I’ve barely ever used Discord, I’m not entirely sure I understand how it works, because individuals host their own servers? “Join my Discord server.” So, Discord as a business provides software and…user account brokerage? In terms of functionality, it does basically what an IM client/forum engine and Ventrilo did?

There is something about the slightly bad kerning of QT that gives KDE a vaguely Windows 95 feel. Especially when you start installing extensions that make no attempt to resemble each other; there is nothing I can do to make my CPU temperature meter and my system clock look like they belong on the same computer.

Gnome on the other hand feels like MacOS with meningitis. It’s designed to look nice, but not necessarily do anything.

Nothing really stops you from using OctoPrint with a Prusa…other than it feeling really awkward having bought a machine with networking built-in only to end around it.

I’m going to take these out of order.

Why should I get a printer?

If you have a continuous and frequent need or strong desire for small plastic objects. If you have a hobby like cosplaying, cosplayers find 3D printers quite useful for making costume parts or props, tabletop players like printing minifigures or playsets, if you’re an electronics hobbyist it can be useful to print cases and enclosures for projects, if you’re a woodworker you’ll never stop needing jigs, brackets, vacuum hose adapters.

Or, if you’re interested in 3D printing itself. There are folks doing like, 4-axis non-planar stuff that’s industry leading, for the fun of it. Hell and gone smarter than I am.

Should I skip the owning part and just use commercial 3D print shops?

If you have one project in mind, or “might occasionally find a use for it,” hire it done rather than buying a machine.

There’s kind of a trap for newbies to 3D printing: Inexpensive printers tend to be projects unto themselves. Which can be a good thing if you’re interested in the hobby of 3D printing itself. If you want to buy a machine, plug it in and it just works, expect to spend $1000. Because you’re either going to buy a Prusa, which start at about $1000 for an assembled MK4S, or a Bambu Labs machine for about $500 and then they’ll getcha somehow. Bambu Labs sketches the fuck out of me, they’re trying to be the HP of FDM.

Even then, if you have one of the “just works” machines, you still have things to learn. What plastic to choose for this model that needs to be outdoors? Do you use a textured or smooth sheet for PETG? Can you print ASA without a heated enclosure? Should you use glue stick for TPU? Can you print PC-CF with a brass nozzle? What do the eight pages of print settings in the slicer do? If you can envision the printer sitting turned off for months at a time, does all that seem worth learning?

What do I do to make it more than a trinket printer?

Mainly, have something you need to 3D print for.

I have found that Thingiverse and Printables are both full of idiots. They let literally anyone on there, and I’ve found the dumbest shit.

“It’s 7% shorter in the X axis because my printer prints 7% long in that direction so I squish all my parts to compensate. And then I upload them like that because my mom let me eat paint chips as a baby” has to be my favorite, right after “This design relies heavily on trapping hex nuts in hexagonal recesses, and I looked up the “diameter” of M3 nuts and modeled that as the across flats dimension because my mom is my dad’s mom!”

If you want to print anything other than flexible dragons and Bender Bhuddas, and then actually use them, you’re going to need to know how to alter things other people ruined through incompetence, or design things from scratch. The ability to design the thing YOU need is what really unlocks the power of a 3D printer.

I would go so far as to say, if you aren’t interested in learning CAD or some other 3D modeling software, forget a 3D printer. Because if you rely on Thingiverse and Printables, your 3D printer is a trinket machine. You’re going to print a few toys, a benchy or two, a paper towel holder that doesn’t work, a shop vac adapter that’s the wrong size, a phone stand the $200 Creality you bought just cannot get through, and then it’ll sit gathering dust.

what went with him? Is he in rehab or something?

Prologue: I can’t talk from experience about the Mini, the XL, or that…$12,000 delta printer they’re offering? This is going to concern the conventional “MK” series of bedflingers and the new Core One.

All Prusa printers I’m aware of “run locally.” From the MK3S and back to the Prusa Mendel, they used various 8-bit ATMEGA 2560-based control boards which had no networking capabilities at all. You could add network capabilities with Octoprint, For awhile Prusa even included a way to attach a Raspberry Pi Zero W to the main board via the GPIO header.

Since the MK4, they now use a 32-bit ARM-based control board that has an Ethernet jack, and a removable Wi-Fi module. You can still walk up to the thing, poke the touch screen, and stick a USB stick in the side with G-Code on it, but we now have not one but two ways of controlling the printer remotely:

PrusaConnect is their cloud-based service. Either through a web browser, PrusaSlicer running on a PC or their smart phone app, you can monitor and control the printer across the internet, from anywhere. It integrates with Printables, their own Thingiverse with blackjack and hookers, and they even have a cloud slicing service. You can choose a model from Printables on your phone, their server will slice it and send G-code to your printer to start it printing. But, everything you do to it goes to the internet. So when I press the Preheat PLA button in PrusaConnect, that message crosses the Atlantic twice before the red light on my print bed blinks on.

PrusaLink is their local network control system, which consists of a web server running on the printer itself, through which you can view the current temperatures and upload G-Code (and firmware) files. That is it. You cannot so much as preheat the bed through PrusaLink. You can set it up in PrusaSlicer such that it will give you a button to upload G-Code to a printer directly across the LAN, but…

It feels really strange that I can preheat my printer either from its control panel, or across the internet, but not across my LAN.

I’ve also been getting a kick out of my new 3D printer and controlling it remotely. Even though if I hit the X+10mm button and that message has to go to Prague and back before the Nextruder nudges to the right.

I haven’t had a computer with a built-in SATA optical drive in years, just the crappy off-brand old recycled laptop drive in a random housing ones you get these days that require a good USB A-MicroB cable, and good luck finding one of those. Having a proper built-in drive is nice enough that I actually want to use it.

So I was playing with some of my old CDs, and noticed that my copy of Slippery When Wet is two-sided. Bwuh?! CDs aren’t two-sided, that’s a DVD thing. Sure enough, the “back” is a DVD that has the four music videos they made for the album, and two more copies of the music, one in “even better than Redbook Audio Somehow” stereo, and one in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound that has been lengthened, mostly just additional studio chatter before and after the tracks but one of the songs, I think it’s Raise Your Hands, has a lengthened bridge or something?

So I learned how to rip FLACs from a DVD!

Weird Al’s Poodle Hat has a .mov file on it.

Had a big ol time partying like it was 2004.

It’s the power glove that really gets me. It’s so bad.

I put an optical drive in my PC recently, and I’ve been giggling like an idiot typing “eject” and “eject -t” into the terminal. Terminal commands that do something physical in the world delight me.

Entice? I thought it was fascinate.

You know, I have encountered a lot of “just pipe curl into sh” from people who absolutely should know not to do that.

Actually, Hammond would show up with something busted like Manjaro and at some point he’d manage to break Xorg or something near the end of the journey.

That seems to be what Zorin is offering, it’s Gnome that has been customized to look like Windows, and yet not forked into its own thing like MATE, Cinnamon, Unity, Pantheon or Cosmic were. And they’ll sell you a Pro version that’s got like, Gimp and Darktable and such pre-installed. I genuinely don’t see what people see in Zorin.

Okay, so, Richard Hammond would be the first to arrive with Linux Mint! …xfce Edition. It’s the sports version, it’s lighter, sleeker, faster than the standard version.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Clarkson would arrive with Ubuntu Server, under the impression it somehow has more POWAAA!!!

James May turns up, having done this properly. With FreeBSD.

And Gnome customized to look like Windows, rather than Cinnamon or KDE.

Can you blame a Chameleon for blending in? Look to the right of Fedora.

The Island of TempleOS is in the middle of the Holy Sea.

Are there a lot of people wanting to plug Zen 1 chips into B550 motherboards? Usually it’s the other way around, upgrading chip in an old motherboard.

I saw a video a few weeks back of a woman cleaning out layers of “decent quality insulated cups” from her cupboard, several each of a decade’s worth of fads. Those are going in landfills en masse before the 21st century is out.