You have loads of options but you need to also start from … “what if”. Work out how important your data really is. Take another look and ask the kids and others if they give a toss. You might find that no one cares about your photo collection in which case if your phone dies … who cares? If you do care then sync them to a PC or laptop.

Perhaps take a look at this - https://www.veeam.com/products/free/linux.html its free for a few systems.

Good skills Sir! Advice noted and I will re-evaluate how I do specs.

Thank you.

Perhaps, but have you actually tested this for yourself?

PLA is extruded at 220C in my Prusa beastie. Once the filament is slapped on the model, I probably want it to to fuse to the previous layer really well and then cool really fast and become stable.

We need to provide working and results rather than “I think that”. My printer is quite close to a very large double doors to outside, which open and shut as required.

It’s complicated but PLA is bio-degradable … eventually. Not months but years. That’s much better than the horrors you see on Blue Planet II.

Plus humidity is bad for your filament.

I keep on hearing this but it does not check out for me.

I have a Prusa 3S+, self assembled. I do not do a great deal of printing and go through phases. I did a flurry of prints during the pandemic and then it rested idle in our rather cold and slightly damp study for a couple of years. When I bought it, it came with a spool of silver Prusament which worked nicely. I then bought a spool of “Sunlu” filament (Chinese firm off of Amazon) and then a box of 10 colours of the stuff.

I recently got the printer out and updated the firmware, re-calibrated it and so on. I’ve done several prints with filament that has been open to the environment for at least two or three years and its fine. I have done a print using some transparent filament which was unopened and that was fine too. The unopened stuff was vacuum shrunk wrapped so could not possibly be damp. The opened filament was stored in the original cardboard box in a slightly damp and unheated room.

For me the main issues for a decent print are:

• Adhesion on the plate. I actually used glue for a print for the first time recently
• First layer calibration. If the first layer is wrong, the rest is wrong. You need to get the right amount of “squashing” to get a smooth bottom
• Always clean the plate between prints - a squirt of EPA and a decent rub with tissue whilst the bed is heating up does the job
• Keep the guide rails lubricated - Mine whined that all three axes were too tight or just wrong and yet the Prusa app to check belt tightness and forum and wiki advice said it was fine. Any engineer will tell you to lube up when in doubt - do it! X, Y and Z.

I will try repeating a challenging print with filament that is way older now and see what happens. I printed a couple of tank models in red around four years ago. Both involved their turrets with the barrel facing upwards - that’s a lumpy cylinder about 4cm long and 2mm wide.

I have seen some notes about PLA being hydrophylic (absorbs water) on the Prusa website’s official advice but I don’t personally think it is an issue and people are probably missing another factor or factors that is fucking up their prints. I think the filament dampness meme is “cargo culting”.

PLA is heated to around 220C whilst being extruded so any water will steam off very quickly as water vapour - which is not even “wet”, well before worrying a print job.

PLA is touted as bio-degradable and it is … eventually. It is extremely stable, despite being derived from corn starch. It really doesn’t seem to care about a bit of water hanging around. That’s why I can print new hinges for a plastic garden storage thing to replace the original ones and they last through winters and summers in the UK.

So, if you think moisture is an issue for PLA filament used for 3D printing, why not do some experiments and then decide for yourself.

I’m happy to be proved wrong.

That is superb. Sadly my eyes degrade faster than the frames wear out!

I see you are on the John Lennon specials which makes it a bit easier to model. I haven’t worn circular specs since college (~1990) My current Tesco specials only have lens frame from the nasal bridge clips, over the top to about 5mm below the temple joints.

Just a thought but you might like to investigate using spring steel for the arms and PLA just for the frames. You could create a jig for joining and heat the ends of the arms up with a brazing torch (kitchen supplies) and sink them into a suitable cylinder close to the temple joint. If you go all in you can make the straight part of the arm rigid and the over ear part flexible with careful heating and cooling and whacking with a hammer!

Now, that metal work will be comfortable but might be a bit chilly. What about PLA tips over ear instead of steel?

Anyway, great job. I’m very impressed.

What are they?

I ditched Windows roughly 15 years ago and I run a MS Silver partner shop.

I daily drive Kubuntu (was Arch but I need to tick boxes). I used to teach DTP, WP, spreadsheets etc and Libre Office is fine as a replacement for MSO. Email - Exchange and Evolution EWS. I create the most complicated docs in my firm and MSO works with them OK.

I 3D print stuff and use LibreCAD and OpenSCAD. All good. Also note that there are lots of other CAD apps on Linux for free/libre and of course we have

As far as I am aware, games is the only area that Linux might fail and that issue is shrinking rapidly.

I doubt it. They make a hell of a noise and print at a rate of characters per second not pages per second. The ribbons suffered from similar issues as cassette tapes (the other ribbons that we had to deal with). The ribbon would dry out if not used for a few days and you’d waste paper and a lot of time.

DM printers were ideal in the guise of “line printers” - the big old IBM jobbies that munched through A3 landscape fan fold at ridiculous speeds. Home printers like the Epson FX80 or RX80 were at least affordable. I still remember the manual of our RX80 congratulating us on buying it and exhorting me to hug the printer on unpacking it. I suspect the Japanese to English translation might not have been the best.

We had to get a Centronics interface board stuffed into our C64 and get it working (sacrifice a chicken on a waxing gibbous moon night, etc)

It worked better on my 80286 box, some years later. I had to set it up in each application - Harvard Graphics, Word Perfect, Super Calc.

In around 1991 I was able to buy a 80486 based beastie, thanks to gift from granddad. In around 1993 I was given a HP LJ 4P so I could print out proofs for a Plymouth (Devon) tourist tat thing.

Nowadays I have a fairly elderly HPE MFP five toner humming away at home. Its on a VLAN that doesn’t get to see the internet. It just works. I won’t be “upgrading” it for the foreseeable future.

My Epson RX80’s ribbon is somewhere in landfill. The Commodore 64 however is all good and now sports a USB interface with more storage than the poor thing can possibly ever use. The Quickshot II joystick still works too.

1984ish was when the C64 was bought by my dad, from the NAAFI in Rheindahlen (West Germany, as was).

Picture the scene:

Me and brother fly home from UK to probably Dusseldorf at the end of the winter term. Its December in the mid '80s. Every now and then, Russia sends a Tupolev Bear or Badger to chug along overhead. The US sends a YR-71 over the USSR at multiples of the speed of sound. The Cold War was quite unpleasant to live through. Its quite chilly, snow tyres on the car, chains in the boot. The autobahn has the usual psychotic bunch of lane two and three drivers. Lane one generally runs at around 90mph (yes, even back in the '80s)

We get to home at the time (we move every two years or so - it is the way of things). Dad shows off the new gadget. He plugs the power lead into the video port.

Some weeks after we have gone back to school for the spring term, the C64 is returned from the menders. We get to use it in the Easter hols. It travelled to the UK and back to DE several times and also to Cyprus (WSBA). The QS II took a serious battering thanks to Daley Thompson’s decathalon.

I got it re-capped in 2019, which was all that needed doing. They were rather well made …

Start the linuxa or alinux project and off you trot. Find a better name than I did here and you’ll be fine.

You

I’m not feeling too genocidal at the moment and I’m not too sure what a big blob of capitalism looks like but it sounds like you are impugning me (int al) in some way.

If you are going to deliver a stinging attack on something you dislike, why not deploy an impassioned and pithy argument rather than … that. You do at least manage to spell it’s correctly, which is nice.

What on earth went wrong?

Arch is just as safe as any other distro, sometimes more so. Being a rolling jobbie, smaller bits tend to break at a time. If you want to live life on the edge then Gentoo is your man but even Gentoo is becoming pretty safe. You might lose your windowing system for a while but you still have links2 to get to a search engine.

♬rope and pull and brand 'em ♬

“Every subsystem is a private fiefdom, subject to the whims of each one of Linux’s 1,700+ maintainers, almost all of whom have a dog in this race. It’s herding cats”

There are three similes in that quote. When your considerations are that disorganized, you have not finished thinking everything through. Fiefdoms, dogs and cats … oh my! That’s on top of wild west and other trite, well worn and rather silly similes.

Make your argument without recourse to inflammatory terminology and similes and you slighten the risk of pissing people off.

Clarity is in the eye of the beholder or as someone once said: “You do you”.

I like to use my enterprise number and a UUID (all in lower case, for legibility). Here’s an example:

.1.3.6.1.4.1.33230.0d456e46-67e6-11ef-9c92-7b175b3ab1f1

Now you might say that the UUID is already globally unique or at least pretty unlikely to turn up anywhere else, so why bother prefixing it with more stuff? To that I say: “I need to be absolutely or at least reasonably sure … OK nearly sure”.

Anyway, you maintain a database of these things and then attach documentation and meaning to them. An editor could abstract and hide that away.

I started this post as a joke. Not sure anymore. Why get your knickers in a twist with naming conventions for variables and constants. Programming is already a whopping layer of abstraction from what the logic gates are up to, another one wont hurt!

If you just run perl it will sit waiting for input. Try perl --version

Windows GPOs are a right old mess. I’ve been managing them for over two decades. The first fuck up is the word “Group”. You cannot assign Group Policy Objects to AD groups unless you use something like ZENworks or some funky WMI filters!

Settings are applied to computers or users. Many settings are available to be set for both but only make sense or even work for one or the other. MS bought out some solution providers and that’s why you get the Control Panel and other handy stuff, rather roughly bolted on.

AD with GPOs with the extension to “local machines” is a great idea but dreadful in execution. MS didn’t want to nobble third party apps in the past so that’s why we have this nonsense. Now its all about Azure/whatevs ie MS’s cloud and subscriptions.

Now you belong us!

Linux being a Unix has NIS(+) for a directory or LDAP or AD or anything else you fancy. Ansible works for all mainstream OSs, including Windows.

So often I see people confusing and conflating authentication and authorisation, machine and session state configuration databases.

There are so many options it is almost impossible to know where to start!

Which distro is the VM running (is it even Linux)?

If you want the VM to use the host’s VPN then you will need some routing and perhaps NAT/masquerade. This is non trivial to sort out. Can the VM have its own VPN connection to your supplier?

You are starting to reach the point where VLANs/subnets and separate routers (real or VM) may be required. Depending what you use as your ISP router, we might be able to get a solution together - so what model is it and do you have any switches?

Lemmy is quite good at not being too “tribal”. Why not embrace a message as expressed, instead of worrying about where it is … posted?

For me, one of the worst issues affecting t’internets is tribalism. Us humans are hardwired to go all in on tribal affiliation. It is generally harder to find inclusive measures than it is to find exclusive measures.

If you are here then you may not be exclusively: Firefox user ⊆browser user ⊆human. Note that browser user can have multiple browsers.