Thanks!

it is still running android underneath

Oh really? I wasn’t aware. That’s a bit of a letdown: I wanted to ditch Android altogether.

Then again, I suppose if the camera works, it must have something to do with running atop a working Android system.

I’ll look into all this. Thanks for the heads up!

Small instances probably aren’t for you

I’m sorry but… no.

Look, I’m a child of the 70’s, I know what shite internet feels like and I’m a patient man. Hell, half of the reason why I stick to SDF is exactly because I’m patient (the other half being because SDF defederates almost no other instances and I appreciate that).

But I’m running a BBS with 32 lines and quite a few users (yes, old-stylee, with modems) and also a few Echolink repeaters for hams, and I provide better service and better uptime than SDF most of the time. And it’s just me, myself and I with little time to spare after work.

I’m glad you’re satisfied with SDF. My bar is a bit higher than yours apparently, yet goodness knows I’m not demanding…

I made a donation once, with the idea of making one every year, because I believe in paying for the things I use, and particularly small-time, old-style services like SDF.

But the plain and sad reality is, most of the things I DON’T pay for work much better than SDF services.

So yes, it truly was money poorly spent. It wasn’t much money and it didn’t make a dent in my quality of life in any way, but that’s just what it was - money poorly spent.

My one donation will remain a single donation until SDF services improve to the point when I can convince myself that the occasional slowness and downtime are reasonable for a small gig like SDF. Sadly, it’s not even up to that standard, and has never been in the 2 years since I’ve joined: it’s more slowness and downtime than it is working normally.

SDF had been nothing short of terrible for me for the 2 years I’ve been using it. It’s easily in the top spot for worst money I’ve ever spent on anything. And I’m not talking about just Lemmy…

The only reason I’m still here is inertia. But I have a shadow account on Sopuli and I’m getting awfully close to switching for good.

So, subsistance supplies are assured.

It’s great to live in America isn’t it?

Remember folks: that big nothing currently docked in US ports will be distributed to a supermarket near you.

That’s Trump’s way of lowering the cost of groceries: when there’s no groceries, there’s no costs.

It’s not just slow, it’s often down.

It’s getting to the point where I’m going to migrate my account and my two communities to another instance. SDF is just plain unusable ☹️

Either someone did something or it somehow made it 12 hours late - which happens every once in a while too.

Anyhow, I deleted it so it doesn’t show up twice…

in what way are they unwearable?

Since you asked on DIY, I can point you to my own 3D-printed glasses:

• You print them yourself - or have them printed. They cost pennies in filament. Any FDM printer can make them in 15 minutes. Break them, print another one.
• They’re very light: my own pair with Trivex prescription lenses weigh around 11 grams. They literally disappear on your face.
• They use wire temples - i.e. hooks behind your ears - so they never slip off. Once they’re on your face, they stay there, however hard you shake your head. And since they’re very light, they don’t hurt your ears.

Yeah I did many posts over months on the lemmy.world 3D-printing community - and other communities too. In the best cases, the post went through 2 or 3 hours late. Sometimes up to 2 days late. Usually it never goes through though.

I usually post things with pictures, so I always have at least a thumbnail picture that I uploaded direct on lemmy.sdf.org.

This last post I did had a thumbnail hosted on SDF’s Pixelfed and it went right up.

As for lemmy.ml, I never have problems with it. It’s just this one time because I hit their images limit - that I wasn’t aware of and is documented nowhere as far as I know.

deleted by creator

I think I finally found the problem with lemmy.world: that instance doesn’t like posts with images hosted on lemmy.sdf.org. Not comments mind you, those are fine. Just posts.

As for lemmy.ml, it won’t accept posts with more than 10 images - although they’re fine on SDF.

See here.

I do have a sell account and I’ve tried getting help from the bulletin board several times years ago. It was crickets, so I gave up.

I tried several things:

• Hosted all the images on my Pixelfed rather than directly on lemmy.sdf.org: no joy
• Replaced “El-cheapo” by “Cheap” in the title, in case lemmy.ml has some overly-busy PC filter and “el-cheapo” is now considered offensive or something: no joy
• Finally, I removed 2 photos to keep the total images in the post to 10: it went right through on lemmy.ml

So it’s the number of images. Apparently more than 10 is not okay with all instances. Good to know if you ever want to make a photo-heavy post too.

I’ve also cross-posted this successfully to lemmy.world. First time in a long time. And the only real difference with all my previous failed posts that only had one or two images is that the images aren’t hosted by lemmy.sdf.org.

So it would also appear that lemmy.world doesn’t like posts with photos inlined directly on the SDF instance.

I can see this. And I’m in world.

When you mean “this” you mean this thread about federation issues on SDF, or my post that apparently didn’t make it to 3DPrinting@lemmy.world? Because the former was created on SDF - which always seems to be visible from other instances - while the latter was created from SDF in a community on lemmy.world, which rarely works for me.

Yeah lemmy.ml is usually no problem. But not this time. The only difference I can think of is the number of photos in the post. Maybe it’s not acceptable? But it seems to go through just fine on the SDF instance.

It seems to be lagging behind by hours.

For instance, this thread on lemmy.world shows 5 comments and 56 upvotes, while the same thread on lemmy.sdf.org has 3 comments and 24 upvotes only. And the weird thing is, I posted this thread from lemmy.sdf.org, as well as one of the comments, and outgoing is instantaneous. It’s just incoming comments and votes that don’t seem to come through.

Interesting… I’ll have to dive into all that at some point. Thanks!

Oh right okay. Yeah now that you mention it. I do seem to recall watching somebody’s video booting the reform from the SD card. Well then, that’s even better: I can just backup the SD card and reinstall over anything I’m not happy with.

I’m totally unfamiliar with how these things boot. I’m not even sure it’s more or less standardized between various SoMs. But I suppose it’s possible to select which device to boot from at some point or other after power-up. So maybe what I’ll do is follow the manual just to familiarize myself with the machine as MNT Research intended, then install Ubuntu on a SD card and boot off of that, until I’m happy enough with it and replace the default stuff on the eMMC with it.

I’m curious: why do you need an I/O board with the Banana Pi CM4? Do you need a JTAG or SWD port that the add-on board provides to program the flash if the updater gets hosed or something like that?

Well I don’t know how MNT will configure the Reform. I presume they’ll load the OS entirely in the eMMC flash. So my plan is to dual boot it - either the default OS in eMMC or Ubuntu in the NVMe SSD. That way I can go back and forth and see what works best. Once my mind is made up, if I decide to install Ubuntu in eMMC, I’ll back it it, blow it, transfer Ubuntu onto it and mount the NVMe SSD as /home. If I decide Ubuntu sucks, I’ll just wipe the SSD and use it as /home immediately.