It turns out there really is a market for a standalone capable wireless headset provided that it actually respects your privacy.

And all the joy of also being a small Linux computer, still with the eyeballs thing. Hit “desktop” in the hotbar on the bottom and you’re looking at a KDE environment.

Most programs can also be opened into a separate full-screen styled floating window you can stick wherever in virtual space, independent of the base desktop.

Correct, the only idiotic thing about VR is buying your hardware from Mark Zuckerberg. As the folks in the VR community here are already aware, I got my Steam Frame the other day and basically the only reason I’ve had to take it off my face since then is because the thing has a finite battery life.

You can extract the chip’s serial number in software trivially. In Windows, from a commandline:

wmic cpu get pricessorid

I’m positive you can do the same with some Linux command, and failing that certainly with basically every vaguely modern benchmarking tool. Same deal with hard drives and probably also video cards. My BIOS/UEFI even enumerates all my connected hard drive serial numbers on screen if I interrupt its graphical boot screen.

Given that the anti-cheat schemes these competitive games are literal rootkits, I don’t think gathering the user’s hardware serial numbers in order to attempt identify them is much of a stretch.

If that’s all you’re doing you can probably get away with belts. The laser engraving, for sure. Most of the commercial diode laser options are already belt driven.

A CNC for what, milling? If so, I agree with the others here. Using belts to drive a milling machine is likely to result in too much backlash to be viable. The entire point of ballscrews is that they’re (reasonably) proof against backlash, even moreso than regular lead screws. We can get away with it on our printers because in normal operation the print head and nozzle are never supposed to touch anything so it doesn’t matter. For milling, backlash in your movement system will cause your tool to kick itself off of the workpiece when its edges touch it (i.e. hundreds/thousands of times per minute) which will make it chatter, result in lousy finishes and accuracy on your parts at best, and most likely wind up with you breaking a lot of bits.

Maybe you could get away with it if all you’re doing it routering wood, or something. The moment metal enters the equation, forget it.

The key to milling is rigidity, rigidity, rigidity. If you are having chatter problems, accuracy problems, tool breakage problems, basically any kind of problem, nine times out of ten you’ll wind up tracing it back to backlash and/or your machine or clamping arrangement not being rigid enough in some capacity.

I’m sensing a pattern, here.

You can do this with most Lamy pens, too, which is where I wound up apparently by sheer happenstance. Do I have a $12 steel nib shoved into my Dialog right now beacuse Reasons? Why, yes I do. (If I sold its stock nib, which is currently safely tucked away in a box, I could probably use that to finance four or five new pens.)

I tried to do an ABS print at PLA temperature once. That sure didn’t work. Vise-versa is also an interesting time, especially if you have the lid on the enclosure shut. If you think you’ve ever seen heat creep, try having PLA in the extruder but running it at 260°C and the chamber heater on. The resultant jam required stripping the entire extruder head down to its individual components and prying it apart in the process, but I put it all back together and it still works. I didn’t even have any screws left over by the time I was done.

Like all Qidi X-Max 3 owners will eventually do at some point, I also once homed my machine without the steel build plate installed. This causes the machine to helpfully drill the nozzle straight into the soft magnetic surface between it and the heater plate. I shaved the high points off of the crater with a straight razor and continued to run that plate without any problems for several months after that. You’d never notice the difference, despite the hole in it.

For said budgets, there are also a myriad of well established tricks such as teleconverters, gimcrack homemade contraptions involving cardboard tubes and magnifying glasses, stuffing the objective of your camera into a dime store telescope or… this friggin’ thing.

One of these days I am totally going to pick up an EF/RF mount adapter and one of those just for the yuks. I imagine the optics are godawful, but it still sounds like a good time.

You still need a camera body to attach it to. But yes, you can indeed spend any amount of money on lenses if you put your mind to it. And if you’ve decided you haven’t spent enough, you can always shoot yourself in the foot by picking up a camera that belongs to a different lens ecosystem than what you’ve already got and then start building up a pile of lenses for that…

Obligatory moon:

Just bring $2200 of glass with you. No problem, bro. (Someone with an even bigger lens will surely show me up on this eventually…)

There are apps specifically to prevent this sort of behavior. Many of them can be configured to chide the person for not repsecting boundaries. My favorite was one I had back in the Android 4.x days which took selfies of the holder, inevitably up their nose at an unflattering angle, if they kept trying to swipe. For some reason people were always ready to stop and hand the phone back in a big hurry once that was happening.

Also my usual left field advice of making sure nothing is stuck to the underside of your build plate, nor trapped in between the plate and the bed. I’ve gotten bit by that one before, as I have recounted several times. Tiny scraps of filament trapped in between, or whatever. That will cause high spots in unexpected places.

I got thrown out of a public library for doing this once back in the day. It was actually my old Dell Axim X50v, so this slightly predated the widespread prevalence of smartphones.

My old Galaxy S5 would work without the battery, including bootup. So it’s not entirely unexpected that other phones could also do so. I would say I can’t imagine who would take the time out out of their day to just talk out their ass and claim something like this wouldn’t work without trying it first. Except then I remember this is the internet, and people do that all the time.

Regardless, good on you for making this all work!

I certainly do. I store mine along with my cable tester in a Beretta pistol case because it confuses people.

Approve.

Aw, hell. Do I even want to know? Or is it no less deep than buddy scaling back to producing about one comic per year now?