I can understand why some programs only allow a single copy to be opened at once, something like email makes sense. However on Linux they got this right… if you try to open a program that is already running, it switches to the screen that program is on and restores the program window to the desktop. There’s no guessing why the program “won’t open”, it just makes the logical choice that you want to see it.

Heh that reminds me of another detail from that call… the guy also wasn’t willing to reboot his computer (which would have solved the problem as well), but berated me for not knowing what I was doing for making the suggestion. Dude, it’s Windows, things break constantly and a reboot generally resolves the issue.

Oh I have no doubt he got angry that the IT guy made him look stupid. Everyone on the support desk already knew his reputation so it wasn’t going to get any worse with us. I wish I had been around long enough to see what happened with his next demotion, because there was no possible way he was going to last even a year, I just can’t figure out how he made it to such a high initial position in the first place (unless he fudged his resume and got hired into it).

At one time I worked for IBM, supporting a nationwide company. There was a top guy who (like in the above story) thought he was hot shit. I think he was something like the CFO, but his ineptitude was recognized and he was pushed out. This company allowed people to move to a lower position, and he always thought he knew more about computers than everyone else, so he took the position of CTO.

One day I got a call from him, ranting that Outlook wouldn’t open and these computers were hopelessly broken. The normal procedure was to remote connect into the caller’s computer to directly fix any problems, but he decided he was smarter than the tech support people, and refused to allow me to access his machine. Fortunately I had direct contact with the on-site tech guy, who knew what he would be facing and went to the CTO’s office.

When he got back a couple minutes later, I asked him what the issue was. “Outlook was already open, it was just minimized to the task bar.”

What kind of crops are you going to grow at 125°? That’s still within OP’s specification of triple digits and with temps getting hotter we’re likely to see a lot more of this happening within our lifetime.

Yeah I think there’s some good ideas that have been built up with the ABL devices over the years, and that mesh leveling seems great. However I also feel like more people should take the time to get their beds physically as flat as possible first, because otherwise your printer spends a lot of time micro-stepping the Z, and I’ve seen some mesh maps that looked absolutely horrible.

Playing around with arduino devices, I have some laser rangefinders that seem like they could work well for an ABL. That might also be a good way to map out the idea I mentioned about creating a thin full-bed shim to get a truly flat bed, and after that perhaps you would only need to do a fast four-corner calibration with the ABL to make sure nothing has changed.

I’ve never had auto-leveling on my own printer, but the one at work has it and I wouldn’t want it. It was great for the first couple years, then the sensors started suffering from corrosion and now it just doesn’t work for crap.

So on my own printer (fully manual) I have always treated the paper test as nothing more than an initial step to make sure the nozzle doesn’t plow your bed during the leveling process. It will get you close, but not close enough. To really dial in your bed, you need at least a 5-point 1st-layer print test so you can really get that initial layer adhering nicely at all points, and this of course performs the calibration with the bed at full heat so it matches conditions during actual prints.

The biggest problem I had was my aluminum bed was badly warped when I got it, but fortunately just bowl-shaped. I cut CD-sized discs of aluminum foil to build up the center – 13 layers in total, then put a glass or G10 bed over that to really get a flat surface. I finished mine with a PEI sticker on top of the G10.

Another problem is that all beds will be completely unique from each other. I have one of the original Ender 3 Pro printers, and purchased a Creality glass bed with it. There was nothing that wouldn’t stick to that bed, and I used a 10mm calicat (which has 4mm feet pads) as my tests for all new filament. Clean the surface occasionally with 91% ISO, and life was good… but after a few years the surface wore out and I was forced to get a new bed. Ordered directly from Creality again, and man, nothing at all would stick to that piece of glass, even for large prints. I tried everything down to brake cleaner to solve the problem and finally gave up on it. That’s when I started working with the G10. The point of this is that you can tell someone a particular bed will solve all their problems, and you will be wrong. The reality is that sellers use different manufacturers to make their product and you never know what you’ll get.

Your observations about the bed warping from the tightness of the screws is interesting, I never thought about that part before. I have heavy springs under my bed, and I have always suggested people get those springs as tight as possibly without being completely closed, then adjust the Z-switch to that point before you start your leveling process. Tight springs means the screws should never wander. It’s been around 3 years since the last time I even touched my leveling screws, and I just fired up the printer and ran some new pieces last week without any issues. A good tool is one that you can ignore for a year, then use it without having to recalibrate. Anything else is just frustrating!

There are a lot of suggestions we can make to help newcomers get their bed leveling correct, and there are a lot of variables that we simply can’t account for including manufacturer defects. One idea I had years ago but never got around to trying is to print a thin sheet of filament the size of the entire bed, ironed to create a top surface perfectly flat to the nozzle but taking up any imperfections in the aluminum plate. Then put a thin bed over the top of that, and you should have a perfect surface that lasts nearly the life of the printer. Seems like a good idea, but how do you figure out where to fill in those first layers until you have a final layer that covers the full bed?

Oh I have a pretty good idea about that… But I was actually referring to the fact that Trump’s platform was the first thing attacked after he bombed the country. Yeah it would be great if we had a government that was focused on letting the various agencies do their jobs rather than dismantling everything that keeps us safe and healthy.

When they’re talking about “poorly secured US networks”, they’re referring to Truth Social, right?

Now if only Sony would get their shit together and start making a compact version of the Xperia line again.

I suspect a lot of that has to do with the entitled way people are driving these days. If you leave a car length gap, some kid will wrecklessly attempt to cram their way in because your lane momentarily moved slightly faster.

I still think rear signaling could be improved dramatically by using a wide third-brake light to show the intensity of braking.

For example – I have seen some aftermarket turn signals which are bars the width of the vehicle, and show a “moving” signal starting in the center and then progressing towards the outer edge of the vehicle.

So now take that idea for brake. When you barely have your foot on the brake pedal, it would light a couple lights in the center of your brake signal. Press a little harder and now it’s lighting up 1/4 of the lights from the center towards the outside edge of the vehicle. And when you’re pressing the brake pedal to the floor, all of the lights are lit up from the center to the outside edges of the vehicle. The harder you press on the pedal, the more lights are illuminated.

Now you have an immediate indication of just how hard the person in front of you is braking. With the normal on/off brake signals, you don’t know what’s happening until moments later as you determine how fast you are approaching that car. They could be casually slowing, or they could be locking up their wheels for an accident in front of them.

Why only “most” of the original block characters? There were only 128 characters to begin with, so why did the creator stop?

Since I’m 57 and have paid some attention to how I’ve changed over the years, perhaps I can add a little insight? Quite frankly, you get tired. I’ve been on the scene since the home computer revolution took off and I’ve seen so many things come and go. It’s not that we can’t learn new forms of communication, etc., but rather that after awhile you start asking yourself why bother when the “next big thing” is going to be another forgotten memory in 5-10 years. It’s not you who are being criticized for wasting items, it’s all the people like you over the years who have collectively wasted so much. Our brains remember all those things and they add up, causing us to fixate on the wrong info (although this last bit isn’t really something that comes with age).

Last night I re-watched The Fifth Element. Afterwards I was thinking about when it first came out in 1997. My god, that’s 28 years ago. I remember things from the 90’s. I remember things from the 80’s and from the 70’s. I remember that after 9/11 the 00’s were boring as fuck. But when you put all of that together, and start thinking about how much you’ve experience… holy hell that’s quite a lot to face squarely. And if I tell you something inappropriate about a co-worker… what? HR will pull me away from the monotony and have a talk with me? Experience tells us what we can get away with, and sometimes it’s fun just to see what people’s reactions are.

So yeah, I’ve observed these things, but I refuse to be pulled down into misery and monotony. Keep yourself busy doing things that you enjoy. Never be afraid to go down the rabbit hole and learn crazy new things. I’m working on assembling a couple swords from parts, looking into bluing some steel pieces I made. And just this week I learned about “rust bluing” which is a crazy concept but is easy to do at home. I learned something new and fun, and I refuse to ever stop learning. I may not care about Instagram or Facebook, but I installed Signal on my phone and I love being able to create my own 3D models and printing them out.

The future is always amazing. Age doesn’t make us care less about it, it just makes us more choosy in what parts are worth investing in. If you don’t want to become a listless old geezer, then don’t… all you need to do is keep enjoying the wonders of the world.

Not Calvin specifically, but pretty much all cartoon characters age really slowly, if at all. And since a leap-century only happens once every 400 years, it seemed appropriate enough to match their apparent immortality.

The year 2000 was a century leap-year, therefor Calvin could be 7 now. That would also imply he’s at least 2400 years old by our normal timekeeping.

Didn’t you see the Tesla ad on the Whitehouse front lawn?

Ah that’s good. Disk space isn’t an issue here, I have around 105TB of storage, but my desktop is an older machine with only 24GB of memory so being lightweight is somewhat of a requirement.

Agreed on Debian stable. Long ago I tried running servers under Ubuntu… that was all fine until the morning I woke up to find all of the servers offline because a security update had destroyed the network card drivers. Debian has been rock-solid for me for years and buying “commercial support” basically means paying someone else to do google searches for you.

I don’t know if I’ve ever tried flatpaks, I thought they basically had the same problems as snaps?

I’m not sure about other distros, I’ve just heard a lot of complaints about snaps under Ubuntu. Cura was the snap I tried on my system that constantly crashed until I found a .deb package. Now it runs perfectly fine without sucking up a ton of system memory. Thunderbird is managed directly by debian, and firefox-esr is provided by a Mozilla repo so they all get installed directly instead of through 3rd-party software (although I think I tried upgrading Firefox to a snap version once and it was equally unstable). Now I just avoid anything that doesn’t have a direct installer.

That’s a good point… if you can’t read messages and discussions without a login, then it’s not really facilitating public notification.