As someone that uses the exact same comparison. I do try to make it clear that they are both valid hobbies but you need to be honest which your hobby is when picking a printer. For a lot of the Ender and similar printer owners they really do have a 3D Printer hobby specifically.

I feel like this can be generalized to AI in general for most people. I still don’t see much usefulness or quality in output in the scenarios where I’ve been exposed to AI LLMs.

This fixation isn’t new at all. One of the most popular modifications to Prusa printers for years has been the Nylock mod to make your plate as flat as possible.

It does make sense, while most parts don’t take up the whole bed area, when you do need to utilize the entire space of a printer you dont want to have to struggle with it. Having a good first layer maximizes the chance that your print will be successful.

If you are new and don’t know much I highly recommend staying away from the Ender and similar cheap printers as they require much more tweaking and are less reliable.

Bambu is the best choice in the price range but the printers themselves aren’t very open. No problem running on Linux though, Bambu Studio is available as a Flatpak and Orca Slicer can be compiled.

If you want the reliable, open option in that price range I’d recommend a used Prusa, you should be able to get a MK3S era machine in that price range.

10 and 12mm long are the standard screw sizes and you arent likely to find anything off the shelf between it.

Seems like a weird spec, +/-0.5mm is a pretty typical screw length tolerance so the standard 12mmL screw would be within the range I would expect, maybe give that a try.

Primarily, remote control from one PC to another. I’ve got a desktop connected to my speakers but when working from home I want to use my work laptop to control the speakers. Tidal has a version of it that can control media streamer devices, but it is unreliable.

It just frustrates me how nobody is even close to Spotify Connect nor do they seem to be trying to compete with it. Tidal only half does what I need but I have had a number of major issues with it that are making me go back to Spotify.

It sounds like everything in your network is at least gigabit, which means you should practically be able to get at least 920Mbit speeds after the overhead on speedtest. Also try the google and fast.com speedtests as sometimes they show different results. Also do a full reboot on every device on your network just in case.

Your ISP is probably going to tell you that your speeds are “up to 1Gbps” and that getting lower speeds are normal. I’d still push them for not providing speeds within a reasonable limit of what you are paying for. For reference on my connection I can easily get 930Mbps down on my 1Gbps connection probably 90% of the time.

Yeah I looked at a pack of these on amazon recently and had a good laugh at the tolerance they provided for one of the measurements.

I’ll die on the hill that classic outlook is far better than Gmail and similar web interfaces for email especially if you have long threads or lots of emails.

Also somehow Google’s email search sucks so bad compared to searching in outlook.

Yup, Motorola sold the mobility division to Google who rustled through their pockets for spare patents before selling the remainder of the brand to Lenovo.

This post turned out to be a bit of a rant about what drives me to model my own designs most of the time. In short, it isn’t required, but I highly recommend it.

I’d say that most people who own 3D printers have little to no skill in modelling and are happy printing whatever they can download online. Maybe they hit a point where they want more, but until then learning modelling isn’t a useful skill for them.

Personally, I’m a designer at the end of the day. 3D modelling is a crucial tool in taking my ideas and bringing them to life in a way that can be passed to a manufacturing process and made into a physical object. 3D printing just happens to be the manufacturing tool I use most often for personal projects because it is what I have the easiest access to. If I had a machine shop, I’d use that too. When working on high volume products I’ll design for injection molding, die casting, sheet metal, compression molding, etc.

I’m not against utilizing models people have already put online that solve the problem I want, that is just efficient use of resources. But I agree, most models out there are very poor quality so I pretty rarely use downloaded models. Heck, I just re-modelled Gridfinity bins because I couldn’t find a parametrically adjustable model for SolidWorks that I was happy with (on that note, the dimensional documentation for Gridfinity is straight garbage and I’m still not sure I have it right) and those are some of the most widely available models out there.

I also absolutely despise STL and other non-parametric file formats for sharing designs. They are terrible, inefficient formats that make files very hard to edit. Most people don’t export them in high enough resolution resulting in horrible looking faceted models. The community needs to fully accept STEP as the file format of choice now that any slicer worth using can import them properly.

Looking forward to see the 3D prints made to fix this “feature”.

Im picturing them sending “cash” with the amount written in comic sans.

Mostly better safe than sorry, but not over compensating IMO. All these large companies in China are partially government owned and many of them have known bad security and backdoors that have been exploited (e.g. to create botnets) and could potentially be exploited by the Chinese government who is less friendly with the West these days.

I went with a Boox device recently and like it. Since it is just android you can load up all sorts of apps. I use it for various things other than reading books, for example with the Paprika app in the kitchen as a recipe display.

I guess space is technically out of the environment.

I’ve got one each of the USB-C and USB-A versions. The USB-A is actually the one that lives on my keychain as the connector is more robust against debris and I was able to find an adapter that is on a lanyard.

Agreed, my main issues with hardware keys are that so few sites support them, and the OS support is kinda bad like in Windows the window pops up underneath everything and sometimes requires a pin entered.

I also hate that when I last looked nobody made a key that supports USB-C, USB-A, and NFC. So now I’ve got an awkward adapter I need to carry on my keychain.

Yup, all the Bambu printers are pretty good. I’m quite happy with my P1S + AMS. Definitely a better choice for a beginner than the Enders and similarly cheap project printers that many people start out with.

You can always buy an AMS later if you don’t want to now, but the utility of it for me is more around having multiple filaments to choose from without having to load a new filament rather than multicolour printing which is very slow and wasteful.

I wouldn’t bother with a filament dryer. I live in a pretty humid climate and between work and home I’ve been 3D printing things for over a decade and have never felt the need to dry my filament. I’d only really consider it if I was starting to print Nylon or something similarly hygroscopic.