I would go so far as to say, if you aren’t interested in learning CAD or some other 3D modeling software, forget a 3D printer. Because if you rely on Thingiverse and Printables, your 3D printer is a trinket machine. You’re going to print a few toys, a benchy or two, a paper towel holder that doesn’t work, a shop vac adapter that’s the wrong size, a phone stand the $200 Creality you bought just cannot get through, and then it’ll sit gathering dust.

Which is why it’s important to starve them for attention, and thus ad revenue, now.

By actively selecting these videos, watching them, sometimes multiple times through, going back to them to show them to me “You’ve got to see this video I saw” god hate fucking dammit, she’s driving revenue toward their uploaders, which is causing them to pave over the entire continent of North America with data centers that are destroying the concept of truth itself and murdering the environment.

It’s not that hard to spot; my mother will watch them sometimes. A parrot using complete sentences and witty turns of phrase about a cat trying to attack them? Yeah no. But how do you get a “I just want to sit under my blanket, eat soup and watch cute animal videos” boomer retiree to understand she’s destroying the world by paying attention to this?

Prologue: I can’t talk from experience about the Mini, the XL, or that…$12,000 delta printer they’re offering? This is going to concern the conventional “MK” series of bedflingers and the new Core One.

All Prusa printers I’m aware of “run locally.” From the MK3S and back to the Prusa Mendel, they used various 8-bit ATMEGA 2560-based control boards which had no networking capabilities at all. You could add network capabilities with Octoprint, For awhile Prusa even included a way to attach a Raspberry Pi Zero W to the main board via the GPIO header.

Since the MK4, they now use a 32-bit ARM-based control board that has an Ethernet jack, and a removable Wi-Fi module. You can still walk up to the thing, poke the touch screen, and stick a USB stick in the side with G-Code on it, but we now have not one but two ways of controlling the printer remotely:

PrusaConnect is their cloud-based service. Either through a web browser, PrusaSlicer running on a PC or their smart phone app, you can monitor and control the printer across the internet, from anywhere. It integrates with Printables, their own Thingiverse with blackjack and hookers, and they even have a cloud slicing service. You can choose a model from Printables on your phone, their server will slice it and send G-code to your printer to start it printing. But, everything you do to it goes to the internet. So when I press the Preheat PLA button in PrusaConnect, that message crosses the Atlantic twice before the red light on my print bed blinks on.

PrusaLink is their local network control system, which consists of a web server running on the printer itself, through which you can view the current temperatures and upload G-Code (and firmware) files. That is it. You cannot so much as preheat the bed through PrusaLink. You can set it up in PrusaSlicer such that it will give you a button to upload G-Code to a printer directly across the LAN, but…

It feels really strange that I can preheat my printer either from its control panel, or across the internet, but not across my LAN.

I’ve also been getting a kick out of my new 3D printer and controlling it remotely. Even though if I hit the X+10mm button and that message has to go to Prague and back before the Nextruder nudges to the right.

Well like, the actual smart dimension tool was nice, thanks for finally joining us in the 21st century. An actual assembly workbench, even if it is a bit jank, we finally got that out the door. My understanding is a big reason that was able to go through was some old blood departed. And I think that’s a story that FOSS can tell over and over again, someone likes the code they wrote the way they wrote it for sentimental reasons even if it has the UX of a yeast infection.

It has been my experience that major improvements to the UX of open source projects comes when someone who has been there the whole time leaves and new blood replaces them, often someone with commercial interest. FreeCAD got a major bump when Ondsel came in, for example. Ondsel didn’t have a viable business model, “We’ll take the crappy FOSS joke CAD app and sell cloud services for it” which I really hope didn’t get them a single customer, and I’m really happy some of their money was deprived of them improving FreeCAD.

I haven’t had a computer with a built-in SATA optical drive in years, just the crappy off-brand old recycled laptop drive in a random housing ones you get these days that require a good USB A-MicroB cable, and good luck finding one of those. Having a proper built-in drive is nice enough that I actually want to use it.

So I was playing with some of my old CDs, and noticed that my copy of Slippery When Wet is two-sided. Bwuh?! CDs aren’t two-sided, that’s a DVD thing. Sure enough, the “back” is a DVD that has the four music videos they made for the album, and two more copies of the music, one in “even better than Redbook Audio Somehow” stereo, and one in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound that has been lengthened, mostly just additional studio chatter before and after the tracks but one of the songs, I think it’s Raise Your Hands, has a lengthened bridge or something?

So I learned how to rip FLACs from a DVD!

Weird Al’s Poodle Hat has a .mov file on it.

Had a big ol time partying like it was 2004.

It’s the power glove that really gets me. It’s so bad.

I put an optical drive in my PC recently, and I’ve been giggling like an idiot typing “eject” and “eject -t” into the terminal. Terminal commands that do something physical in the world delight me.

It’s open source, so the name has to be a diaper fire. It’s an acronym, it stands for Kool Desktop Environment Non LInear Video Editor.

Everyone I’ve heard pronounce it out loud says “kayden lyve.”

Yes, that’s a built-in feature called proxy video. It makes lower resolution copies of the video files, you edit with them, it’s a big load off your machine (and easier on RAM), you can render a low quality version from the proxy files for you or someone else on your team to preview for any last minute changes, then you can render out the entire thing from the original high res files.

Well we’ll sick Tantacrul on it once he’s done with Audacity, MuseScore, GIMP and FreeCAD.

It’s more like the RC Cola version of iPadOS but your main idea holds up.

You know, I have encountered a lot of “just pipe curl into sh” from people who absolutely should know not to do that.

Actually, Hammond would show up with something busted like Manjaro and at some point he’d manage to break Xorg or something near the end of the journey.

That seems to be what Zorin is offering, it’s Gnome that has been customized to look like Windows, and yet not forked into its own thing like MATE, Cinnamon, Unity, Pantheon or Cosmic were. And they’ll sell you a Pro version that’s got like, Gimp and Darktable and such pre-installed. I genuinely don’t see what people see in Zorin.

Can’t; I dumped Windows 8 for Linux.

Okay, so, Richard Hammond would be the first to arrive with Linux Mint! …xfce Edition. It’s the sports version, it’s lighter, sleeker, faster than the standard version.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Clarkson would arrive with Ubuntu Server, under the impression it somehow has more POWAAA!!!

James May turns up, having done this properly. With FreeBSD.