dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Re: Pets. I have three cats and I’ve been doing well with my Qidi X-Max 3, which has a fully enclosed filament path even in stock configuration. And mine still does now in its current getup, where I feed it directly from my filament dryer.

The PLA I currently use near-exclusively is Elegoo Rapid PLA+ which at least when you buy it in the bulk 4 packs is $12.99 per 1kg spool. I’ve occasionally used other off brand sub-$15 PLA filaments and not gotten screwed. Cheap bullshit filament can be OK if you are willing to commit to thoroughly drying it out before use and can have its uses if you need one decorative thing in a particular weird color and don’t feel like shelling out for an oddball. For me, the Elegoo stuff is as cheap enough and is a known good quantity so I don’t see much reason to mess with success unless I have to.

You’re right about TPU being a specialty material, but for the times I have needed it, it has definitely come in clutch. Its unique mechanical properties have allowed me to make various weird gaskets (most recent being a replacement air intake gasket for an old motorcycle), adapter boots, bumpers, buffers, and most recently this thing. TPU exhibits incredible layer adhesion – you can make parts out of it that are basically completely isotropic, even with a bog standard filament machine – which turn out to be damn near indestructible provided you don’t need them to tolerate high heat or be rigid in any way whatsoever. It’s a rather silly choice to use for just making static objects, though. For printing your low poly Pikachus and Deadpool busts and Yoda bobbleheads or whatever the hell, PLA is much easier to use.

I think a lot of people get caught up in the trap of thinking of your material choices being a “ranking,” with the cheaper and easier to print polymers being lower on the totem pole and assuming that the more expensive and harder to print ones are “better.” This is not necessarily the case. Every material choice (excepting various strange exotic materials some of which have no realistic purpose other than showing off) has its advantages and disadvantages that may be a consideration depending on your application. Boring old cheap PLA, for instance, is actually the most rigid of the commonly available materials that are possible for ordinary people to print without non-industrial printers. It also confers the second best layer adhesion strength out of the rigid polymers in that same category (behind TPU which is not rigid, and arguably polycarbonate which is a pain in the ass to print and presents it own other problems). Really, the only failings PLA has is a very low temperature resistance and susceptibility to cold creep.

Hey. I will play Oregon Trail exactly how I see fit, thank you.

Oh, for sure the prices will remain inflated forever. I was just gauging the longevity of trying to use this as the stated excuse.

My go-to in cases like this it to just step up the solvent-molecular-weight scale until you either A) get the desired result, or B) destroy whatever polymer the thing is made out of.

I don’t know about ammonia, but isopropyl alcohol seems to dissolve all the constituents of every dye based ink I’ve ever tried it on, which ought to encompass all fountain pen inks – and also inkjet printer inks, for what it’s worth.

No, but Librewolf and Iceweasel and all the other forks are ultimately wholly dependent on Mozilla and Firefox continuing to exist. If Mozilla techbros themselves into imploding entirely and goes bankrupt, for instance, all of those other fork projects are also by association toast.

If you want a good laugh, or possibly just transform into a pillar of salt, you could stick a temperature logger in your fridge to see if it’s actually holding its setpoint (your big one, that is, not the mini fridge).

I did that in our office fridge a few weeks ago just for a lark. The results were… not good.

Honestly IDGAF about Bambu, but these patents are for technologies clearly used by other manufacturers as well. Stratasys is just picking on Bambu because Bambu is successful, and they’re smelling a payout.

It is in the best interest of everyone in the hobby – not just manufacturers – that Stratasys loses.

If that pattern holds then a modern one should be ~4x more energy efficient…

Also bear in mind that there is only a single evaporator in that thing, so it’s not a case of “just the freezer isn’t working.” The refrigeration system in there has partially failed, wholesale, and you only notice it first in the freezer because that’s the coldest compartment and stuff melting is a very obvious tell. That fridge is probably working its compressor constantly in a vain little mechanical attempt to reach its temperature setpoint, which it will never accomplish because it’s lost compression or has a slow refrigerant leak or whatever. So it’s consuming even more electricity than it otherwise would, and replacing it with just about anything would be a net improvement.

The manufacturer(s) will publish an energy guide label with their estimated kWh/year energy usage for any given model. Using your Kill-a-Watt or whatever energy monitoring device you have, it should be fairly trivial to measure a day’s worth of energy consumption from your old fridge and multiply it by 365 to get a yearly figure.

Then just see if A < B.

I’ll start with among the cheapest and junkiest available, the Avanti RA31B3S (which has a separate freezer compartment). The manufacturer claims it burns 320 kWh/year.

The answer is apathy.

You have to remember that most users simply don’t care. The majority of consumers are some combination of either not technologically savvy or just outright intimidated by technology, are not very well educated, are incredibly reluctant to read, are not particularly observant, will not leave their routines or comfort zones without very significant motivation, and have spent their entire lives being the very frog in that gradually boiling pot of ever more numerous and intrusive advertising to the point that they just accept this as “normal.” They’re busy. They don’t read tech headlines. They don’t understand what’s going on under the hood, and nor do they want to.

Normal people don’t see the world like us nerds do. I am positive that these streaming services (and many other businesses) have studied this and understand it very well. If they lose 1% of their business which was made up by vocal nerds, but whatever odious change the just rolled out results in an increase in profit that is greater than the revenue from those subscriptions lost, they’ll go ahead and do it anyway.

They think they have a captive audience because by and large they functionally do have a captive audience. This stuff works, and people keep paying for it en masse.