I’m a mech E in the medical field. We’re consistently understaffed. If I validate an Excel worksheet in Excel '08 or a Python program in 3.5 with a specific version of NumPy, we’re probably sticking with those versions for a while. Every time I bring up re-validating with the latest version, keeping one old system running the old software requires fewer resources than me or a colleague re-validating.

My whole department is stuck on one version of Python because that was the most recent version when I had an emergency project and developed a data analysis algorithm. We validated it, then as new members were added to my team, they needed a copy, so we had to keep using it. I’ll probably re-validate it to the next Python release. It’s not only unit tests, or we could automate validation. Unit tests are a tiny part of validating software for making medical decisions. And software that directly runs a medical device (like firmware on an insulin pump) is an order of magnitude more rigorous than what I do.

Side note: there are people who somehow root their insulin pumps and run algorithms on them. There’s a group that can get a PID control loop on an insulin pump that has a more simple control scheme on it (because that’s how the FDA approved it). The company has been trying to get approval to use PID control in the US for years.

I love MPFC, but some of the sketches are “meh”. For every “Battle of Pearl Harbor”, there’s a “Confuse-a-cat”.

Fawlty Towers is great. Mildly racist against the Spanish and Irish.

It takes 4 episodes to really build into the complexity. Then season 2 turns it on its head.

Red Dwarf is pretty good. Fawlty Towers is great. Someone recommended “Yes Minister” and the first season is awesome. The Hallmark of great comedy writing is if it holds up, and Yes Minister still is hilarious 40 years later.

Dark is a German Netflix show. It unfolds into something akin to “Lost” over the first four episodes. The ending doesn’t suck, and they set up the end to where it’s almost impossible to get it right. It’s not an amazing ending, but it’s impressive that they managed to make it not terrible, since it builds up to a near-impossible ending.

Squid Game is pretty great but gory. Letterkenny and Trailer Park Boys are quirky comedies with some rough language throughout.

Look at Sovol or Anycubic in that price range. I don’t have direct experience with either. A good friend of mine had two Anycubics at one point last year and he said they were easier than his Creality.

My third printer, I paid $70 for, used (ender 3 pro return). It was missing several small components, one big part (top aluminum extrusion) that required some machining with a drill press, and had a bad thermistor.

I don’t think you can get a beginning printer for $100 unfortunately. Sovol and Anycubic make printers among the cheapest that are more beginner friendly (I think) than Ender, for roughly the same price. I have a friend with a Creality and an Anycubic Vyper, and the Vyper seems to be more beginner-friendly. I have two Crealitys and I love them, but both required a ton of modifications to become reliable.

Can you check your area for a local maker space? My local library has 3D printers for anyone under 18. Universities typically have a few of different technologies (SLS, SLA, FDM)

If you have a filament runout sensor, the klipper default settings aren’t great. If the sensor activates, the printer shuts down after about an hour, losing your home position. With a part on the bed, you can’t re-home, so it’s a wasted print.

The mesh leveling isn’t automatic either. You might want to add either auto-load your default mesh leveling if you always use the same print surface, or put mesh leveling codes in the starting G-code section of your slicer.

I ran the pressure advance tuning and found that I needed a ton of pressure advance. My prints turned out much better.

I also got improvements by reducing the allowable deviation in the slicer (G-code files get much bigger, though), and I load files as STEP files directly in Prusaslicer. STL doesn’t have curves, it’s a series of planes. STEP files have geometric primitives and can have curves.

Out of curiosity, have you watched the Simpsons recently? I think, after season 31 or 32, it started getting better again. There are some really great episodes from two seasons ago.

The latest season of Futurama had two good episodes, but the rest were kind of weak. About the same level as season 9-10(Hulu season numbering). Those seasons were “meh” mostly but with three really amazing episodes (Free Will Hunting, Game of Tones, Meanwhile).

I watched Futurama trying to stay sane in grad school, as it was released on DVD. It’s straight-up comforting to watch now. Watching it when I’m stressed connects me emotionally to almost 20 years ago. I was stressed then but I made it out ok.

Seriously? I was looking at a Surface product recently, and it appeared to have an access panel for the NVME drive. I read a ton of complaints about the dimensions of the drive being unusual, but access to it was easy. I don’t think I was looking at a Surface pro though.

If a surface pro wants to be a full OS and not a tablet OS, it should be easy to replace the storage device.

Ah ok. That’s probably true. I was under the impression that a polymer that is solid at room temperature is a plastic.

Cellulose, starch, and chitin are all sugar polymers in plants and crustaceans (may be a broader group, I used chitosan from crustaceans though).

In mammals, collagen is a polymer. It’s like 30% of a humans non-water weight. Bones are composites that are tough collagen binding hard and strong fibers of apatite (mostly calcium apatite/ hydroxyapatite). I don’t think the apatite system is considered a polymer, though.

Triglycerides aren’t polymers in adipose tissue. Although plant triglycerides can split and polymerize. Which make beautiful wood stains.

This looks like it would work with any E3D V6 heat break, right?

After CNC Kitchen’s review of the orbiter, I want to add one to my CR-10 V2. Its OEM heat break is an E3D V6 design.

3D Print General had one video where I recognized an AR-15 lower being printed in the background. The voice over was on the printer or filament (I forget).

Hoffman Tactical is still on YouTube. I was made aware of this channel when researching CF Nylon. HT has several promotional videos of his 80% printed AR rifle, and long discussions about which filament to use for which part of a rifle.

It’s very inconsistent.

The one thing I didn’t like about klipper firmware on my CR-10 was the default filament runout setup. One of my first big prints (with expensive ApolloX filament) ran out. The default klipper setup waits something like an hour, with the hot end still hot, then completely shuts down.

So my home position was lost, and with a partial part on the plate, there was no way of re-homing, so it was a wasted part.

Make sure your filament runout timeout is set to 24 hours (and I think I might have made the temp lower so it didn’t burn?)

I like klipper on mine, too. I do wish the default mesh would be loaded at startup, but it doesn’t load any mesh. Which doesn’t really matter, I guess. I have four build plates, three different styles, so I’m running bed levelling pretty much every print anyways.

I haven’t dealt with HPC in a while, but Intel C compiler against MKL libraries were fastest CPU, and Nvidia CUDA was slightly easier to develop than OpenCL for other cards. I’m not sure if the situation’s changed.

For my current applications, I use NumPy compiled against Intel MKV installed as a binary. It works great.

I’m not following closely and haven’t gamed on PC in a while but:

Denovo is a technology that is supposed to prevent copying games (DRM). Not sure what it’s current state is or might be mixing it up with other DRM, but DRM is known for causing headaches for paying customers. Using excessive system resources, refusal to launch for legitimate paying customers, spyware/excessive data collected and sent to a corporation, etc. In some games, volunteers will patch bugs out of a game, and this will cause the game to think it’s cracked and refuse to launch.

Some DRM is “phone home” and can’t be played offline, so people in remote areas can’t play. And sometimes the company doesn’t want to keep servers online when the game has been out for 10 years, so people that purchased the game can no longer play.

In this case, the company let reviewers rate the game and got the initial scores and sales, then pushed the unpopular DRM update. It’s scummy. If you’re using it, then use it. Don’t bait and switch.

Polymaker polylite PLA pro. The Polymax PLA is more expensive and less rigid. The PLA pro is only $2 more a kilo than regular polylite PLA and significantly stronger. Many colors are more matte than esun PLA + which is similar in cost and performance.

For what it’s worth, the US doesn’t use imperial anymore. It’s “US Customary Units”. It’s mostly a mix of metric and units based on metric. The US uses volts, amps, watts, and seconds which are metric. The inch, by definition, is 25.4mm. I’m not sure how the US gallon (less volume than the Imperial gallon) is defined. Food content is given in calories and grams.

I’m also not sure how temperature is defined. Originally, temperature units were set so that fresh water boiled exactly 180 degrees above it’s freezing temperature. To avoid negative numbers, zero Fahrenheit was set to the freezing temperature of sea ice.

Oof. Is that the official plugin language? Siemens NX uses “grip” which is a fork of TCL. And they require purchase of a pricy package to sign and compile code so NX will run it, so we only had one programmer for our custom grip functions.

Reverse Polish notation, right? Operand operand operator?