100% with you on places like Culver’s. At McDonald’s new price point I would rather go somewhere slightly more expensive and get better food and/or experience.

Best documented, supported, and repairable commerically available printer - absolutely.

Something like a Voron probably qualifies as even more open, since all the designs are freely available and the parts are off the shelf, but you’re going to need to be able to troubleshoot yourself or rely on forums for help.

I completely get the eat the rich mentality. At the same time, it really doesn’t make sense to rebuild some of these places. We’re all paying for it one way or another.

/a rub living in a flyover state that’s very boring from a climate change perspective, at least so far.

They have a mode called stealth mode that should reduce the quantity of noise produced by the steppers: https://help.prusa3d.com/article/power-modes_2213

Evidently the mk3 was significantly quieter than the mk2 with this mode enabled.

You’ll be fine on a balcony. Prusas are fairly quiet. I have an enclosed printer (a Voron) and it’s fairly quiet. I WFH 2 days a week and am able to have it printing 10 feet from me while working and on calls without issues. I wouldn’t call my old unenclosed printer loud, but it wasn’t quiet either.

That sounds like a pretty sweet gig. Legacy companies especially are filled with lots of opportunities for hacky automation that can substationally improve the day to day lives of worker bees. The trick is getting leadership to support that kind of work. It sounds like you’ve been able to succeed in that regard, so kudos.

Also, my career has caused me to realize how much important stuff around the world relies on some idiotic code snippet someone wrote “as a temporary fix”.

If it’s stupid and it works, is it really stupid?

It’s always fun watching the clash between this reality and compliance/safety/regulatory folks, lol.

Or doomcube, those should probably be in detached buildings. Or you like to print filaments that are high on fumes and don’t have a great way to vent.

My oldest pair of headphones is a pair of Sennheiser HD650s that I bought over 20 years ago. Their headband snapped a few years back, but I was able to track down a spair. They recently got a fresh pair of pads too, but have otherwise been going strong. They have gone through a bit of a boom/bust cycle of usage and are currently seeing near daily usage again.

As someone who recently “upgraded”, I agree. My prior pair of headphones are nearly as good as the new pair and have some functionality that just isn’t offered anymore (lots of physical buttons).

I have a pair of Plantronics 8200UCs that I very recently bought pads for. The first set lasted me since October 2021, so I should be good for a while again. They sound pretty good for music, support multipoint (multiple devices pairing) and aptX HD, have a dongle for teams certification, they support sidetone, their voice feedback is fantastic (muted prompts, etc), and have good physical controls (power switch, dedicated mute button, play/pause, ff/rw, volume, answer/hang up, etc). I wish they had a slightly better microphone and better ANC, but they largely get the job done.

I went down the headphone rabbit hole this holiday season and other than better ANC and transparency mode, which the 8200s lack completely, it turns out that I really wasn’t missing out on much.

So: keep them, unless there’s a very specific reason to ditch them.

Drinking age is set by each state but that hasn’t stopped the feds from tring to influence things.

Very cool, glad to hear it worked out so well!

Local or did you need to travel? Even though you were “only” performing for say ~30 minutes/day were you able to do any other work those days?

This does seem like a good hourly rate, but if you had to travel there and back, and couldn’t do other things for $$ in your free time, the deal doesn’t become as good sounding.

The scanner will only work if your model is absolutely flat. I spent some time trying to model a baseplate for my camera that I wanted a glove like fit on. In the end I had to iterate a ton. I suspect this was due to

• The camera base had a 1mm or so fillet around the edges and the scanner has a very narrow focal plane. This made it hard to precisely place the spline
• I was probably a bit too obsessive about the tight fit initially and would have been better off starting with a looser one

Good luck!

+1 for a flatbed scanner. Put a ruler somewhere on the bed for scale. If you use fusion 360, you can add an image to a sketch and scale it to be the correct size. That said, if you’re going for a perfect fit it’s really hard to beat a pair of calipers and things like radius guides unless it’s a super complex shape.

Great call out on lens distortion. Photoshop, along with most other high feature image editors editors, will often have a lens correction option if they have a built in profile for your lens. Darktable is a good FOSS option. You still need to be absolutely parallel to your object though.

Straight off the printer! I’ve never tried annealing and the minimal amount of poking around has been somewhat inconclusive. I tend to change materials when I want different physical properties. The vast majority of my prints are functional, and don’t need to be super pretty, so I buy mostly ASA and PETG these days.

IME, PLA prints nicer than PETG, which in turn prints nicer than ASA. Also IME, ASA supports are super nice to remove. PETG is a massive PITA.

Thankfully, I haven’t had a print that demanded very nice surface finished and also strength/ruggedness.

They’re under an intermittent load, but it’s probably not very high. Interestingly, the parts don’t seem very brittle. I suspect the exact materials in PLA+ probably vary wildly between blends/companies, so their material properties likely have some variation.

I wonder what the various companies blend into their pla+. This stuff is from a company that’s since gone out of business, but it seems to shrug off UI, rain, and ice/snow. It wasn’t matter hackers, but they had a similar name from what I recall. USA made and cheap, but their QC wasn’t great.

As for ASA, I’ve only printed Polymaker. I buy the 3kg spools when they go on sale and it’s hard to beat 3kg for $70 or so. I am tempted to try another brand to see if it prints differently though.

Agree on ASA. I have some PLA+ prints that have been outdoors 24/7/365 for going on 5 years now and they’re holding up really well, so that’s another good option.

I’ve been printing ASA for about a year and a half and haven’t dried a spool yet. I guess it all hinges on a mix of relative humidity in your area and how much you care about a flawless finish.

I take it you live somewhere that’s fairly sunny year round? We had a visit from a door to door solar salesperson stop be recently, so I dug in a little. We get a little over 6 peek solar hours in the summer, but come winter we’re down to around 2. Our energy use last month was about 25 kwh/day. There’s basically no chance of us generating all of that :( Add in a third of that being my plugin Volt, which charges at night, and it’s really not looking good for generating all our own power.