Yeah, well, they promised Windows 10 would be the “last Windows,” too. We know how their track record goes on that.

I’ve had a very successful lifelong policy of never giving Microsoft any money for anything ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper gnawing on the keyboard of my first 286, and it’s served me pretty damn well so far.

repair leaking pool equipment

You have a pool. You are already head and shoulders above most people, including people who are also mortgaging a property.

Racket.

A racquet is what you hit your insurance adjuster with when you’re tired of his racket.

The first gen 3 series machines definitely had some teething troubles, so waiting on the 4 is probably a wise plan.

Me, I’m mostly interested to see if they backport compatibility for their “Qidi Box” filament changer thingy (which thus far is vaporware in the first place) to also work with the Plus/Max 3. I don’t care about multicolor printing that much so I’m not about to buy a new printer just for it, but if I can slap on an add-on I just might.

Even if these are overblown, I personally refuse to tolerate setting the precedent that this kind of thing is ever okay, and once a company tries it they’re burned forever as far as I’m concerned. No one needs to be spying on me, for any reason, ever, and I will never do business with anyone who did it even if it was in the past. Trying to force people to use a cloud account just to get functionality of the piece of hardware they already paid for with no technical reason behind it whatsoever is ludicrous. My printer can do everything a Bambu can do without the need to connect to a third party’s severs. If Bambu’s cloud servers are ever disabled, compromised, or simply shut down then your printer suddenly winds up somewhere on the spectrum between having functionality crippled or simply becoming useless. That’s a stupid risk.

Bambu Studio’s extremely fishy behavior has been very well documented, and I don’t think it’s work the risk doing business with its company for any reason when so many viable alternatives exist.

Qidi does not have a proprietary slicer that phones home, and they have not been demonstrated to engage in any suspicious behavior.

My issue with Bambu isn’t that they’re Chinese. My issue is how they conduct themselves.

And notwithtanding that the damn stuff is around $78 for a kilo of filament! My other guess was polyethylene (HDPE). These two are pretty similar mechanically, both being polyolefins, but polypropylene melts at a higher temperature.

They’re slimy. Their machines use proprietary software and parts, and their software has a highly questionable always-online requirement that phones home back to their servers, which is something that really ought not to be happening with anything that may be able to identify what objects people are 3D printing. Even if they’ve walked back the always-online thing and allowed local only operation on some of their printers, that still demonstrates that they are not to be trusted. There’s nothing to say that they can’t prevent your slicer from slicing some object the CCP has deemed should not be printed, or remotely brick your printer, or just simply refuse to allow their slicer software to connect to it anymore.

Their company was founded by former DJI employees. That should really say it all.

Qidi X-Plus 3. If it’s anything like my Max 3, which is the bigger version, it ought to be plug in and use (after running the included calibration). It’s on “sale” right now for $500, but it’s always on sale. It’s also not made by Bambu, and if I were you or anyone else I would not give one rusty penny to Bambu for anything.

The draw with this thing is it comes with a fully enclosed chamber with a heater and PID to control it, and it’s the easiest time I’ve ever had printing ABS and PETG if that’s what you want to do. You can slap a 0.2mm nozzle on it easily enough if you want to print tiny stuff.

If you don’t care about high temperature materials you can get the X-Smart 3 which is based on the same system but is smaller and minus the heater, and is even cheaper.

Well, if we’re ruling out PET and PETG – PET would probably require the temperatures you describe and would be impervious to acetone, as well as extremely flexible – there is an outside possibility it could be HDPE.

HDPE filament is damn rare, though, and I’d doubt anyone would be giving it away as samples given how difficult it’d be to print with most consumer machines. HDPE’s signature tell is that it feels somewhat waxy if you e.g. scrape at it with your fingernail.

The other point here is that if the lenses a user gets don’t quite match the frame you could always just tweak and reprint the frame a bit to match the lenses. That’s not really the end of the world, but I don’t count on any opticians to understand that. The concept of a user being able to so easily self manufacture a set of frames is probably completely alien to them.

Ditching the PETG would probably go a long way. Try it in ABS or even PLA and you’ll have better shape definition and a whole lot less stringing.

Rather than reproducing the pattern in the original wholesale, you could also consider stealing the idea from e.g. this, which has a “mesh” outer wall that’s a continuous loop and thus doesn’t require a zillion retractions every time there’s a gap.

I hope you meant PLA. Printing in PVC is a hilariously bad idea unless you do it inside a lab grade fume extractor or something. There’s a reason barely anyone makes PVC filament.

PVC releases chlorine when heated which is not only incredibly harmful for you, but will also oxidize with and corrode all the metal parts in your printer and probably eventually embrittle its plastic parts as well. This is also why you should not make bongs out of PVC.

I’m using a diamond tipped nozzle, 0.4mm. I understand that smaller nozzles like 0.2 don’t play well with filaments filled with solid materials, and the glow stuff suspended in this is indeed a solid material.

Temperature may be an issue, but I wouldn’t know. I print PLA typically at 230° C, including this filament, which I am certain many people will find jowl-flabberingly appalling but that’s what I do. My machine goes pretty fast and I found that gives me the best results.

Speak for yourself. I have a full set of chainmail. Have at you, ruffian.

I think most gamers would have been perfectly happy with a trip to the Borealis just for the closure of the thing, even if the gameplay brought little to nothing new to the table other than some nice new visuals and arctic setpieces.

Instead we got Half Life: Alyx which was a stunning albeit niche experience in the same old City 17, which retconned Episode 2’s cliffhanger with another, different cliffhanger. For fuck’s sake, Gabe.

My account is so old I have (or had, before they normalized the format) a four digit steam ID. I “owned” Half Life 2 for like four months before it released thanks to getting a code free in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro back in the day. For a short and glorious flash of time in the summer of 2004, I was guaranteed a copy of the most hotly anticipated game ever, even though nobody could play it yet, and also owned an example of the fastest video card on the planet. Damned if I didn’t mow a fuckton of lawns and reinstall Windows and Outlook an a horde of septuagenarians’ computers to afford that card.

And no, they do not stop asking about your age.

Neat, but.

Even HL: Alyx left us with just as much of a cliffhanger as the end of HL2 Episode 2…

You fuck with enough industrial automation equipment and you absolutely will find yourself needing those 40 pin IDE cables, not to mention 25 pin (ugh) serial cables, and BNC.

Still.

Technology in some sectors changes very slowly.

Correct, any instant (or interrupt, if you have cards from expansions old enough to still have them) will work. Fireball is a sorcery and is slower, so instants/interrupts will resolve first.

You also have the potential to be scooped if you do not win the coin toss and don’t get the first turn. There are tons of single cost interrupts and various fast tweaky creatures that can deal small amounts of damage on the first turn, and all your opponent has to do is shave off one single point of life from you and this won’t work.