Something I recently learned: it is outright impossible to legally play 4k blu rays on PC.

I use Syncthing for this; it syncs directories on my phone and computer, so to put something on my computer from my phone I just put it in that directory. I share my camera roll so my pictures are synced with my computer.

If you just want a “send this file” application, warpinator might do that.

If I understand correctly, the 1541 was initially launched for the VIC20, where the datasette and several Commodore printers that would remain compatible with the VIC20, C64 and later were PET-era. This is what I think I’ve learned from Youtube, mine was an IBM household since before I was born.

Windows, like DOS and CP/M before it, was designed for a standalone microcomputer that the user had physical access to, so they lettered the drives A, B, and C, That would allow mounting 26 drives which should be enough for everybody forever.

Linux, like UNIX before it, was designed to run on a minicomputer in a university basement accessed through a dumb terminal where the end user has no physical access to the hardware, so the file system presents as completely abstract.

In the modern paradigm of local PCs attached to network storage, both approaches have their disadvantages.

I wonder how UEFI treats it; diskette drives were kind of sacred in the old BIOS days. How modern Windows handles it is anyone’s guess, I’m sure it’s been rewritten by Copilot by now.

I had reason to use an optical drive lately, and even that was a blast from the past. Hitting eject, watching the light blink and then the drawer opens. USB-based storage just isn’t the same.

Every slicer I’m aware of runs on Linux. I’ve got PrusaSlicer and slic3r installed right now. Cura is on Flathub. Hell, Simplify3D does or did offer a Linux version, though it was one of those janky .run installers where they translate the Windows install process as literally as possible to Linux.

As for modeling software, depends on what kind of modeling. I tend to use FreeCAD, but it’s mostly suitable for engineering and not art.

Ages ago when I still bothered with Octoprint, Cura Engine could be installed as a module, and you could slice an STL on a Raspberry Pi through Octoprint. I quickly gave up on that as a stupid gimmick because you pretty much always need to do adjustments in the plater, but once upon a time Cura could do it.

There is no goddamn reason to continue to use magneto ignition in aircraft engines. I’ve been a Rotax authorized service technician for 13 years, I have never seen the digital CDI installed on a Rotax 900 series engine fail in any way, and you’ve still got two. Honestly I believe a CDI module is more reliable and less prone to failure than a mechanical magneto. The only reason why we’re still using pre-WWII technology in modern production aircraft engines is societal rot.

So there hasn’t been any RAM manufactured in Europe in nearly 20 years? Is that the point you’re making?

This, I think, is related to where I draw the line between a ‘moon’ and a ‘sattelite.’ If an average human can hit escape velocity under muscle power, it’s a satellite. If you can strand someone there, it’s a moon.

Mainland Europe has never had a culture of computer hardware development or manufacture. They’ve been coasting on the United States and Britain since WWII. Name me a CPU architecture developed in the EU. There’s one, ARM. British.

Furthermore, Europe just doesn’t have the work ethic to run a chip fab. You know those attempts to bring fabs to the United States? They’re running afoul of American labor laws, turns out American citizens won’t work 14 hour days like the Taiwanese. You lazy ass Europeans with your 51 weeks of vacation a year don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making your own CPUs.

not that I’m aware of; I designed the part with this shenanigan in mind and used PrusaSlicer.

See that seems like the kind of thing Matt Parker would make a video about, “Someone noticed a weird pattern in some numbers.” Like how 2 pi or the fibonacci sequence keep turning up in nature, and I just can’t muster up much more than a “…huh” about it. I mean I understand margesimpsonpotato.jpg but if you want me to do calculus you’re gonna have to bring me more than “I just think they’re neat.”

It is in fact a fairly old, homemade budget printer.

I built this printer around 11 years ago, it’s a Folger 2020 i3, the company folded years ago. This is back before flexible PEI coated steel build plates were common; the bed assembly is a simple aluminum plate with a PCB heater suspended above it at the four corners by spring-loaded screws, and then the glass is binder clipped onto that. Glass was pretty much the meta for 3D printer build plates at the time because it’s a perfectly flat material that’s cheap and easy to source. The choice of a mirror over clear glass was mostly an aesthetic choice, though sometimes it can make it easier to manually level the bed, it makes it easier to see the gap between the nozzle and the bed.

This machine is pretty legacy by now and it’s starting to show some signs of wear but it does still work.

Oh, I just about forgot: One of the best things you can do is sit and watch it print, even as it’s going slightly wrong. That can be instructive. Watch it do things like overhangs, bridges, small features, etc.

I hope my cat doesn’t learn that trick.

They’re on a mission from Gad.

It has been my experience that you can just forget about disk space usage when sysadmin-ing an old person.

The olds that I’ve set up with computers basically don’t move in. They go to a couple websites. They don’t create files, they don’t install a lot of software, they aren’t playing all 500GB of Red Dead Redemption 2. Like, I’ve gotten ready to move files across, prepared full on network connections or brought large external SSDs to transfer files from one computer to another or to copy them off of Windows to copy them back on with Linux…half a gig of pictures, maybe.

We’re talking about folks who might not install any software on the computer at all because they live in a browser.