Slotted is the way to go. I’ve messed with a lot of drive types on 3D printed screws and I always come back to slotted, because it’s the most resistant to being reamed out. Phillips, Torx, Roberson (square), and especially Allen (hex) really don’t work very well when printed in plastic.

melt ceramic

If you’re melting crockery in your microwave, I assure you whatever it is you’re using is not ceramic. Even the earthenware stuff that cheap coffee mugs are made out of has to be heated to upwards of 1000° C just as part of its hardening process, never mind melting.

You can absolutely get silica gel beads hot enough in a microwave to melt and deform plastic containers, though, including those faux stoneware textured ones. Beware if what you have is not actually Pyrex or ceramic.

I cook the shit out of my silica gel beads in the microwave in an old ceramic pie dish I have no other use for. There isn’t a mark on it. Although I will say, you probably want to microwave your beads gently anyway because at high power levels the moisture flash boils out of them fast enough to cause them to split and shatter, or occasionally leap out of the dish like popcorn.

I have a Dell Axim X50v in a box somewhere. I imagine the battery is toast and I’ll probably have to keep it in its cradle to remain powered. It was a hell of a machine for it’s day.

I went through a succession Windows CE/PocketPC machines back in the day, starting with a Casio Cassiopeia E-115, then an Audiovox Maestro which was a rebadged Toshiba, then an HP iPAQ 2215, and finally the Axim.

The displays on the Maestro and the Axim were really something, and I wish someone would bring these back for a modern smartphone. They were rotten at color accuracy, but both had transflective displays that were fully readable even in direct sunlight. The Axim X50v also had a full 480x640 screen resolution which blew the first few iPhones out of the water on pixel density and even gave the iPhone 4 a run for its money. “Retina” display, my ass.

I had a Microdrive bunged into the CompactFlash slot on my Axim which was… several gigabytes, I don’t remember how many. I kept it packed with MP3’s, and I had a custom wallpaper with a white-on-chartreuse silhouette of a pacifier on it with the legend, “All 10,000 Songs On Your iPod Suck.”

But then the entire PDA market got swallowed in one gulp by smartphones.

I’ll bet you a shiny penny that’s what it is. The backend recompresses things to some other format, probably a low bitrate JPEG, in order to save space and/or in case some joker uploads a 90 megabyte uncompressed TIFF image to use as a profile pic, or something.

Those are displayed in browser, right? The only reason that would be happening is if Piefeed is recompressing images and their code is not smart enough to identify an animated .gif and act accordingly.

I mean, that’s already how animated .gifs work. If somehow you manage to load one into a viewer that doesn’t support the animation functionality it will at least dutifully display the first frame.

How the hell you would manage to do that in this day and age escapes me, but there were a fair few years in the early '90s where you might run into that sort of thing.

Yes, the iPhone did not and never has supported Flash. At least not officially from Apple. There was support, albeit not quite 100% complete, on Windows CE/PocketPC at the time, though. That was one of the things that let me lord it over early iPhone adopters back in the day — my pocket nerd computer could play Homestar Runner videos, and their stupid expensive bauble couldn’t. So there.

I don’t print TPU on a textured bed. I use the flat side of my build plate, which I also have coated with a giant sheet of Kapton/polyamide tape. Peeling the completed parts off of the smooth surface has never been an issue.

A word to the wise: Always run with a sheet of polyamide tape if you have a flat build plate. This will go a long way towards protecting the finish and flatness of your plate, and I have definitely saved myself a couple of times when having a Z offset that was too low and thusly crashing the nozzle only into the tape and not the surface of the expensive plate itself. You can apply adhesive and clean the tape’s surface just the same as the PEI surface of your plate, but once it gets worn out or chewed up or otherwise no longer produces parts with a pretty underside, you can just peel it off and reapply. If you’ve already fucked up the surface on your plate you can also paper over this with a layer of tape which will smooth out small scratches, pock marks, and other imperfections.

And if you really need to employ the nuclear option to get a stuck part off of your bed (i.e. if you’ve printed something with a sticky filament such as TPU or PETG and happened to have your Z offset way too low) you can peel the tape off along with the part. The tape is unlikely to survive this process, but a pack of 12 sheets is only $20 or so.

That is a mighty chunky thread!

I can tell you from experience that the strength of your part is not likely to be due to the design or pitch of the threads but rather down to the layer adhesion strength of your print and whatever material you’re using. Even a dinky 1.0mm thread pitch is perfectly capable of ripping the layer lines of a print apart, and your point of failure will be the layer immediately below where your countersunk head contacts the base of your nut and/or part it’s screwed into, the exact moment you overtorque it.

I have a bit of experience with this sort of thing. Actually, these days, probably rather a lot.

Your thread creation approach is similar to mine but I prefer to use an additive helix on the male thread, and then a matching subtractive one on the nut or female side. I find this makes it a little easier to tune for good engagement. If you need to make multiples in a single assembly you can draft clone your sketches to make them all the same. Change one, change them all. You can just use triangles to create both the male and female helices, unless you want to make the tips of the threads flat in which case you can draw a trapezoid.

There are various threaded fastener workbenches and plugins available, as others have mentioned, but I prefer to do things the hard way since I came up using FreeCAD in not only the pre-1.0 era, but even pre-0.21 back when the hard way was the only way to do anything and there was no path forward except to Git Gud. If you have specific design parameters in mind I find that building screws manually provides much more flexibility. That, and not having your file explode in your face if you happen to open it on a machine that doesn’t have your full selection of plugins installed is always nice.

Old people are actively using tablets. Lots and lots of them. A significant cross-section of my Boomer-and-up client base uses an iPad to do absolutely everything. It’s broadly the same experience as what they have on their phone, so I guess it’s familiar, but the screen is giant so they can actually see it. They seem to like that.

Especially since the majority of computer users worldwide now no longer use a PC to do their computing. The average consumer now uses Windows only at work. Their personal device, whatever it is, runs Android or is some manner of iDevice, two platforms which have thoroughly eaten Microsoft’s lunch.

It’s too bad for Microsoft that their mobile platform – Windows Mobile, er, I mean Windows 8 RT, er, actually it was Pocket PC, um, no wait, it was Windows CE, et. cetera – all bombed so spectacularly, and the most recent one mere moments before Google took over the world.

I imagine Microsoft is no longer eyeing private users as a cash cow except purely as advertising targets.

It’s only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses, and the days of Windows as a standalone OS will be over.

Before anyone gets too excited, this still requires sintering to finish your part, i.e. it has to be baked to a metal-fusing temperature in a special purpose kiln that is so expensive that it’ll require a mortgage to buy one, or you’ll have to send all of your parts away to get processed and wait for them to get sent back.

The headline here is that this stuff requires less postprocessing in that regard, but it is still absolutely not for hobbyists or home printers.

If it is, their stupid model forgot a “more” in this passage:

Password compromise is no joke; it leads to account compromise and that leads to, well, the compromise of most everything you hold dear in this technological-centric world we live in. It’s why Google is telling billions of users to replace their passwords with much secure passkeys.

(Wow, much secure. Very password.)

“Moooooom! They’re looking at me!!!”

I personally do not trust ISP provided routers to be secure and up to date, nor free of purposefully built in back doors for either tech support or surveillance purposes (or both). You can expect patches and updates on those somewhere on the timescale between late and never.

Therefore I always put those straight into bridge mode and serve my network with my own router, which I can trust and control. Bad actors (or David from the ISP help desk) may be able to have their way with my ISP router, but all that will let them do is talk to my own router, which will then summarily invite them to fuck off.

Likewise, I would not be keen on using an ISP provided router’s inbuilt VPN capability, which is probably limited to plain old PTPP – it has been on all of the examples I’ve touched so far – and thus should not be treated as secure.

You can configure an OpenWRT based router to act as an L2TP/IPSec gateway to provide VPN access on your network without the need for any additional hardware. It’s kind of a faff at the moment and requires manually installing packages and editing config files, but it can be done.

You can even skip step 2 by using one of the IoT editions (either Win10 or Win11) which come minus the prepackaged bloatware.

Microsoft is mostly interested in making everything bullshit for home users. If you convince them you’re an enterprise customer, preferably by running up the old Jolly Roger, suddenly your life is a lot easier.

That, and as a first time rider it’s probably a good idea to have a bike with all of the safety features – like brakes – known to be working. And without the possibility of mystery stalling issues or randomly conking out on the road, or bits falling off, or suspension components being wonky, etc.

It’s much harder to learn to ride on a bike that doesn’t friggin’ work right.

Try to find one that hasn’t been cut up too badly (“cafe”, “bob”, etc).

This is the way.

I’ve lost count of how many times my idiot friends have gotten themselves ripped off by buying a bike with half of the frame cut off just so some asshole could make a bobber, or whatever the fuck, to the point that it now won’t pass state inspection anymore. So they’ve just dumped it on Craigslist in the hopes that they can get out of it and make it some other sucker’s problem.

Of course said other sucker inevitably winds up bringing it to me, Captain Wrenches On Stuff, to bail them out.

You ought to need a license before you’re allowed to buy an angle grinder…

I almost bought one of those but I wound up with my Orion instead, because everything was unobtainium during COVID.

I don’t see any luggage on there. Did you carry all your kit in a backpack? If so, good on you. That’s dedication, right there.

You would be amazed in the industrial world. There are tons of large and incredibly expensive special purpose machines that are operated by super antiquated PC architecture computers running geriatric operating systems, sometimes still even DOS or Windows 3.x.

Think industrial CNC mills and lathes, presses, pick-and-place machines, specialty lab testing equipment, electron microscopes, etc.

Process control, i.e. production line automation, is usually driven by dedicated PLCs. But the user interfaces connected to them are almost invariantly some old ruggedized panel mounted PC running Windows. An absurd number of them in my experience are still on 2000 or XP. NT4 is pretty easy to find, too.

Granted often these are not networked, and in cases where they are they’re not connected to the internet, or may even talk to other workstations via RS-485 serial (!) or some other gimcrack method that is unlikely to be a vector for modern malware.