Listen, is it really a 3d printer hobby if you don’t have 5 or 6 printers, none of which could actually print anything, and five boxes of parts laying around for you to fix your printers?

Oh also see above while planning another printer project, because none of those printers will do something you might want to do.

(/s, kidding, etc, but there’s That Guy somewhere, and you know who you are.)

Oh, that’s neat and I can certainly see why that’s useful.

I have to do a little gcode header swapping by hand because I’m cheap and bought a p1p and am certainly making it do things it’s not really designed to do, and that kind of functionality could save a bit of time.

I’d also argue it makes it harder to use, period: something that takes me 10 seconds to read somehow ends up being a 5 minute video, of which 90% is fluff that’s not related to the problem.

I’ve yet to land on a tutorial video that gets to the point and doesn’t feel the need to waste a ton of time introducing themselves, a paragraph about what we’re doing, asking me to subscribe, talking about their sponsor and so on.

I lament the death of the text-based tutorial and strongly dislike the youtube format video.

I’d love to know if this was just some guy who went ‘let’s ship it to all our customers!’ or if this was a C-level 300 hours of meetings type of thing which concluded that spreading christmas malware cheer was the right move.

What is a macro in this context that requires custom firmware?

My googling makes it just look like gcode stuff to work around hardware issues, but I’m confused how that requires Klipper, since you can drop any gcode block you want into any slicer I’ve ever seen?

I was just curious if they had done their own thing. Some companies just ship Cura, some have done their own thing, and I wasn’t aware of which way they went.

I’m not a giant Cura fan* so was just curious.

(* Cura has the problem of trying to be everything for everyone and to do everything anyone ever might want to do, and ends up just being… a bit much.)

The software was easy to pick up.

Are they shipping something other than Cura?

I’m a fan of the Bambu printers because they just simply work.

You want to print something, they print something, done.

If you want to fiddle, then they’re the wrong printers, but if you want to model shit and make things then they’re really hard to beat right now.

And, yes, I have reservations about the closed sourced nature, but honestly ask yourself: are you going to contribute to the code? Are you going to build your own firmware to run on your printer? If the answer is no, then that’s probably not really a concern that should be driving your decisions.

will never be widely accepted by the majority of the populatioj because it just isn’t what the vast majority of people want. They want communication methods that compliment their real world lives

I don’t think that’s strictly true, but I do think it would require their real world lives to get shockingly worse to increase the appeal of living in a “better” world.

This is usually how you see these kind of things presented in fiction: everyone uses a “metaverse”, but it requires a full on completely society destroying dystopia to also exist to make it sufficiently appealing.

I’d put money on the next round of VR worlds getting a lot more buy-in since you’ve got a generation of kids growing up that are already living mostly online, and a species that seems hell-bent on diving in to a nice authoritarian dystopia, so uh, the next 20 years will probably be real interesting,

What platform would you perhaps be interested in?

There’s other use cases for that.

The immediate one, and applies to my own living room, is that there’s one switch for the lights and it’s in the far back corner by the front door, and like 15 feet and around behind the couch from where you’d enter the living room from the rest of the house.

The smart switch lets me turn the light on and off from the inside of the house without having to navigate the room and cats in the dark either via a voice command, mobile app, and ESP32 button.

Though, and this is the next use case, I really don’t have to do any of those. The smart switch facilitates lots of fun things, and in this case that room has a mmWave occupancy detector that’ll turn the light on and off based on the time of the day and if there’s a human in the room or not. (mmWave stuff is super accurate compared to the older motion detection crap you’ll find in use in that you don’t have to actually be moving, because it’s good enough to determine if a human is in the room motion or not.)

And, of course, since this is the living room and the TV is in there, it’s also tied into the media playback status of the TV to dim the lights when you turn the TV on, turn them off when you start playing a movie, and then turn them back on dimly after you pause, and then slowly increase the brightness over the next 5 minutes if you don’t resume playing the movie (unless everyone leaves the room, at which point it’ll turn the TV and lights off based on the occupancy sensor.)

Also it’s useful for setting a timer: the backyard and front porch lights go on at sunset and off at sunrise, and the controller is smart enough to grab when this is on the internet so it stays accurate and timely year-round.

So yeah, it’s maybe not life-changing by itself, but it’s seriously the backbone of a lot of automation I’ve got in place that simplifies having to even think about or do anything to adjust light levels based on where I am in the house and what I’m doing in the room.

Disclaimer: this was not trivial to setup, the components required to make it are not off-the-shelf and require electronics and soldering knowledge and you have to understand the ESP32 ecosystem and how to modify code and deploy them to do what you want. It also then requires you to configure all of this in HomeAssistant, and in my case, requires yet another piece of software (NodeRed) and a ton of webhooks to make everything cooperate and work. It’s not trivial, it’s not for everyone, and it’s not a product most people could build on their own, so I don’t entirely disagree that a switch by itself is life-changing, but if there was a proper ecosystem around them where you could do this shit I think more than a few people would hop in.

I kinda have two responses here, so uh, here’s both of them:

1. Well, by the time this is an issue, odds are you’ve been a career politician anyway and don’t need another job. This is just old people who refuse to retire because they like the power and trappings more than they care about doing their job.

2. By the time they MUST retire, these ghouls have stolen sufficient money that it doesn’t matter, and sticking around is just them refusing to give up the power and feed their greed even more.

Both seem equally reasonable and applicable to the problem.

If only they made smart switches you could use, perhaps?

100% agree that smart bulbs are incredibly stupid and you should go with a switch if you want to smartify shit.

Well no, it’s not enormous, but Amazon is selling a couple million ring doorbells a year, and a couple million more of their cameras.

It’s a sufficiently large market to hop into, especially if you can make a product that’s easier to deal with from an ecosystem perspective than the incumbents, which isn’t something I’d ever bet against Apple managing to pull off.

Hopefully the Mastodon devs are paying attention to the features that bsky has that they don’t, and actually copy them rather than sit there and tell everyone that no, they’re wrong they don’t want that feature.

I want to like Mastodon (or any platforms that are federated with them and trying very hard to be them) but they’re utter and total lack of interest in and development of features the community keeps asking for is going to keep it a niche option for weirdos while people keep hopping into corpo social platform after corpo social platform.

The biggest problem for smart homes for people who aren’t enormous nerds is that nothing works together with each other in a simple, coordinated way.

And, of course, one of Apple’s biggest strengths is that they’ve built a cohesive ecosystem that, usually, works just fine with limited fiddling.

Right now you’ve either got 14 apps for different shit, or you’ve built something like Home Assistant to try to glue together all this garbage into a coherent solution. I’ve gone that route, and it works mostly, usually, typically, fine-ish.

It’s a shit experience, still, because it’s a pile of random plugins and code from random people glued into something that can’t stop fucking with existing and working features and thus is perpetually in need of updates and maintenance and fiddling.

I wouldn’t bet against Apple being able to make a doorbell, security cameras, light switches, and a thermostat and then turning that into something that actually works properly in homekit, is kept updated, and is easy to configure and use and secure.

That’s really the missing piece that nobody seems to have been interested or willing to go after.

You can share your wisdom and be of great value to the public without being in public office.

At some point, though, you’ve gone from useful adult into honored elder, and while I’m not suggesting we put them all on ice floes, they shouldn’t be running the country, especially since more than a few of them clearly don’t even know which country they’re in, let alone how to run it.

If you can’t walk, are having strokes, have developed dementia, and generally just sit around staring at the wall like my cat, perhaps it’s time to gracefully retire and go spend the rest of your life doing conferences and speaking engagements and whatever the hell else you want, not trying to legislate.

ArchiveBox is great.

I’m big into retro computing and general old electronics shit, and I archive everything I come across that’s useful.

I just assume anything and everything on some old dude’s blog about a 30 year old whatever is subject to vanishing at any moment, and if it was useful once, it’ll be useful again later probably so fuck it, make a copy of everything.

Not like storage is expensive, anyway.

Honestly, I think we’re 3 years out from Windows being replacable for a gaming platform.

Anti-cheat is a big one (sure, there’s “support”, but if none of the games people play are supported, is that support?), but VRR and HDR are also huge.

That trifecta is the only reason I’m still sitting in Windows, and I find myself hopeful we land there sooner rather than later so I can dump Windows and never have to think about whatever dumb crap Microsoft is going to do next.

It is mostly professional/office use where this make sense. I’ve implemented this (well, a similar thing that does the same thing) for clients that want versioning and compliance.

I’ve worked with/for a lot of places that keep everything because disks are cheap enough that they’ve decided it’s better to have a copy of every git version than not have one and need it some day.

Or places that have compliance reasons to have to keep copies of every email, document, spreadsheet, picture and so on. You’ll almost never touch “old” data, but you have to hold on to it for a decade somewhere.

It’s basically cold storage that can immediately pull the data into a fast cache if/when someone needs the older data, but otherwise it just sits there forever on a slow drive.