t know that I’m willing to fiddle with another brand at this point because I’m just so smitten with the one that I have. 32:57

Geoff: I mean, that’s, that’s why I really don’t want it. Cause my P one S does 90% of what I like. It’s just, it is just the, the poop purge. That is not, it’s a, it’s a small, it is a very small problem, but it’s a problem I would love to solve if I could. 33:30

Alex: You know, I’m going to wrap up this segment with guys, don’t you? I remember reading my kid a story when she was tiny called Everybody Poops. And that’s all I can think of when you talk about poops and 3D printers. 33:47

Geoff: there. 34:02

Alex: Right, Adam, in Portugal, you used the snot out of a power bank, right? And are you looking for recommendations or are you wanting to tell us about the one you used? 34:04

Adam: I can tell you about, I actually purchased one the instant I got home actually, because it was so very useful while we were over there. We had a few people who actually couldn’t make the trip. So we were consistently doing video calls, video meetings and such. And to be able to go, you know, Many hours on my MacBook Pro and whatnot and just have it plugged in was amazing. These power banks have gotten so good and I was so impressed by it. The one that we were using for this purpose over there was not mine. I was borrowing it from my coworker. And it was an anchor that had built in USB-C cables that were extendable. They were really nice quality. They had like braiding, I believe, on the outside of them even. And I believe it was pushing 100 watts per cable. It had two of those that you could use concurrently. I did not go with that one, but I went with something very similar. And it was the Ugreen option that I am actually using right now, plugged into my laptop. And the 34:14

Alex: That’s 35:17

Adam: only 35:17

Alex: cool. 35:17

Adam: reason for that was it was slightly less expensive and it could push 140 watts out of a single connection. And yeah, that was what it came down to. It just doesn’t have those handy little extendable USB-C cables, but man, these came in clutch. 35:17

Alex: And what size did you go for? 10K, 20K, what would you go 35:35

Adam: 25, 35:38

Alex: for? 35:38

Adam: I believe. It’s a little brick, 35:38

Alex: Oh, wow. Big boy. 35:40

Adam: a little brick. 35:41

Alex: The big boy. 35:41

Adam: Yeah. 35:42

Alex: Okay. Yeah. I mean, those things are pushing the limits of what you’re allowed to take on an airplane, aren’t they? 35:42

Adam: Mm hmm. 35:47

Alex: That’s the trouble. You end up, if you go too big with these power banks, I find you end up in this uncanny valley with them where you think, right, well, I need to take a battery bank with me on my trip, but I don’t want to lug around a 25,000 milliamp hour brick. So I won’t take it. And then you end up buying a 10,000 or a 5,000 anyway, and so you end up buying two. So I found a really nice sweet spot. Anchor make this one that is like a MagSafe one that goes on the back of your phone that’s like 3,000 or 4,000 mAh. It also doubles as a kickstand. So like on the plane or something, you just put it on the lunch tray in front of you. And it works really nicely. And then for everything else, I’ve got this 10,000 milliamp power anchor one with the extendable cables. A good friend of mine recommended. He lives in Manhattan and so he spends half his time on the subway. I think, you know, long days of maps and photos and that kind of stuff. I live in suburbia. I don’t do that. So honestly, this battery bank sits on my nightstand most of the time. And I bring it out when I travel and that’s it. 35:48

Adam: Question, the one that your friend recommended and that you went with, did it have a little LCD screen on it, that anchor with the extendable cables? 36:52

Alex: Yes, I am slightly obsessed with charges at the moment that have outputs, displays on to show you how much power they’re using. I have one of the Anker ones running my Lenovo M720Q cluster I referenced earlier in the episode. It’s a four port one with four USB-C ports on the front and then it’s got a couple of A’s on the side. I can connect to it from an app on my phone and turn each port individually on or off. And they do switch individually. Some of these USB-C banks, chargers, you turn one port on or one port off and it resets all of them briefly. So all of your, in my case, my Kubernetes cluster would go down, which is no bueno. The Anker that I’m using doesn’t do that, and it’s amazing. And I can see real time that my cluster’s using 40 watts, and it’s… I’m addicted to seeing the number go burr. Like, my battery’s really flat. Holy moly, my iPhone can take in 30 watts. That’s so cool. 37:00

Adam: And it’s one of those things that once you’ve had it, you never want to go back. Like, again, it’s a nicety. It’s not necessary. But dang, 37:59

Alex: Completely. 38:08

Adam: once you’ve had that cool little screen, it’s like, oh, yeah, I’m never going to buy one of these without this. 38:08

Alex: But I’m the sort of guy that has iStat menu running on my MacBook in the top corner, so I always know exactly how many watts the entire system’s pulling and the fan speeds and the network in and out and blah, blah, blah. I just like data. I mean, what can I say? 38:13

Stephen: Okay, so your batteries. I don’t like traveling, so I don’t need a battery for traveling. But what I have been thinking about using it for is just like power outages at your home, right? You know, ice storm comes along, maybe not for some of you that are in much warmer climates, but it’s every 15 minutes here. So how do you kind of tend to the battery, right? And to this, I mean, like, you don’t really want to just leave it plugged in. Unless they’ve gotten so smart that they just tend themselves and they bring themselves down a little bit and then up. How are you guys going to manage that long term? Because surely you’re not using this every weekend where you’re actually putting it through its paces and it’s being healthy for the battery. How are you dealing with that? 38:26

Alex: I am sticking my head in the sand and hoping for the best. 39:11

Stephen: Okay. 39:14

Adam: my understanding is that they have gotten very smart and that they’re, they’re doing the conditioning for you for the most part. 39:16

Stephen: Hmm. 39:23

Adam: Interesting point about the, the home aspect and using it for power outages. I’ve been reading some interest and I wasn’t reading it. It was an iPod or a podcast. Two and a half admins. Again, I referenced them often. They were using some of these heavy duty anchor, for your home battery banks. And they’re using them as UPSs because apparently like they’ve got the tolerances for switching, um, switching on and off to the point where it’s close enough to be a good solution for that. And I’m like, wow, that’s, that’s kind of brilliant. 39:24

Stephen: Yeah, I’ve looked at those as well because the battery that they have will last quite a bit longer than, say, like an APC or something that you purchase. uh for you know less money arguably but um sometimes you can look at those for the run times that you might not really consider a generator i do understand generator is going to last far far longer but you know if you really only experience like 10 minute outages kind of at the most a battery like that might make more sense but they really they do run the fine line of being slightly too long for the cutover that 40:02

Adam: Hmm. 40:39

Stephen: computers really don’t love especially if you 40:39

Alex: Yep. 40:42

Stephen: start getting into spinning hard drives and whatnot. So you really got to watch the spec of those. The Anker ones tend to be a little better that I’ve noticed while I research for that cutover. But yeah, that’s one of the things I’ve been looking at. And I don’t know if it’s to the point where I want to jump on it yet. 40:42

Alex: You know, I think this will be a topic for a future episode because I think we’re out of time for today. But when the ice storm came through the southeast this winter and we were threatened with 10 days without power in sub-zero temperatures, I was looking at Delta whole home battery backups to go into my generator transfer switch and all this kind of stuff. And I realized in that moment that self-hosting is about more than just infrastructure. It’s about that feeling of not being dependent on other people for your basic needs. In our case, it’s like a digital thing. But I could see myself in that moment wanting to build a house and build it from the beginning with solar in mind and redundant, I don’t know, well pumps and all this stuff that seems a little bit prepper until you’re actually staring down the barrel of an ice storm. So… We are about out of time, as I say. So you can head over to bitflip.show to find out more about the show. Don’t forget, you can email the show at contact at bitflip.show. So until next time, I’ve been Alex. 41:02

Adam: I’ve been Adam. 42:10

Geoff: I’m been Geoff. 42:11

Stephen: And I’ve been the cold guy up north, Stephen. 42:12

Alex: All right. Thanks, everyone. See you next time. 42:16

Adam: Thanks guys. 42:18