I had a World of Warcraft-server running for a while, that was quite fun.

You have to maxxxx those x’es!

Ha, thank you. The themeing is not at all my complaint with these tools, but I appreciate the tip! I look forward to seeing what freecad produces, it has a lot of potential but alas, not a lot of funding to make sure the devs can afford to eat.

Well, then we need to keep donating to keep bread on their tables! :) I have no prior experience with any CAD-tools, so I guess I won’t notice the shortfalls of FreeCAD UX in the same way as other people who have more extensive experience with CAD in general and other tools specifically. I also don’t have very demanding needs of functionality, as most of what I draw are fairly simple structures for FDM-printing, and FreeCAD has been excellent for that. I would love for FreeCAD to get the point of being viable in a professional setting - do you know of any good write-ups that details what is still missing for FreeCAD to fill that space?

Last I played around with them the blender cad plugins all use poly modeling, which puts them out of the running for anything more complex than FDM parts. Primarily they exist to either support 3D printing or for simulation/animation of simplified parts. They’re… better than nothing, for sure, but unless you need something specifically given by blender you’d be much better served by just using freecad.

Alright, I thought perhaps they were designed to give an alternative workflow to drawing in CAD for people who are more familiar with or simply prefer Blender. I have tried to make some parts in vanilla Blender, and control of dimensions is horrid, but otherwise I do prefer to work with geometry in Blender over a CAD-workflow. But I can see that if you are doing serious CAD-work, that’s not going to cut it.

and while freecad has improved massively it’s still a very similar UX to Sketchup circa 2009 :(

I started using OpenDark theme, which I found to look more modern. Also, I believe FreeCAD has some very specific UI-work currently funded (details here), so you should definitely keep your eyes open for progress on this front going forward :)

ETA: Oh, and Blender does have some CAD-plugins - I never tried them myself, but they are supposed to make designing functional components less dreadful in Blender

If it wasn’t for the fact that I wanted to share my library with someone else, I would likely stick with my system for quite some time still. But I need it to be browseable for them.

Hm, I never considered Audiobookshelf for e-books - I already have it running for audiobooks. I should check that out!

Good to know - I will keep my eyes peeled!

Grimmory looks sweet, but with the recent drama and the apparent opt-out (but not really) telemetry, the massive amount of AI-generated code etc. I will want to let the age a little before I install that on my server.

ETA: Well, I toured the Calibre-Web settings again, and now I can upload books and covers. Must have been a little tired on my first attempt. Still couldn’t get the conversion to work properly - I only have the option of going from EPUB -> KEPUB (whatever that is). I typically prefer reading PDF on my current reader, and I have users who need .azw3 for their jailbroken Kindle device. I guess the paths to the conversion tools aren’t properly configured.

ETA2: Now I got the conversion to work as well. Seems like I will be able to use it with Calibre-Web only as well. Nice!

Hm, I’m using lscr.io/linuxserver/calibre-web:latest, which is version 0.6.26 (5a1f3d8eec42d03228b1e5dec9bc750ca10bbc94 - 2026-02-06T20:40:07+01:00). Looked again to see if I could find a way to do it, but no.

How do you upload books directly using Calibre-Web? And do you not have Calibre running behind at all, just the original database?

An other shortcoming of Calibre-Web seems to be that I am unable to convert books from the UI (that is thankfully very easy to do in Calibre). I added some Docker mods that I thought would allow me to do this, but I have at least not found a way.

Nice to know it works with Kobo - I don’t have one, but if my current reader stops working I am likely to get one of those.

Can we also take a moment to acknowledge how utterly unhinged this part is?

“This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI’s mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!”

Their web installer makes degoogling accessible to everyone.

With the right hardware

otherwise they will be prone to warp and collapse in on each other. If your item will be as tall as you suggest, this is likely to happen before the print even finishes

Yeah, this is what happened in the original, failed print.

I ended up making the model with 3mm thick walls, using two perimeters and 10% adaptive cubic infill (I sliced with gyroid as well, but it looked weird). Turned out great. I made some that were not quite as tall as well, with 2mm thick walls and 3 perimeters, which worked fine as well. It might have worked for the main boss here as well, but I’m not quite sure. The difference between the models was about 55 mm in height. The difference in material usage between the two options was negligible (< 10 g), with the infill variant coming out slightly lower in consumption.

Good lord no. Don’t do that. That would be a waste of filament and also cause a host of other problems for you.

Just to be clear, it is the “hoping to use infill to get some support” that your response is aimed at, right? Out of curiosity, what kind of problems could I be looking at for this?

In the meantime, I’ve been printing some smaller bins of about half the height of my problem where I increased the wall thickness of the model from the default 0.95 mm to 2 mm, and used 3 perimeters, which resulted in fairly sturdy walls.

Looking at the same bin with 2 mm walls without infill, and 3 mm walls with infill, there is barely any difference in material usage.

I was writing up some additional questions as I didn’t quite get your suggestion, but while writing the response I think I understand. You suggest that I increase wall thickness in the slicer settings to match the model thickness, and not only in the model?

I was hoping to use infill to get some support between the outer walls and avoid having to use too much plastic and not having a single, free-standing wall.

If I understood you correctly, do you have a suggestion to what a suitable wall thickness would be to avoid the issue I described?

We would need open source cars which will never happen.

:'(

When I initially scanned thtough the headlines, I read this one as “ASUS plans to produce RAM problems” and thought “Yeah, of course they are”. My expectations of companies seem to be very low in general these days…

That’s a weird thing to present as an absolute truth. As someone who has exstensively used both Windows (3.1, 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10 and 11) and macOS (from 2011-2022), and now using KDE Plasma on my daily driver laptop, GNOME at work and Cinnamon for my living room machine: all three Linux DE are superior experiences.

Surely there are people who would prefer Windows and macOS over them, but it is highly subjective.

I would use Audiobookshelf as a source for Music Assistant, and then play them via Music Assistant. That way I can use my Sonos speakers (and eventually Snapcast speakers), synchronize across rooms etc. If I had to use Audiobookshelf directly, I would either play it from my TV with the TV on (only other way I can use my Sonos Beam) or on my phone with a Bluetooth speaker or headphones.

How voluntary is it when these platforms have a monopolistic grasp on how consumers access music these days? And the more people believe that the artists are actually fairly compensated from this model, the firmer this grasp becomes. What choice do they have of being there if they want to have any kind of reach?

A Spotify Premium subscriptions will cost someone 156€ a year. If that person instead spent that entire music budget on purchasing albums from select musicians according to the enjoyment they derive from their works, or buy concert tickets or merch, and decides to pirate the rest of their music listening, what changes? For the consumer, they are now left with actual, irrevocable access (legal and illegal) to the same music you had rented access to before, and have spent the same amount of money. For the musicians, the ones who received the purchases are left with much more of your dedicated music spend, and the rest will have marginally less (their share based on total streams of your monthly subscription x12). For Spotify and Taylor Swift, they receive marginally less money (but more than the artists you actually listen to) of which they should probably not have received to begin with.

I’m not sure how you think Spotify compensation works, but it is not a “one stream and you get paid”-deal, but rather a revenue share model where artists are compensated from a large pool by total streams. The main share of your Spotify monthly subscription that goes to compensating artists goes to Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny etc. Being a top listener to your favorite, but underground band contributes negligibly to what they actually get paid.

If you care about their compensation, buy the album as directly from them as possible, or buy merch/go to concerts, and recommend their msuic to other people so they might end up paying customers. Subscribing to Spotify and thinking they get a fair deal out of that is not the way, and increasingly not the way (with their GenAI-shenanigans).