3.2 2x2 Episode 2.

I did once have a Mac user describe the Bash terminal as “it looks like breaking things.”

If you mean, why not install a load cell in the spool holder instead of an RFID reader, well…

I just happen to have four empty 1kg spools lying around, because I’m a total packrat. Let’s weigh them:

1. 343g
2. 319g
3. 300g
4. 254g

So that’s a range of 89 grams, out of just four spools. And these are all visually similar 1kg black plastic spools. I’ve seen skeletonized spools that tried to reduce plastic, I’ve seen cardboard spools, and I’ve seen spools of different sizes. How is a printer supposed to tell a mostly empty 2.5kg spool from a full 1kg one?

Then…What happens if you load one new spool, use some of it, unload it, use a different spool for awhile, then switch back to the first? Will you have to manually key in a tare weight for that first spool?

If you install a load cell in addition to an RFID reader, well then the spool’s RFID chip could store the weight of the spool, the initial weight of the filament loaded, and the weight of the remaining filament, and the printer could weigh the spool to verify that, which could catch and correct errors caused by oozing, miscalculation, using the spool on another printer, having to cancel a job mid-run because of a problem, etc. I’d kind of like this for reloadable spools. Somebody is coming up with split spools that you can buy just the filament for, and then you could reload the spool with another load of the same filament, and a printer with a load cell could automatically weigh and recalibrate a reloaded spool including an updated tare weight.

All told though, given how much it matters, I’d be fine with the dead reckoning approach done by the slicer. I mean, my personal 3D printer just turned 11, it has no auto bed leveling system, no filament runout sensor, no auto loading system, hell I haven’t updated the firmware since Barack was president, and I’m in the habit of running one spool all the way empty, and just shoving in the start of the next spool as the printer runs. I’ve done that for two-color signage and such, something with colored raised lettering on a white background or something. You can get away with shit on a primitive old clanker like mine that the newfangled units won’t put up with.

A girl sexually assaulted me in middle school.

I see it as useful for some rando with a printer as well. If you’ve got a printer to make little dinosaurs for your kid or the occasional curtain rod bracket, that little warning “this gcode file was sliced for ABS, but you’ve got PETG loaded. You sure?” or “There’s only 177 grams left on this spool, this print will take 190.” can be helpful.

If the tag is read-only, it can allow:

• marginally better loading, as the printer can heat the nozzle correctly for that filament without input from the user.
• Comparing a G-code file to the loaded filament, either to throw a filament mismatch error, or to adjust temperature settings on the fly.
• Allow slicer software with a network or serial attachment to the printer sense what filament is loaded

If the tag is writable, it can allow for keeping track of how much filament remains on the spool, by writing how much was consumed during each print. This means, when you get to the end of the spool, the printer can warn you if there isn’t enough filament remaining without having to manually track the mass of the spool.

The definition of the First World is “The United States and its allies in the Cold War.” The Second World is the Soviet Union and its allies. The Third World is everyone else. This definition places Finland and Switzerland in the Third World.

The connotation of “third world” meaning where we go to shoot those “for less than the price of a cup of coffee a day, you too can give food and water to this desolate brown child” commercials came later.

This is Izzy, aka Her Majesty Queen Isabella Greypelt, Isabella Busy Boo, Izzy Boo, Busy Butt, and The Monochromatic Quadropus.

This is Miss Chiff, aka Widdle Bit or Tiny Tux. She weighs 8 pounds and she hates everyone except my mother.

By definition.

I saw this thread a couple days ago, and I"v ebeen giving it a couple days of thought, and I think I just now came up with the succinct answer:

Woodworking lets me get what I want.

Just about anyone making videos about woodworking talk about “what I want” a lot. “I mixed a little bit of aniline dye into the stain, and that gave me the color I want.” “I’ll use the cove bit for the first pass, then use the roundover bit on the second pass, and that will give me the profile I want.”

Building things myself lets me get what I want, not settle for whatever someone else built down to a price.

Star Trek needs to be taken away from Paramount while it still has a good name.

At this point my laptop is just my away mission machine and a backup. I do just about all my computing on a desktop PC these days.

My x86 tablet exists almost entirely so I can have a running copy of FreeCAD in my wood shop.

I always figured that the Master Sword should have been unbreakable, just a mediocre weapon against normal enemies but very powerful against Malice’d enemies. Like it should have been a 10 sword when not glowing, and 100 when glowing. Because the Master Sword is Sting now.

I don’t think that’s true. Take Little Rocket Man, that achievement is a special challenge run that encourages people to replay through the game, probably after they’ve beaten it naturally, and then they see that achievement in the list and they get some more fun playing through it doing this weird thing.

Subnautica’s achievements are pretty much all on the critical path, only two (launching a time capsule during the end game sequence and hatching a cuddlefish) are reasonable for a first timer to not do. These serve more as useful metadata for both players and the developer. For example, the achievement “Get your feet wet” stands at 88.7% of players have gotten that achievement. 11.3% of players have played Subnautica but haven’t gotten into the water? You can look at the achievements in the order a player would probably do them, and you can see where players tend to fall off, and in fact it makes 100% sense to me why it does where it does. If a lot of players start the game and get early achievements, but there’s a sharp drop in the mid-game where players fall off, maybe you need to look at the mid-game, especially if it’s an early access title like Subnautica was, or you can learn from how players interact with this game and apply that knowledge to your next one.

I mean, I’m going to invite everyone of every age to strip bottomless, take any “back in my day we didn’t have your fancy [whatever]” bitching an moaning you have to do, dip it in honey, roll it in sand, and cram it up your exposed ass.

I’m 38. In my mid-20s, I taught flight school, mainly to people twice my age, and this included a fairly large section on reading Sectional Aeronautical Charts. I’ve got zero fucks to give for someone 7 years my senior pulling “back in my day we had maps” shit.

Breath of the Wild does it both wrong and right.

Weapons in BotW are almost like ammunition. A given sword or club or whatever does so much damage per swing, and will last a certain number of swings, so it represents an amount of damage you can do to an enemy. This system is at its best when you break a sword over an enemy’s head, pick up his weapon, and then keep beating him with that. Problem is, there’s only so cool weapons can get. Players that want to work hard to get a really cool weapon don’t really have a way to both play with it and keep it around. Hell, the Master Sword breaks and grows back.

BotW does it right with shields. Shields have a use case, and an abuse case. If you do a perfect parry, your shield takes no damage. Same thing happened in Skyward Sword, if you abused your shield too much, it broke. But if you used it correctly, it wouldn’t break. If you built use cases and abuse cases for weapons, for example, bashing a sword against an enemy’s shield would wear it out, but striking soft flesh wouldn’t, that would reward players for learning the combat system by giving them a way to keep their coolest swords around.

TotK…Youtuber Skittybitty did a 3-hour takedown of that game and I could add at least two hours of my own criticism.

Eh, these can be implemented well or badly.

Look at Subnautica’s achievements. There are seventeen total, seven of them are triggered by events required to beat the game, 5 are triggered by non-required but main path “players will do this” story beats, and 3 are “engage in a major advertised featuer that are technically possible to skip.” The last two are “play with this little bonus feature we included.”

I’m quite fond of a couple achievements for Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and 2, which are basically challenge runs. “The One Free Bullet” which challenges the player to beat the game having fired only one round from a gun (the crowbar, grenades, rocket launcher, crossbow I think, and gravity gun don’t count as “bullets”) and Little Rocket Man, an achievement for carrying a garden gnome from the beginning of the game all the way to the end and placing him in the rocket.

Possibly my favorite achievement in all of gaming history has to be in Portal 2. At the beginning of a chapter, PotatOS says “Well, this is the part where he kills us.” And you land on a platform surrounded by spikes and Wheatley says “Hello! This is the part where I kill you!” And then the chapter heading reading “Chapter 9: The Part Where He Kills You” flashes on screen. And then you get an achievement for “The Part Where He Kills You: This is that part.”

I’ve been looking into robotic lawnmowers, and they’re basically the same. The more primitive ones have a hall effect sensor under their snout feeling for a wire you bury around the edge of your yard, and do the “go until you hit something, turn a random amount, repeat until low battery, follow perimeter to dock” or they require phoning home in some way, shape or form.

Meanwhile, some guy’s got an open source system that runs on a Raspberry Pi on the mower itself.

I guess I’m willing to believe that some of the LIDAR or camera-only guided mowers need some serious processing power to create the maps they use for guidance around the yard, and that’s more practical to do on the company’s servers than on the device itself…except not really; we’ve got decently powerful ARM SoCs that don’t cost much, don’t take a lot of power to run, and can do that job. The reality is, you can’t get a pedometer app for a smart phone that doesn’t broadcast sensor telemetry to two continents these days.

Unicycle jousting exists.

Steam is honestly your best shot for getting a game to run, they’ve worked pretty hard on their compatibility layer.