A Reddit Refugee. Zero ragrets.

Engineer, permanent pirate, lover of all things mechanical and on wheels

moved here from lemmy.one because there are no active admins on that instance.

  • 53 Posts
  • 1.14K Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: December 22nd, 2023

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  • I donate to quite a few people close to me, as many are much worse off than my family and I are. I help them with projects, car repairs, house repairs, and dinners when things are tight. They never ask, I offer, and they’ll accept maybe 50% of the time. I keep good company.

    I’ve also put a few hundred dollars this one election cycle towards a few select political campaigns I care about, especially now that I’m in a good paying job. Not something i’ve done before, and it’s not much but enough to at least feel like I’m helping get rid of fascists.


  • People forget Musk isn’t actually technically smart, he’s just good at buying into and investing in already good ideas using money he got by playing the capital machine (and his parents south africa money).
    He didn’t found PayPal; he merged another company with them and capitalized on their already good idea.
    He didn’t found Tesla, he invested in them and then drove the original founders out.
    He did admittedly create SpaceX, but only by bringing on good engineers from the start after failing to buy ICBM’s from Russia. Yes, he tried that… spaceX has been successful only because he gave them the runway to let engineers work right.

    The cult of personality is insane, he’s just another average investor bro who got lucky in the crazy growth of the 90’s/00s.







  • Ok, so a vast majority of 3d printers do not connect directly to a PC these days. They have a self contained microcontroller.

    The workflow is:

    1. You design or download a 3D model you want to to print.
    2. Open the 3D model in a slicer software. The slicer takes a 3D model and, using a profile designed for a specific printer’s nozzle size and controller, converts the solid volume of the model into G-Code, or machine readable code that is a series of coordinates and move rates. This tells the printer where and how to put plastic.
    3. Export the G-code to a .gcode (or other) file. Save that file onto an SD card.
    4. Put the SD card in your printer.
    5. Select the file on the printer display and away you go.

    Now, some printers use a network connection component, eg Bambu printers have a wifi adapter. This let’s them download firmware updates and receive print jobs from a computer remotely without needing to move SD cards. This does require the right software, e.g Bambu printers require proprietary Bambu Studio (or it’s open source fork OrcaSlicer) that has the networking module to talk to it. This doesn’t require special driver setup though.