Companies try to maximize green per red. By paying less, and getting the same, they maximize that, year after year until (in a temporary and unforeseeable setback) you leave for… Bluer pastures, apparently.

There are different sorts of companies, and the more they think of employees as a number of years of experience plus a stack of skills, the more susceptible they are to believing that replacing humans with other equally skilled humans is a productive way to spend their time.

I’ve heard this comparison so many times I ran some experiments. A number 8 1.5" coated decking screw inserted into two one by pine boards through the grain by a hammer holds about half as well as one inserted using a screwdriver. One hit to drive the screw is better than several, but a two hit approach (one to set the angle of the screw tip, the second to send it home) was most reliable. Drilling a pilot hole before hammering improves things pretty significantly, up towards 3/4 of the holding power of a driver driven screw.

On the other hand, even very slight misalignment between the hammer swing and the screw can result in failure, and the board was always more damaged by a hammer inserted screw.

I ran out of crtcs, but I wanted another monitor. I widened a virtual display, and drew the left portion of it on one monitor, like regular. Then I had a crown job that would copy chunks of it into the frame buffer of a USB to DVI-d adapter. It could do 5 fps redrawing the whole screen, but I chose things to put there where it wouldn’t matter too much. The only painful thing was arranging the windows on that monitor, with the mouse updating very infrequently, and routinely being drawn 2 or more places in the frame buffer.

You can just issue new certificates one per year, and otherwise keep your personal root CA encrypted. If someone is into your system to the point they can get the key as you use it, there are bigger things to worry about than them impersonating your own services to you.

Modern operating systems have made it take very little knowledge to connect to WiFi and browse the internet. If you want to use your computer for more than that, it can still take a longer learning process. I download 3D models for printing, and wanted an image for each model so I could find things more easily. In Linux, I can make such images with only about a hundred characters in the terminal. In Windows, I would either need to learn powershell, or make an image from each file by hand.

The way I understand “learning Linux” these days is reimagining what a computer can do for you to include the rich powers of open source software, so that when you have a problem that computers are very good at, you recognize that there’s an obvious solution on Linux that Windows doesn’t have.

Inflation is wild. Just a few decades ago, you could get this kind of thing for just an arm and a leg.

This and systemctl cat $unit are my favorites.

I counted twice. It didn’t match.

Cost is obviously a big factor. Almost every printer can change to any nozzle size and layer height for just the cost of the nozzle. Print volume is a major limitation, depending on your use case. The filaments it can print will probably be the same across any relatively low cost printers, with the only significant change being direct drive vs. Bowden.

Bed leveling is huge, and makes probably the most difference in print quality on low cost printers these days. If there’s an easy way to tension the belts, that’s a plus. If there isn’t a power switch on the front (or even if there is), a emergency stop switch can be a help, like if the nozzle is running into the bed.

Maintenance varies from printer to printer, generally you’re aiming for tight but not too tight on any belts or rollers. If the pulleys on the motors aren’t preinstalled, use something like loctite blue to fix them in place better.

Also make sure if you plan to buy a printer that it’s got a decent amount of community around it. Running into the same problems with a bunch of other people is a big plus as a beginner, so popular printers are better.

Teaching Tech made a calibration guide website that I’ve had a lot of good experiences with.

Where’s my underappreciated, but definitely real “cone rhymes with gone, but not with scone” gang?

I’ve known a lot of math people, and /on average/ I think they’re more capable of programming useful code than the other college graduate groups I’ve spent a lot of time working with (psychology, economics, physics) /on average/.

That said, the best mathematicians I’ve known were mostly rubbish at real programming, and the best programmers I’ve known have come out of computer engineering or computer science.

If you need a correct, but otherwise useless implementation, a mathematician is a pretty good bet. If you need performance, readability, documentation, I’d look elsewhere most of the time.

Why have laws restricting bottles of wine to specific sizes in the first place? Surely as long as it’s labeled clearly it’s sufficiently easy to know what you’re getting.

I’ve worked at a big tech company. I can all but guarantee there are some firey memes posted amongst colleagues about this situation. Unfortunately, they’re unlikely to ever become public.

An r320 is new enough that iDrac Express (two IPs on one interface) is available in the BIOS. The server needs a license for some features (like remotely attaching an ISO, and remote KVM), but not for the basics like controlling the power.

Sure, sure, but what color did they paint the bike shed in the parking lot?

It’s worth noting that some but not all combinations of heat break, nozzle, and heater block require re-tightening at the temperature used for printing. Basically, different metals expand different amounts when they’re heated, so if the block expands more than the other two, a gap will open up between them, and melted filament can find its way through.