I highly recommend Astrum’s series about the Opportunity rover.

I was picturing Phalanx CWIS. doesn’t take much mampower to run one of those.

Proofing yeast is crazy to the Brits. If you say so.

For most of the history of home video gaming, a television was primarily purchased for viewing broadcast, cable or satellite TV programming and/or watching movies on tape or DVD. A household that was going to buy a video game machine almost certainly already had at least one television and a game console would be one of the things attached to it. The investment would be considered already made.

That has been true of PC gaming for very small stretches of its existence; PCs have rarely worked on the living room couch so you usually set up a desk scenario with a dedicated monitor. The average PC buyer of the last 30 years would buy a monitor along with the computer.

Yes, if you have no AV equipment at all and want to get into video games you will have to buy some kind of monitor. The typical unwashed mass who has absolutely no AV equipment and wants to play video games will likely buy a Nintendo Switch because he hasn’t heard of a Steam Deck.

Some of this I think still goes for hobbyists if they plan to buy the printer as a kit. The first (of like, eight) Prusas I built I had a hell of a time assembling the extruder mech because it’s not designed to be easy or sane to assemble, I still pinched wires, not bad enough to break anything but still. And I had built several 3D printers and a couple laser engravers prior to this.

And that PINDA probe mount is still hilariously delicate.

As a hobbyist machine that will spend most of its time powered off, they’re fine. For their gantry mechanism and the 8-bit control board, they’re surprisingly high quality if slightly slow printers.

Oh there’s another thing: The Prusa community is in the bad habit of sharing G-Code rather than STLs, because everyone everywhere has the same printer, right?

My personal printer is still my first manually leveled Folger 2020 i3 with some customization of mine, and I don’t need another.

1840s, actually. The patent was granted to a Scottish man named Alexander Bain.

First thing’s first, the telegraph. An electric circuit which can be energized or not energized at the push of a button called a telegraph key. At the other end is a solenoid which is spring loaded up, and an electromagnet on the circuit pulls down when the line is energized. Originally this was supposed to cut into paper tape to “print” the morse code message, but telegraphers quickly learned how to hear the letters in the clicks, a good telegrapher just…hears words. So they did away with the tape.

Morse code telegraphs require a single circuit to transmit an on/off keying message, the following aparatus uses five:

If I understand this right, the message would be written on non-conductive paper with conductive ink, and then wound around a cylinder that featured a whole bunch of insulated conductive pins, each kind of forming a “pixel.” A mechanical probe would check each one of those pins in turn, each pin in a row, and then shifting to the next row at the end. if it was conductive it meant there was ink there so click. So it would perform a raster scan. At the other end was paper that was coated with an electrosensitive material that would darken with the application of current, so at each pixel if the conductive ink on the original completed a circuit, current would be applied at that pixel on the copy, producing a low quality probably unusable copy. It was difficult to get them truly in sync plus it would have been hilariously low resolution. But it did somewhat function.

Well whose fault is that, the granary or the railroad?

Most white loaf bread recipes start with “dissolve sugar into warm water, add yeast, allow to proof until thick and foamy.”

I had a side gig as the printer mechanic for a small company that 3D printed bracketry for their product. They used both genuine and “knockoff” (open source ftw) Prusa Mk3s. I’d kinda like to staple Josef Prusa’s foreskin to the ceiling. I think it would make him have better ideas than the extruder-and-hot-end-assembly that those machines currently have. Deal breaking issues I’ve had with them in service:

• Nothing is connectorized at the business end. If you need to replace either of the two fans, the extruder motor, the PINDA probe, the temperature sensor, the heater cartridge, you have to partially disassemble the extruder mechanism and unwrap the wiring harness. The filament runout sensor is connectorized at the tiny little board, but…

• The wiring harness passes through a hole in the back of the carriage plate and most of the wires have to fit into one of two little slots as the extruder mechanism is attached to the carriage. It’s really easy to pinch or sever wires like this, and it means you can’t replace a broken fan or something without partial disassembly.

• The PINDA probe mount is about 3 planck lengths thick. It’s subject to some load from the thickness of the PINDA probe’s cable, it’s rather near the hot end and the heat plate, so I’ve seen them warp or break under continuous use. And it’s built into a foundational part of the mechanism so it’s not a quick swap, it’s a 100% teardown and rebuild from scratch.

• The whole thing is a demented sandwich with like 25 printed plastic parts. It’s a convoluted thing to work on, even if it’s not printed in gloss black so you can make out the shape of everything. But they print it in gloss black.

• It’s not designed to be built up as an assembly that can be easily and quickly attached and detached from the printer. In service, this makes it impossible to have a spare extruder assembly built up so when you get “Number 3 needs a new nozzle” you can swap in the spare assembly, return the machine to service, and then work on the part at your leisure. No, the production manager is breathing down your neck with a machine in many pieces. Hand me my stapler, I just want to talk to him.

• Those goddamn pressed in square nuts. If you want to re-use the hardware because one of the many plastic pieces partially broke in a way that means you HAVE to replace it, re-using the hardware is just one more jumper cable to the cornea.

It’s not specific to the Extruder mechanism, but because nothing is connectorized at the business end, you end up having to open the main board’s enclosure and dealing with shit in there, and there isn’t room. It’s turned the wrong way; the connectors and shit should be on the OUTSIDE of the printer so you could get to them easier and most of the cover should hinge or bolt off.

For an 8-bit AVR-based Mendel pattern machine they work surprisingly well when they’re in good shape but they are a PAIN IN THE TAINT to keep running in a production environment. I have the skills to do better than this but I’m not doing it for free.

We’re talking about the Japanese domestic market, right?

Cost of doing business goes up, price of goods goes up.

Cost of business goes down, price of goods stays up, profit margins increase. After all, if energy costs are down, everyone can afford to buy more, right? And then rent goes up because it can.

Paint me a picture of what you think that looks like. Here’s my painting: Everybody marches on their capitals, everyone gets gunned down with 30mm cannonfire, the Americans are gunned down holding pistols and rifles everyone else is gunned down holding pitchforks and torches.

I’d prefer not to.

Most things in the world carry a botulism risk if preserved incorrectly.

I’ve got a lot of woodtube like Paul Sellers and Wood By Wright, plus a lot of stuff about Subnautica and RedLetterMedia. Also SEA, Astrum and History For Granite, my fall asleep documentary team.

Thiquid.

Retirement is bad! You should keep working even if you’re worn out and not fit for purpose! Keep laboring!

And “chat” as a synonym of “y’all.”

Which doesn’t surprise me; it’s like how TV hosts started over-using “ladies and gentlemen” to address their studio audience and it leaked into common parlance. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a blown head gasket.” Says an auto mechanic to no one in his empty shop.

Original black and white NTSC television was 30fps interlaced. You got a half frame, every other scan line, every 60th of a second, so a full field was painted every 30th of a second. Why 30 instead of 24 like film? Because US electrical power is 60Hz. That could be used as a convenient timebase to sync signals with.

Adding color to that existing standard while still maintaining compatibility with existing black and white TVs was doable by very slightly decreasing the frame rate to 29.97, which was within the vertical sync tolerance of a television. worst case scenario you’d have to slightly turn the V Hold knob on the back of the TV set. The only 20th century analog video tech that was truly 60fps color video was VGA, a true RGB signal which AFAIK was never sent over the air.