That trucker is definitely toast. Time for replacement.

Both of my Qidi machines have been plug in, load filament, and print. My current X-Max 3 also provided a rather polished out of the box experience with an on-screen guide and everything. I would much rather have a Qidi than any Bambu machine at this point.

I’m a little disappointed that they’ve apparently recently abandoned their homegrown fork of Prusa Slicer in favor of a home grown fork of Bambu’s slicer, but here’s hoping Bambu’s current litigious fuckery will cause them to rethink that strategy. Still, their stuff is open source enough that there’s nothing stopping me from using any other slicer with it if I felt like it. Or, indeed, any other firmware.

Agreed. I’ve got two bird feeders made out of the stuff just cooking away in the sun year round and they’ve been fine.

Yes. And I suspect due to its low temperature resistance (this an intuitive guess; I’m not exactly a materials science engineer) it also exhibits very poor cold creep/permanent deflection characteristics. ABS is actually the best of the bunch there, probably hand in hand with ASA.

However, one thing people are often surprised to learn or discover about boring old PLA is that it actually has among the highest layer adhesion strength of the commonly available materials, I believe second only to polycarbonate, and it’s also the most rigid of the commonly available (non-filled) materials. At least at room temperature, anyway. It turns out that printing the screws for e.g. my Rockhopper or Adélie in anything but PLA amounts to being a fool’s errand.

It’s tempting to think of the litany of plastics available in filament form to consumers as a simple linear and escalating spectrum with “cheap, flimsy, easy to print” and one end and “expensive, strong, difficult to print” at the other. In reality as you know it’s not quite so simple. If anything, the hypothetical graph describing the properties of PLA, PETG, PET, ABS, ASA, Nylon, polycarbonate, etc. would have to be three dimensional.

That’s because everyone starts with PLA, and PLA has the lowest shrink and warp of all commonly available materials… which is why it’s so common and everyone starts with PLA.

Basically anything is going to warp more and compare poorly against PLA, but ASA’s shrinkage after cooling is less than half of ABS, so it compares favorably to ABS in particular. 1.6% vs 0.7% or something similar. PLA’s shrink rate, meanwhile, can be as low as 0.3% for competently manufactured blends. Shrinking while cooling is what causes warp, especially on broad flat objects.

It’s the same way they raised the drinking age to 21 despite there being no national drinking age laws nor a theoretically legal/constitutional method for enacting one. The latter was, obviously, successful.

ASA is the go-to answer. You could also try filled ABS or ASA, either glass fiber or carbon fiber. The fibers do not make it any stronger per se, but they do mitigate shrink and warp to a large degree. If you do so, use a hardened steel or gemstone nozzle.

PETG may also be suitable for some applications.

In the immortal words of Daniel Rutter (again): If nothing else, backups are necessary because at some point in your life you will confidently instruct your computer to destroy your data.

Be careful of what, spontaneously learning to fly? I’m still trying to wrap my head around what possible sequence of events could have led to hooking that bike by its forks on the pole like that while apparently causing very little damage to it in the process. Okay, he’s knocked off the front fairing and the windscreen, if it had one. But both tires are still inflated, the frame appears straight, the lower splitter is still attached, and I don’t even think the fork tubes are bent.

Just.

How?

Or constructive dismissal.

“We’ll make all those expensive whiners quit, and then they won’t get unemployment benefits. Don’t worry, we’ll replace their positions with AI. It’ll totally work. Honk honk.”

That’s only the rear wheel drive ones. There are still plenty of other idiots who were dumb enough to put down even more money for the prior more expensive variants.

Rampant incompetence?

They should, yes, but they don’t. In fact, they’ll ding you for having too many failed transactions and claim that it’s your responsibility to do something about it.

The author not only uses ASCII bricks ( ▓ ) as bullets, and not only uses silly CSS tricks to mark down animated rainbow text rather than using the four megabyte or whatever jquery library which would inevitably tempt everyone else, but also goes as far as to literally name the aforementioned CSS class “funky.”

I think I like this cat already.

Win + G if you don’t have an XBox controller connected to your PC, like I presume most people probably don’t.

RIP to the Microsoft support forums, then. Although if these get tanked in the search results that will probably be a small net benefit for society given that not a single problem has ever been successfully solved by the Microsoft support forums in the entire history of computing.

Correct. They only care about this stuff because they don’t want anyone to use it on them.

If you don’t believe me, just note how basically every single weapons ban written in the US magically has an exception for law enforcement carved into it. So… We (not me, but all you Californian people) can’t have, say, a butterfly knife but for some reason the cops can? What do they need it for that we don’t, exactly?

Curiously enough I had the opposite result with the windshield on my Shadow. Fitting it make the bike significantly more stable at speed, albeit at the expense of making the top vents in my helmet whistle. Oh well.

Interesting. Well, if I ever want to get into any of that I’ll look into it. For now, the stock firmware is doing fine by me.

All stock. What limitations are those? I haven’t run i to any that have impacted me as far as I can tell.