Bonus points for including an 8" disk as well, which even most computer nerds have never seen one of in real life.

You had a beagle who was immune to chocolate, too? So did I, when I was a kid. Mine ate an entire gift box of Godiva chocolates, after snatching it right out from under the Christmas tree in the middle of the night. Insofar as I can tell they had no effect on the little bastard whatsoever.

We found the wrappers for each chocolate glued to the floor in the morning, because he’s licked them nearly geometrically flat against the floorboards.

The goal of your offset is not to be zero. Actually, in a perfectly ideal world that would be impossible because it would result in your nozzle touching and dragging along the surface on the first layer. Your actual final Z offset figure will be arbitrary based on the vagarities of your particular machine including the total overall length of the nozzle and thickness of the build plate, etc.

The actual goal is to achieve an accurate first layer which results in a thickness of 0.2mm or whatever your first layer’s height is, with minimal inaccuracy. You have to set the offset of the nozzle from the plate via Z axis adjustment such that there is a (literally) paper-thin gap between the tip of the nozzle and the plate. That doesn’t mean just setting it to zero. If setting it to zero actually worked, there would not actually be any reason to calibrate it…

Wiping the bed with alcohol doesn’t really remove any contamination from its surface, it more or less just moves it around. Wash it thoroughly with dish soap and running water as others have suggested and give it a real good rinse afterwards. The goal is to get oils and other contaminants off of the surface and to wash them down the drain, whence they will trouble you no more.

The vast majority of homeless people are not visible, and they are not the stereotype of the drunken incoherent bum sleeping under a newspaper on a park bench like the guy in Back to the Future.

It’s startlingly easy to become homeless simply by having a minor upset in your income, which can get you evicted quickly if you’re renting and especially so if you live in an area which has weak or nonexistent tenant protections. Lots of homeless people were doing just fine or at least close to okay before something happened. They got injured and thus lost their job. A spouse divorced them and took most of the income with them. Their house burned down but they didn’t have enough insurance to cover it. They had to escape from an abusive domestic partner. Etc.

These are just ordinary people who had their home pulled out from under them for some reason. Now they’re temporarily living on a friend’s couch, or in their car, or in a motel room, or whatever. But the barrier for entry for obtaining housing is so damn high in many places that it’s impossible for them to work up the capital to make it over that hump and either make rent plus a security deposit, or magically cough up the down payment on a mortgage.

Many of these people probably already owned a car before whatever it was happened to them and thus they still do. Even if they’re still paying off the loan on that car, that monthly payment is almost guaranteed to be less than rent or a mortgage.

Yes, but everything you listed is the kind of crap we should be teaching in high school, and aren’t. That’s because America has a fascination with transforming our middle and high schools into tiny little prisons and disciplinary systems rather than places where education happens.

In a theoretical correctly functioning modern society, college absolutely should not be necessary to earn a living except if you wish to enter a specialized field where a significant degree of additional training and accreditation is required in order to, among other things, ensure public safety. If you want to be a doctor or dentist, lawyer, architect, critical infrastructure engineer, etc., then yes. Absolutely, there should be a degree for that.

No one should be attempting to demand with any kind of straight face that it should be “required” to have a nonspecific bullshit degree to get a job in sales, marketing, retail or even retail management, graphic design, programming, etc. In fact, the vast majority of both white collar and blue collar jobs in reality have absolutely nothing to do with getting a degree other than showing employers that you’re Willing To Play The Game.

A beater car is still probably cheaper than an apartment. Also, you can’t drive your slummy apartment away if you don’t like the scene wherever it is, nor can it transport you to work. It’s also some modicum of space wherein you can lock up what stuff you do own.

If I were placed under the terms of some very specific curse where I had to choose explicitly between a car and a house, I’m sorry to say I would be forced to choose my car. Actually, if I had my druthers I would probably pick my truck over my car, because despite its impracticality for daily transportation it’s big enough to live in semi-comfortably as kind of a mini RV and would also allow me to store and transport some tools and stuff. (It’d also be much easier to use my truck to make money than a car, in some manner of hypothetical sudden destitution scenario.)

There is no surer way to ruin a work of literature for someone than to force them to write a book report on it.

Or switch Firefox to reader mode (F9), which usually reveals the content of the article with any extraneous CSS trickery removed.

Authoritarian fuckwits making sweeping ultimatums to change typefaces for spurious, racist, and political reasons?

Believe it or not, this has happened before. Perhaps most famously… yes, guess who!

The Quest was never not Facebook. Meta/Facebook bought Oculus in 2014 and even the OG Rift wasn’t released until 2016. Arguably only the DK1 devkit units were produced not under the Facebook umbrella.

The major difference was that they weren’t playing it up at the time and they didn’t yet require you to have a Facebook account just to use the damn things. That came later.

Same way I didn’t know about the -U update parameter, I’ll bet you. You ask yt-dlp to list its flags and arguments and it spits out a listing into your console that’s about nineteen miles long because apparently it can do anything.

The only command line tool I use regularly that’s comparably capable and even more byzantine is ImageMagick.

Task Manager is launched by the listener in winlogon if you use the Ctrl + Shift + Esc method though, right? I’m pretty sure you can still launch Task Manager, and from there attempt to relauch Explorer, even if Explorer is borked or not running. You’d just have to know how to do that and that you can.

That’s what I always do when Explorer’s ears inexplicably catch fire and I’m either too lazy or too naively hopeful to reboot.

For anyone following along at home, Windows Explorer is also responsible for displaying the start menu/taskbar. In the example in the article there’s something else funky going on inside Explorer, though, because the taskbar and even the desktop icons are all there, it’s just not rendering correctly. (Explorer is also responsible for showing all of your desktop icons.)

I generally upvote stuff to reward engagement and effort. Anything I pass by that looks like a creative work someone is putting forth themselves I’ll upvote. Also pretty much any response to anything I post or comment on. Often times comments I respond to as well.

I only downvote utter bullshit, i.e. people spouting things that are categorically not true, or bad faith arguments, or just people being argumentative in general when there’s no reason to be so.

I don’t give enough of a flying fuck if we hypothetically disagree, only if your position is so odious that it is in fact literally objectively wrong or intentionally misleading.

Or utterly useless bots that no one asked for. I’ll downvote those, too, but I haven’t seen too many of them anymore in the corners that I regularly haunt.

It doesn’t even have to go that far. There is a no way that assault of an elected official is not some kind of high grade felony in Arizona.

Well, fuck. Just at this exact second you’ve taught me that I’ve been doing that the hard way for ages, by actually going to the project’s github page.

Anyway, another shout out for yt-dlp regardless. I get a giggle every time I see one of those sporadic news articles involving the music recording industry still whinging about piracy. Er, the record labels themselves pathologically post every single track ever recorded to Youtube to rake in that ad revenue, and it’s all free for the taking. If you decide you’d like to be proud owner of any of them forever you can just hit it with the ol’ yt-dlp -x.

I am continually amazed at the number of non-Youtube sources that yt-dlp Just Works with as well. It seems any video content posted online that you’d like to gaff can be handily vacuumed up with it, regardless of the site operator’s desperate attempts to prevent you from doing so.

I’ve never retrobrighted anything because I always had a hunch this would be the case. It turns out I was vindicated. We all know full well that oxygenation is one of the things that deteriorates many materials, including embrittling plastics, and what you’re doing with this stuff is literally just oxygenating the shit out of your plastic in order to bleach it.

For stuff that I’ve really cared about de-yellowing, I’ve always just cleaned it thoroughly and painted over it. This has the added bonus of the paint being an additional protective layer rather than a destructive chemical reaction inflicted on the material itself. Sure, it sucks that you also paint over any logos printed on it or whatever, but you can recreate those with stickers if you really care. I figure that if anybody can’t identify what an NES or Dreamcast or something is shaped like, even without the logos on it, they’re probably not invited to any more of my parties anyway.

Then they can kick rocks. Anyone who claims you “need” to use the Bullshit Machine to achieve productivity is a moron who is setting themselves up to lose. If any interviewer tries to tell me this is required I’m picking up my stuff and walking out right then and there.

If nothing else those people are outright admitting that they’re not offering stable employment because the corporate dream is that these LLM schemes will allow them to eliminate all of their coders, tech writers, artists, and marketing department. Not only this this an anathema to anybody earning a living, it’s also mathematically impossible. So why would I even want to work for them in the first place?

When the inevitable collapse occurs, these idiots will have to pay the remaining dwindling number of competent people left to come back and bail their stupid asses out, and that’s even if any of us deign to do so for them.

I don’t use generative “AI” and I never have. Not even once. What I create is my own, I can understand and document all of it, and I can maintain it in perpetuity. Every pixel I’ve pushed, every line I’ve written. All of it, without exception. That’s not changing.

The space station when it was armed to the teeth. I will remind you that at the beginning of the show they were woefully undersupplied and had a single digit number of torpedoes (I believe six), all of which Sisko fired at the Cardassians in a bluff to make them go away. Once we get to the war against the Jem’hadar and they allow O’Brien to festoon all the surfaces of the station with guns, then we’re really talking.

If you have more than one toolhead you’re not limited to just ramming different colors of the same material in there, either. You can run otherwise incompatible filaments that even require different temperatures from each other in the same print. Plus the ram-cut-and-purge brigade rarely work well with soft materials like TPU.

Multiple toolheads is the way to go if you actually want to get work done and not just slowly poop out multicolored low poly Pikachus, or whatever.