I run 16 Bit Virtual Studios. You can find more reviews from me on YouTube youtube.com/@16bitvirtual or other social media @16bitvirtual, and we sell our 3D Printed stuff on 16bitstore.com

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Right, lots of suggestions for Bambu and Prusa and rightfully so. But their prices are high and while they are worth it, they wouldn’t be what I’d suggest for a first time printer.

    The Ender 3 is what I’d suggest, though not the V1. The S1 or the v3 and good starting points for being in budget and having some modern features.

    This isn’t like the mid 2010’s where it was hit or miss and the printers will have a slight chance of burning your house down. Hictop anyone? But these days even a $200 printer is good enough to start printing.

    That said software is going to be your biggest pain point.

    For the slicer make sure its compatible with PrusaSlicr or Cura. Preferability the former. This makes the models to print, and some cheep third party slicers makes their own with questionable quality and support.

    For modeling, you have some options. Blender if you are looking to design 3d shapes like clay. Fusion360 is a cheap and free (while limited) solution for parametric cad design. With TinkerCAD is a good in between. But like Photoshop is to gimp, Fusion 360 is to FreeCAD and it may be worth learning how FreeCAD works since its an extremely flexible tool.

    TL:DR Ender 3 V3/S1, Prusa Slicer, Cura, Blender, TinkerCAD, Fusion360, FreeCAD and you should be too to start printing and making brackets.




  • Recommendations for learning. Have someone who knows how to hand sew nearby to ask questions. My local leather shop has classes to help newbies.

    That said I didn’t take those, as I had a really good idea on what I wanted, and someone nearby that could teach me to sew. Plus I used cutting machines to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

    My only advice is to not use a vinyl cutter like from Cricut or Silhouette. The motors are not strong enough to cut actual leather, they fetch and loose steps very easily. Laser is your best bet, though the smell is pungent, ventilation is required.

    The other advise is unlike cloth, you need to plan and make your stitch holes before you sew. Leather is too thick to punch through it without significant force. A Sharp knife is your best friend if you missed a hole.




  • the16bitgamer@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlIt's time to move to Linux - YouTube
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    1 month ago

    While I agree with this video. As someone who did migrate from Windows to Linux, I feel the biggest issue which wasn’t address here was the planning for migrating to Linux.

    Migrating to Linux means loosing access to Windows native applications like Adobe and kernel level anti cheat online games. What I found helped the most was transitioning to cross platform application and learning their ins and outs in Windows, or discovering ways to validate which applications work well in Proton and Wine.

    With games ProtonDB is your best bet to see if there are issues. Or finding ways to solve issues.

    With Professional software… you’re not going to be as lucky, so transitioning to an alternative which works for you might be the best solution.

    The best way to check if Linux will work for you is to run Linux in a VM or on an external SSD on your actual hardware. The best way to check if something works for you is to try it yourself.


  • I while I understand the sentiment, I have found that paid software is more polished than foss software… most of the time. And when I need to get work done, I want to ensure that my software is stable and I will pay to do so.

    That said, I feel software is like a bell curve, and the older the type of software is, the more it should be FOSS. Like word processors, 3D modelling, or image manipulation should be foss, while video editing and 3D scanning software is OK to be paid.

    What I feel everyone should agree with is not being forced to use a subscription service to use the software. I will boycott software if it forces that upon their customers, looking at you Adobe, Autodesk and Microsoft.


  • I see it has two different products for two different use cases. Kdenlive is for those who missed Windows Movie maker or iMovie. Something to stitch together videos, or split apart videos.

    DaVinci Resolve is for those who need stable professional software like adobe.

    Not saying that kdenlive can’t be used professionally but I found its stability lacking, its tools unpolished and its functionality limited. The only benefit is that it can handle aac audio, and export it too thanks to ffmpeg.






  • 16GB is more than enough for most written books, ranging from 1-3MB. But for comics they can range from 93MB to 250MB or more. As such while you can have 5000+ Books on your Kobo, you can only have 65 comics, and considering how large some manga series are, that’s not enough to keep everything on the same device.

    My gripe with Kobo is how they organize their books, and while I could organize them into collections, for DRM free books, they don’t store them in the system, so if I remove and re-add a book to my e-reader, I have to manually re-add them to the collection. But in truth no e-reader is perfect, the closest I found is the Pocketbook, since they offer SD Card support, but I opted for the Onyx Boox Nova 3 Color. I like the fact I can write on it, like a remarkable tablet, it’s running Android so I can get a lot of utility out of it. But I don’t like the fact that it’s a chinese android tablet stuck on Android 10 with no OS updates in sight, and the lack of Micro SD Card support (though USB support is nice).

    You win some you loose some.



  • Well your only alternative is Kdenlive, which is a very unstable experience. There are some alternative video editing software on Linux, but they follow the adobe model of, give me your money forever to use it. Resolve works, just need to tune your injest to get the video to work. I have a bash script I can send you that batch fixes videos which I can send you.

    As for apple machines. I get the distain as I too don’t like Apple, and feel their locked in software, hardware, and ecosystem is overpriced and unreliable. But the way I see it, if the computer is for work, which this appears to be, I need the best machine for the job, and Apple unlike Microsoft and Google, has very clean software and hardware that I can trust for professional work. No ads, very fast hardware, stable, with no compromises.

    That said I will not use them for personal use. Hence the switch over to Linux. I would’ve got a Mac Mini for work if I had the budget for one.


  • I have both (cuz I’m selling the case and needed to test), and I’m working on a video review for it.

    Tldw for the video is this. Clara BW is a Clara 2e, processor, ram, and storage are spec exactly the same, even the power button and sleep sensor is the same position. It only took me 9 days to make these since I reused the sleep cover from my 2e case design. However it’s a little snappier, making it on par with the latest Kindle for books. Still slow for comics.

    The e-reader shown is the Clara color, despite the spec bump feels exactly the same as the Clara BW. Unless you read colored books like magazines, comics, or textbooks it’s not worth the upgrade. Kobo really needed more than 16GB of storage.

    That said I was never a fan of Kobo so the Clara color is the first one I actually like.


  • Yeah, I made these because my original case broke (Nova 3 color not kobo). I sell them on Etsy, though sadly since it’s so labour intensive to stitch it ends up costing as much as the eReader. Trying to make it more upgradeable and user serviceable to better justify the price, but I’m still testing them.

    As for the desk, it’s my deterrent to keep eBay scam artists from selling my designs with my photos. I have fancy professional photos I can use if I want.

    Like this one

    The Keyboard is from EVGA but it was on clearance when I got it so I don’t think they sell it anymore.



  • OK, let me fill you with my experience. Now I am on Desktop Linux, and I can’t say how your Double Touch screens will work. But I can tell you about some of your points.

    Affinity, canva, corel, and cinema4d are not Linux compatible and you’ll need to run them in Wine/Wine GE via software like Bottles or Lutris. Most will not work, while others like affinity might work, but requires a lot of working around. If these software’s are required, you may want to look at a Mac.

    keyshot, gimp, vscode(ium) are all native and have either scripts or can be installed via Flatpak or from the distros app repos.

    Davinci Resolve is interesting, You’ve lucked out since you have an rtx2060, but Resolve is quite finicky to get working Linux. You’ll need nvidia drivers and the open source free drivers will not work. All good Linux distros should have easy access, but I found Fedora to be trickier to install. Once you can get Resolve working, you’ll either need to buy Studio if you want H.264 support, and if your videos aren’t using PCM audio then you’ll need to convert it using FFMPEG. I have a script which I use at the end of my injest. Afterwords, it runs and works fine, with no issues (assuming you have the RAM to run it 32GB recommended). If you don’t want to deal with any of this (understandable) Mac OS has no issues out of the box.

    Working file explorer: up to taste, and personal preference. Every distro will have one and it’ll be good enough, but some distros tailor theirs to their OS’s tastes. If you are running with a popular Desktop Environment, i.e. KDE Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon, then it’ll work.

    Now if you want my two cents on all of this. First you should aim for a Ubuntu based distro. While Ubuntu itself isn’t bad, I personally prefer a different Desktop Environment as Gnome is too different for me from what Windows offers. Linux Mint with Cinnamon and POP_OS are good alternative with a more Windows/Mac flavoring, and since they are running Gnome underneath it’ll have the same compatibility as Ubuntu proper with hardware.

    Another option is Kubuntu which used KDE’s Plasma. Plasma is OK, but I find it to be a little less refined than it’s appearance lead me to believe.

    Now for testing, I’d advise you to get a second SSD and an enclosure and plug it into a USB-C port. It’ll do wonders to quickly go an run everything, without sacrificing you existing install of Winblows. Linux is so efficent I ran my main PC for a week off of it, and only noticed while running games.

    Finally, depending on how often you are using your Windows only software. You might get away with running them in a Windows 10 VM, and using a shared folder to the Host machine to move files back and forth.

    This is definatly a project you should look into, but I feel you should probably look at more cross platform alternatives to your software first. Since another alternative, if you aren’t playing games, is a Mac.