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.

I have Mint installed on my Aunt’s laptop, which she basically never uses. Fun thing I learned: APT can get constipated if it doesn’t run in a few months. It got itself somewhere you couldn’t GUI out of so I had to use the terminal. It needed something like an apt clean or an apt --fix-broken or something, the error message it gave me told me what command to run, but that needed to happen.

I think you’re alright, Mint’s whole thing is being defuckulated Ubuntu.

I have never looked at math and saw this beauty people describe. Math to me is as beautiful as an angle grinder, it’s a useful tool that hates you and plots your demise.

I seem to remember hearing this story: Back in the 2000s, Google did all their back-end stuff in C++ to make sure it was performant, and when they acquired Youtube they found it was made in Python, slow to run, fast to develop.

The one that gets me is the cat treats that list their flavors as “With Chicken.” Like, that’s the back half of the sentence, where’s the front half?

I can’t see this product without thinking of astronaut Chris Hadfield. He tells a story of going blind in space, because they apply a surfactant to the inside of the EVA helmet as an anti-fog coating, it’s basically a mix of oil and soap. And a drop of it got in his eye, while in a spacewalk, it stung and his eye slammed shut and began to tear up, and because zero g, tears don’t fall, so it just pooled in his eye socket until there was enough tears for it to spill over the bridge of his nose into the other eye.

“Now we use Johnson’s No More Tears, Which is what we should have been using from the beginning.”

Funnily enough, my fiber provider advertised my internet speeds as “up to 600Mbit/s” and I get about 630 in practice.

“All this slicer stuff”:

So an STL file stores the shape of an object by defining triangles by their vertices in 3D space. Kind of like a giant 3D connect the dots puzzle. I’ll note here: This is a close but imperfect approximation of a shape, especially curved surfaces are actually highly faceted. Other file types like AMF or 3MF or something might be able to do true curves, I’m not sure. An STL only stores the surfaces of an object, it is up to the program that is reading it to interpret the interior as hollow or solid or whatever.

Your 3D printer can’t understand an STL file. It’s a fairly simple machine, it’s got a couple heaters, a couple fans and a few motors, and it needs to be told what to do with them in very direct terms. Most 3D printers use a command langauge called G-Code for this; a line of G-Code might look like this: G1 X35.386 Y181.683 E27.01397 I actually copied that line out of a G-Code file. It’s commanding the printer to move the nozzle from its current position in a straight line to an X, Y and E position. E is the extruder axis, get used to that 3D printers actually track motion in 4 axes. G-Code is designed to be human readable and writable, and I suggest you learn a little bit about how it works for reasons I’ll get to later, but for the most part you’re going to use software to automatically generate G-Code, using a slicer.

A slicer is what we call 3D printer CAM software. 3D printers usually create objects by laying down thin, flat layers of plastic that can be described in 2D terms, so the software “slices” the model into a bunch of horizontal cross sections to arrive at a 2D shape, and then uses an algorithm to draw that shape using lines of extruded plastic. G-code has commands for curves and such but most slicers just use a series of very short straight lines.

The general algorithm is going to be something like “draw a few laps of this layer’s outline. Color inside the lines, and then move the Z axis up a fraction of a millimeter and do it again.” Things like how many laps it does drawing the outline, how densely to color inside the lines and in what pattern, along with what temperatures to heat the bed and nozzle among many other things are adjustable in the slicer’s settings. Almost all of the 3D printer’s behavior is actually decided by the slicer.

Including the little routines it goes through at the very beginning and end of the print. You’ll find a page in the settings that allow you to write custom G-Code that it will copy paste at the beginning of each file, at the end of each file, and sometimes between each layer. I have a Prusa-style bed flinger printer, and I added a command to the end script to run the bed all the way forward as if presenting the model, to make it easier to get to for removal. This is why I said it’s wise to learn a little about G-Code, so you can add customizations here.

Additional tools: I like to keep a pair of needle nose pliers near the printer to grab oozed filament, some side cutting pliers for snipping filament, I have some dedicated allen wrenches for the common adjustments on my machine, and a razor scraper for removing prints from the bed. Your machine may have different features than mine so adjust accordingly.

Oh just give it a minute. Europeans pretending they’re not following right behind the US, that their own right wing retards aren’t consolidating power.