Spotify and other such services almost certainly sound worse because they are compressed. But it’s not really a like for like comparison with vinyl. Spotify is streaming audio for people who want to play music casually in cars, earbuds etc. It offers convenience, not perfect sound fidelity. FLAC / CD on the other hand could be compared to vinyl and would win hands down for better frequency and range. The only reason they wouldn’t is if the CD master sucked and the vinyl master didn’t.

And vinyl is very lossy in its own way. The (digital) master of each side undergoes dynamic range & frequency compression to fit the limitations of the format (e.g. to reduce sibilance, track width). Then the master is cut into a lacquer disc from which a “father” is made, from which “mothers” are made, from which stampers are made and from which the vinyl record is made. So the vinyl in someone’s hand is a copy, of a copy, of a copy, of an altered digital master. The stamper too wears out so if someone is unlucky they get a pressing right the end of its life. And playing the disk can cause wow, flutter, distortion and general wear & tear can cause hiss, pop, dullness and scratches.

So vinyl will never sound better unless it received a better master than other formats.

In the 70s and 80s there were kids toys which played injection moulded plastic discs with a stylus that tracked the groove. I think you might be able to achieve something similar out of a printed record if it was spun fast enough but it wouldn’t sound great.

I had the misfortune to have some PLA snap just before and after the direct drive in my Bambu P1S and it took ages to get it out. I think age and moisture can affect filament, especially it blended with wood dust, sparkles or something which undermines it even further. I’ve resorted to packing my AMS with silica beads to hopefully mitigate for the issue and I threw out the filament that caused the issue. Ironically this is one of the few places a bowden extruder is any benefit - if the filament snaps just push it from behind through a heated nozzle until the blockage clears.

Concerning logs:

1. You can still log to text if you want by configuration (e.g. forward stuff to syslog) and you can use any tools you like to read those files you want. So if you like text logs you can get them. You can even invoke journalctl to output logs on an ad hoc / scheduled basis in a variety of text formats and delimited fields.
2. Binary allows structured logging (i.e. each log message is comprised of fields in a record), indexing and searching options that makes searches & queries faster. Just like in a database. e.g. if you want to search by date range, or a particular user then it’s easy and fast.
3. Binary also allows the log to be signed & immutable to prevent tampering, allow auditing, intrusion detection etc… e.g. if someone broke into a system they could not delete records without it being obvious.
4. You can also use splunk with systemd.

So people object to systemd writing binary logs and yet they can get text, or throw it into splunk or do whatever they like. The purpose of the binary is make security, auditing and forensics better than it is for text.

As for scripts, the point I’m making is systemd didn’t supplant sysvinit, it supplanted upstart. Upstart recognized that writing massive scripts to start/stop/restart a process was stupid and chose an event driven model for running stuff in a more declarative way. Basically upstart used a job system that was triggered by an event, e.g. the runlevel changes, so execute a job that might be to kick off a process. Systemd chose a dependency based model for starting stuff. It seems like dists preferred the latter and moved over to it. Solaris has smf which serves a similar purpose as systemd.

So systemd is declarative - you describe a unit in a .service file - the process to start, the user id to run it with, what other units it depends on etc. and allow the system to figure out how to launch it and take care of other issues. It means stuff happens in the right order and in parallel if it can be. It’s fairly simple to write a unit file as opposed to a script. But if you needed to invoke a script you could do that too - write a unit file that invokes the script. You could even take a pre-existing init script and write a .service file that kicks it off.

Kind of sad there are still people raging over systemd. When it flares up in discussions there is the usual debunked nonsense:

• it only logs information to binary and this is somehow bad. Except it it can be configured to log to text as well and it uses binary so it can forward secure sign records to prevent tampering as well as offering database style query operations.
• it’s insecure because the repo has millions of lines of code. Except that they compile into hundreds of small binaries running with least privilege, and often replacing the task of far more dangerous processes (e.g. there is an NTP client in systemd which sets the time and nothing else).
• various rants about the primary author

What is more bizarre is the nostalgia and hearkening back to sysvinit scripts when systemd didn’t replace sysvinit! Systemd replaced upstart which replaced sysvinit. Because writing 100s of lines of script to stop/start/restart a process sucked - insecure, slow, didn’t scale, didn’t capture dependencies and everyone knew it. Upstart was the first attempt to solve the issue and was used in Debian / Ubuntu, Fedora / Red Hat, openSUSE and others until systemd came along.

Yes. Some game “reviews” were such absurd, performative straw man attacks at JK Rowling that they bordered on parody. I’m thinking of the Wired one in particular but others were equally bad. The irony is these diatribes clearly helped the game, or rather, this really good game sold well in spite of that crap. Ultimately these websites just undermined their own reputations.

I thought it was a great game that captured the spirit of the books & movies so well. Thankfully all the mock outrage and virtue signaling didn’t affect its sales and probably boosted them.

I don’t think any solution is ideal but imo it’s better than dual booting.

It works great too. Day to day I’ll be building Linux code, running IntelliJ under X, installing docker containers and doing other stuff all from a Windows desktop.

You can use Linux and Windows at the same time with WSL. Works extremely well for people who develop Linux but also need Windows stuff.

Forgiving is the word for this - being able to undo mistakes and recover. I reckon FreeCAD would massively benefit from doing a complete feature freeze and focusing on usability for a couple of releases.

I think FreeCAD would win a lot more converts if it focused on usability. Fusion360 and Onshape are parametric modelers just like FreeCAD yet they’re way simpler, taskcentric and more forgiving tools to use.

Did you turn layer ironing / smoothing on for the last layer not all top layers? Aside from smoothing modern slicers can also use more attractive patterns for top layers than zig zag such as hilbert.

It also looks like you might have underflow issues so maybe check your e-step setting on your printer to ensure you’re extruding proper amount of filament. There are articles that explain the process but you basically mark a reference point on the filament, e.g. 10cm away from where it enters the extruder, tell the printer to extrude 10cm, mark and measure how far away the mark is from where it’s meant to be. So if the filament moves 7cm when it should have 10cm then your e-steps need to be multiplied by 10/7.

Wouldn’t the problem be that you’d still have to remove the print, wash it, empty the vat, clean the vat & build plate and only then could you put the print back in and then fire up the UV. Meanwhile you won’t be using the printer for anything else. Maybe it’s easier to just buy something that can wash & cure separate to the printer or leave the print out in the sun to cure.

Plastic cutlery is disappearing in most countries - it’s all wood or cardboard now. I suppose someone could make a business of collecting used cutlery where it’s still in use and recycle it (not necessarily into filament), but I wonder if it would be economically viable.

BL touch works great but you need to get the Z offset. Then you can just G29 before the print or whenever and it works great. I hate manual levelling and these days there isn’t much reason for it. I’ve just upgraded to a Bambu P1S and levelling is even more straightforward since there is no Z-offset since it uses the hotend itself to probe.

In my Ender 3 Pro I found tightening the screws too much made the bed bow, so I loosened them until they were just firm but not forcing up the corners. I also replaced the default springs with stiffer ones so once set they stayed set. I also built a custom Marlin firmware and I changed the bed mesh algorithm to probe more points and use a more sophisticated algorithm to compensate for levelling. This was with a Bigtree 1.2 board which barely had enough memory for the firmware but I made it work. After that I really didn’t have any issues. Biggest pain was dialing in the Z-offset on the BL touch.

I’m sure it’s easier for them in a sense. I write software to control cloud based devices that are not adjacent to the caller and they use message based comms. But it’s also an unnecessary overhead to upload a 70Mb file to the cloud and back down again. If I were writing this software I’d consider some shortcut mechanism where the send file action could be sent to the printer directly and only fallback to cloud if that was not possible. If for no other reason that saving myself money and general responsiveness. I’m sure it would be achievable by doing a UPnP scan of the local network and allowing the PC to talk to the printer if it possesses and sends an API key - much like Octoprint works. Also, local network probably helps for the camera which could just blast a feed out on UDP.

I’m not sure it helps them “steal” models because they probably have 100,000s of models passing through their system every day. It would be a wall of noise and random junk. And these aren’t models in the CAD sense, but some STL meshes and print settings. It does give Bambu information about what filaments people are using and in what quantity, the frequency they print as well as geographic location. That might be useful for marketing. If a government was interested in a particular user, they could also see in retrospect what they were printing. e.g. if someone were printing gun parts then maybe there would be evidence of that in the cloud.

I have a P1S and I don’t really follow why it is necessary at all to send prints off to the cloud. Yes, it could be useful if printer and PC / app are on separate networks. But if they’re on the same network then they should directly communicate.

I have a Bambu P1S. I think biggest fear is the cloud stuff goes or gets hacked whereas Prusa prints straight to the machine which is less of a man in the middle problem. I can’t speak of longevity but the P1S is pretty idiot proof as a printer and I like the AMS aside from the needless pooping which is more of a firmware issue - should be a way to suppress purge poops if a person knows they’re using same filament between prints.

As for fragmentation, the X & P range are essentially the same except around the edges - the control panel, supplied nozzle, lidar, camera etc. The A seems like a weird diversion but it has been received favourably and slaughters the Prusa Mini which is getting on in years.