Everybody’s touting round corners like it’s something people want. Cinnamon 6.1 features round corners! who cares?

I encountered a weird thing in my BIOS. I’ve got a graphics card and a CPU with integrated graphics, I could save power and free up some system RAM by turning the iGPU off. The option in the BIOS says “dGPU Only Mode” and you Enable it to turn the iGPU off.

dGPU Only Mode, turns the iGPU off. It makes more sense the less you think about it.

A further complaint: There’s a setting in the BIOS called “Game Mode” and what that does is turn SMT and some other TLA off. SMT is AMD’s name for hyperthreading. Learned this when I noticed KDE system monitor reporting 8 processor threads instead of 16. Apparently that is to increase single core performance on high end chips to wring a few more FPS out of single-threaded games, but meh.

Toggles are strange, now that I think about them. They’re one of the few things that have skewed more skeuomorphic over time. Or, In the Win95 era were we thinking about paper, with documents in folders on the desktop, and a check box you’d check with a pen makes sense there, where now we think of the computer as a device with switches to flip?

Either way, this is the aviator in me speaking but an on/off toggle switch should be longitudinal or vertical, with forward or up ALWAYS being ON. Toggles in UIs are pretty much always horizontal with right being ON.

There’s a game for the SNES called Act Raiser, I think it was by Quintet or Taito or Square, one of those. You play Actual God taking back the world from Probably Satan, you do this partly in a side scrolling platforming combat style, and partially in an overhead city building style. Surprisingly good soundtrack for a game as weird as it is.

it’s entirely possible somebody decanted their Scope.

Profoundly, hilariously slow.

Amazon sold me a defective planer that had sawdust in it. Ibwas apparently the second to return it under warranty.

They keep re-implementing things.

Just the Start menu. You can see how 95 evolved into 98 evolved into ME, then they changed it for XP, and they never stopped making big pointless changes. In many cases, those big pointless changes have been lengthening the process of going from the bare desktop to the thing you need by adding pointless screens and dialogs. Or, like the Start menu, they just drastically redesigned it such that a user used to Win XP tries to use 7 and they just…stare at it because it’s not what they were expecting. Windows 7’s Start menu might even be objectively better, Microsoft’s software engineers could very well produce good research documentation about UI design based on observing or polling users about what features they wanted and then they made the thing people seemed to want, but to people who got used to how it already worked the new thing was bad because it’s different.

I could be convinced Windows 8.1 is a mental unwellness simulator. In Sierra’s FMV horror game Phantasmagoria 2, the player character goes insane at work, and this is simulated by the paperwork he’s working on flashing scarier words for a split second. You’re reading this document and then near the bottom of the page an ordinary word like “recommended” turns to “murdered” for a few frames. Win 8.1’s animated tiles reminded me of that. Plus the whole “The desktop and all normal Windows apps therein is itself just an app that can be run in split screen next to special phone-like single tasking apps which pretty much only we will develop for and we won’t include desktop versions of so you have to deal with this.” I hate Windows 8.1.

What’s real fun is you can tell when they abandoned work on a project by which drastically different UI it’s encrusted with. The modem dialer looks like Windows XP, the fax program looks like Vista, some things have the flat purple stank of 8, some things have the dark glass look of early 10.

I use Syncthing for this; it syncs directories on my phone and computer, so to put something on my computer from my phone I just put it in that directory. I share my camera roll so my pictures are synced with my computer.

If you just want a “send this file” application, warpinator might do that.

Every slicer I’m aware of runs on Linux. I’ve got PrusaSlicer and slic3r installed right now. Cura is on Flathub. Hell, Simplify3D does or did offer a Linux version, though it was one of those janky .run installers where they translate the Windows install process as literally as possible to Linux.

As for modeling software, depends on what kind of modeling. I tend to use FreeCAD, but it’s mostly suitable for engineering and not art.

Ages ago when I still bothered with Octoprint, Cura Engine could be installed as a module, and you could slice an STL on a Raspberry Pi through Octoprint. I quickly gave up on that as a stupid gimmick because you pretty much always need to do adjustments in the plater, but once upon a time Cura could do it.

There is no goddamn reason to continue to use magneto ignition in aircraft engines. I’ve been a Rotax authorized service technician for 13 years, I have never seen the digital CDI installed on a Rotax 900 series engine fail in any way, and you’ve still got two. Honestly I believe a CDI module is more reliable and less prone to failure than a mechanical magneto. The only reason why we’re still using pre-WWII technology in modern production aircraft engines is societal rot.

So there hasn’t been any RAM manufactured in Europe in nearly 20 years? Is that the point you’re making?

Mainland Europe has never had a culture of computer hardware development or manufacture. They’ve been coasting on the United States and Britain since WWII. Name me a CPU architecture developed in the EU. There’s one, ARM. British.

Furthermore, Europe just doesn’t have the work ethic to run a chip fab. You know those attempts to bring fabs to the United States? They’re running afoul of American labor laws, turns out American citizens won’t work 14 hour days like the Taiwanese. You lazy ass Europeans with your 51 weeks of vacation a year don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making your own CPUs.

not that I’m aware of; I designed the part with this shenanigan in mind and used PrusaSlicer.

Three. Wordpad also existed.

See that seems like the kind of thing Matt Parker would make a video about, “Someone noticed a weird pattern in some numbers.” Like how 2 pi or the fibonacci sequence keep turning up in nature, and I just can’t muster up much more than a “…huh” about it. I mean I understand margesimpsonpotato.jpg but if you want me to do calculus you’re gonna have to bring me more than “I just think they’re neat.”

It is in fact a fairly old, homemade budget printer.

I built this printer around 11 years ago, it’s a Folger 2020 i3, the company folded years ago. This is back before flexible PEI coated steel build plates were common; the bed assembly is a simple aluminum plate with a PCB heater suspended above it at the four corners by spring-loaded screws, and then the glass is binder clipped onto that. Glass was pretty much the meta for 3D printer build plates at the time because it’s a perfectly flat material that’s cheap and easy to source. The choice of a mirror over clear glass was mostly an aesthetic choice, though sometimes it can make it easier to manually level the bed, it makes it easier to see the gap between the nozzle and the bed.

This machine is pretty legacy by now and it’s starting to show some signs of wear but it does still work.

Oh, I just about forgot: One of the best things you can do is sit and watch it print, even as it’s going slightly wrong. That can be instructive. Watch it do things like overhangs, bridges, small features, etc.