u/XdtTransform

...or is it incomprehensible?

Consider this photo. It says to drive 0.3 miles on the I-605 and then drive some more - 0.6 miles - on the same I-605 freeway.

Another example. I want to drive from Irvine Spectrum in Irvine, CA to Culver City. It's a straight shot on the 405 freeway - 50 miles. But when you pop in directions, it segments the directions by each intersecting freeway (605, 710, 110). So first it will tell you to drive 18 miles on the 405 (the distance to its intersection with 605). Then 11 miles on the 405 (distance on that freeway from 605 to 710). And so on.

If I look on Apple Maps, it's a simple. Google Maps on the PC is similarly simple (though also confusing on mobile).

This didn't use to be a problem 2-3 years back. Is there a setting or a tweak that restores sanity to directions?

Hello everyone,

I often run prints in my garage that take many hours, mostly unattended. I wanted two fairly simple automations:

• Turn on the garage smart light when a print starts.
• Turn it off and send me an SMS when the print finishes.

I had previously asked here how to do it and people suggested Home Assistant, but I didn’t want to buy another computer just for this. And ElegooSlicer desktop app doesn’t provide any extension points where I could attach my automations.

So I built (mostly vibe coded) ElegooHooks, a Windows desktop application that connects directly to an Elegoo printer over the local network using the official Elegoo Link SDK.

Here is an example of the application and it's settings to connect events.

When a printer event occurs, ElegooHooks can launch an executable of your choice with configurable arguments. The application supports the following events:

• Connected and disconnected
• Print started and completed
• Pausing, paused, resuming, and resumed
• Stopping and stopped
• Printer errors

For example, I can configure Print Started to launch my smart-light utility with an on argument. When the print completes, another utility can turn the light off and send an SMS. If several actions are needed for one event, a small wrapper batch file can perform all of them.

Arguments can include information from the event, such as the printer name, IP address, filename, progress, layer information, error codes, and timestamp.

The application also handles multiple printers (I only have one, so not really tested), live event log for each printer, reconnection attempt if disconnected, minimize-to-tray option. That is pretty much all that it does.

This is an early release. I only tested it with the Centauri Carbon. Other printer types recognized by the Elegoo Link SDK (CC2, Neptune, etc...) will theoretically work, but I can't vouch for it since I don't own those.

Repository and downloads: https://github.com/rgelb/ElegooHooks

I’m sharing it in case anyone else wanted a lightweight way to attach their own automations to Elegoo printer events without setting up a full home automation server.

I am trying to determine how much RAM our SQL Server needs. I've googled around, but I can't get a definitive answer as there are so many opinions out there.

The server has 78 GB of RAM installed. Of which 3 is available.

The allocation says 99% of RAM is utilized. The buffer is up there though, but I can't tell if this is good or bad.

I've also checked various wait stats, but once again, I can't tell if these are bad or not. And all these queries were taken after hours.

And the page life expectancy I think is fine.

The CPU during the day is between 20 and 60 percent depending on tasks going on. The users complain very occasionally about slowdowns, but when I look at the current queries I don't see anything obvious. But also, from what I've observed, the users are perfectly ok with something being slow, so they are unlikely to report anything unless it physically impedes their work.

So based on this... does the server need more RAM?

P.S. The server hosts a single 350 GB database (e.g. that's the size of the full backup) and some minor ones that in total are less than 1GB. The server probably has low 5 digit sessions per day. Most transactions are short and read-only. A few are heavy duty, like reports, data denormalization, etc... And since someone asked, here are the server properties, including parallelism. The SQL Server itself is 2017 Standard Edition running on Windows Server 2016 Standard.

P.S. Thank you all for your suggestions. I suspected earlier that it was our backup vendor but they swore up and down that they only backup the drives and their software doesn't even know what a SQL Server is.

Based on everyone's here insistence on this being VSS, I dug into their application folder and literally searched everything for words like SQL or Server or VSS. And sure enough, I found a log hiding several directories deep that literally said "Start SQL Server Backup" and listed the database in question.

So now they are trying to figure out how to even turn this off. Thanks again.

---

For whatever reason, there are some phantom "Virtual" backups going on with my SQL Server 2017 and I can't identify what kicks it off.

Consider this screenshot. It has entries where the physical device name is a GUID. It appears to take a snapshot. And this occurs every 3 to 4 hours roughly.

My first thought was that there is a scheduled job. But I looked through it and there is nothing like that. Then I though it we may have software installed on the box that kicks it off, like Acronis Backup or similar. But we've accounted for every piece of software on the box. It's possible that software installed elsewhere maybe kicking it off. This is difficult to track, because the database is almost 30 years old and many different people did different things to it.

So my question is how to identify what this is, or how to catch it in the act. Or how do I block or stop this.

Query to generate this resultset.

SELECT
    bs.backup_start_date,
    bs.backup_finish_date,
    CASE bs.type WHEN 'D' THEN 'Data' WHEN 'L' THEN 'Log' WHEN 'I' THEN 'Differential' ELSE 'Don''t know' END AS TypeDesc,
    bs.name,
    bmf.physical_device_name,
    CASE bmf.device_type WHEN 2 THEN 'Disk' WHEN 7 THEN 'Virtual device' ELSE 'Other' END AS DeviceType,
    bmf.physical_block_size, 
    bs.is_snapshot,
    bs.backup_size,
    bs.is_copy_only
FROM msdb.dbo.backupset bs
JOIN msdb.dbo.backupmediafamily bmf
    ON bs.media_set_id = bmf.media_set_id
WHERE 1 = 1
    AND bs.database_name = 'romulus'
    AND bs.backup_start_date > '2026-06-15 00:00:00.000'
ORDER BY bs.backup_finish_date ASC;