Crazy part is that Mercedes makes pretty good EVs - unlike some of the other German manufacturers which struggled a bit, and even though they seem to have the main platform worked out by now still have shitty software. Mercedes software is usable and rock solid - which I didn’t expect when we were buying one last year.

In the area I’m living in here in Finland EV Mercedes seems to be the most popular choice currently - the number of EVs is rising very fast, with pretty much all brands present, but a clear majority is Mercedes.

Yes, but: Brake dust is significantly more likely to become airborne than tire dust, and is significantly more toxic than tire dust - and might be the most toxic thing your car is spreading.

Like always in 3D printing you need to understand if something is worth printing. There are enough toys that work as 3D print, and enough stuff that either will not survive the load, or not be played with (like those figurines). For those categories (especially the figurines) commercial ones might have the same fate, though, so just printing one to shut the child up may have smaller footprint/costs.

A small list of toys that work very well 3D printed:

This propeller pull toy last longer than the commercial ones with pull string.

This stomp rocket also works great, and if the kids listen to instructions will last ages.

This kind of logic game has similar durability than commercial ones.

This kind of balloon toy also is pretty nice - we used to build those from wood when I was small, but 3D-printing here offers quite a bit more options for experimentation together with the kids. (The author has different models in his profile)

From that there’s pretty much a direct line to 3D printed RC models, where the main problem is that many are in the classic model builder mindset where you have to live with the parts you can buy, and due to that end up with a BOM containing dozens of different screw types. This one is an easy to build example not making that mistake, and there are some others as well.

It’s the legal situation in the US - and the reason why people familiar with the topic have been upset about the EU data sharing exemptions and similar stuff for over a decade now. It’s also really frustrating to keep explaining customers that the way they’re planning to use cloud stuff violates local data protection laws (even before GDPR), only for them to ignore it and do it anyway. We need way better education for people in charge of that kind of projects - and way higher penalties for violations, including the ability to fine organizations before they lose data when they store protected data in a way US government can get access to.

The only way a Microsoft cloud (or any cloud service from a US company) in the EU can work is if that company doesn’t have access to the European systems - both on hardware level and system level.

Microsoft attempted to do just that by having a German cloud managed by T-Systems - but gave up on that already years ago

Not really a new thing - searching for and playing with security cameras has been light entertainment for about two decades now.

For an equally long period it has been clear that if you connect an IP camera or similar device you’re a pretty big moron if you don’t isolate it from both your internal network and the internet, and only provide controlled access - no matter the manufacturer, non-Chinese ones are not really better in how horrible their software is. Unfortunately most large IT systems are run by absolute morons.

Seems pretty much all current AI models are not familiar with the works of Tom of Finland. Took a lot of kicking to get even remotely close to what I wanted.

Just like the UK exemptions most of those were given to early members as rules changed to get them to agree to the rule changes.

New members don’t get that - and UK would be treated like a new member.

I haven’t been TUI only for roughly two decades now - that’s around the time the server got properly usable.

I typically have a daemon running - on Linux via systemd user session, on MacOS via launchd, on Windows via startup. I then attach GUI frames to that, and - at least on the unix style platforms - typically have a tmux with a TUI frame running.

I have scripts to open files in emacs - that’s easy configurable to either open in the last used frame, or attach a TUI frame in the terminal, and open it there. I also have the EDITOR variable set to those scripts.

When fully using emacs you’d probably end up doing more work in emacs, and only occasionally wanting to do shell call outs.

For example, I edit some project, commit it via magit, trigger a build via compile to pack things up, open dired to move the files to a publish location, then open dired at the publish location and modify the publish package from there, and then finally start a shell in that directory to trigger the publish workflow. Only slight annoyance with that is that out of the box emacs shells are not setup for that kind of multiple shell buffers in specific directiories with easy throwaway - but it’s easy enough to make that work.

China is currently building coal power plants to replace old, less efficient and dirtier plants. Then they use them for base load / network stabilization while they build up ridiculous amounts of energy storage. They’re not running all the time, only to compensate variability in renewables power generation while they build up storage. They’ll probably be taken out of use in a few decades without having much runtime.

For installed capacity the new power plants don’t change much as they take old ones offline - percentage wise coal is falling due to the ridiculous speed of building renewables.

Yeah, Prusa Mini and (back then) mk3s with PrusaSlicer

Few years ago I had similar issues with silk PLA - until I accidentally sliced it with a prusa PETG profile. Came out absolutely perfect. Since then I just treat silk PLA like prusa PETG.

I mainly used chrome for a few years when Firefox dropped it as I was so angry about them at that point. Went back to Firefox eventually as it still is the less bad browser, but compared to old one it still is shit. 10 years later we still don’t have abilities for stuff like overriding keybindings back.

Note that those are deepseek, not chatgpt. I’ve largely given up on chatgpt a long time ago as it has severe limitations on what you can ask it without fighting its filters. You can make it go on hallucinated rants just as easily - I just nowadays do that on locally hostable models.

And I started thinking that I could use them in the same way I tend to use desktop workspaces: organizational buckets to put groups of windows in.

I use eyebrowse for that - also gives me that functionality without wasting space with useless UI elements

Only way I managed was chrome in porn mode via VPN.

Went digging a bit after that and found a statement from them that anonymous download issues are intentional to drive people to make accounts.

Can we ban makerworld links here? They have a low limit on downloads without registering an account, a very shitty default license many use without the reading and generally don’t hide they want to run that thing as a walled garden.

zypper remove --clean-deps removes automatically installed requirements when removing a package. zypper packages --unneeded will show a list of packages no longer required.

Setting solver.onlyRequires to true in /etc/zypp.conf does not install recommends - it’s way less of a problem than on Debian/Ubuntu due to not recommending half the world, but still useful. Setting solver.cleandepsOnRemove will automatically remove automatically installed deps when removing a package (i.e., like always specifying --clean-deps).

Just get a drive from any old notebook of the last 15 years or so someone wants to throw out, and buy a USB to SATA slim cable.

it has been known for years that the defaults on windows are insufficient, and they don’t make it easy to switch to a password prompt at boot time (though it is possible)

While I fully support that comment, their cloud printing thing also is annoying - I’d rather they spend effort on proper lan printing.

On my mini I’m still using octoprint (even though I’ve added a network card), on my mk4s I’m using the local connection for uploading - but I got the GPIO board, so once I have time that should enable me to get better monitoring working again. But it all still feels kludgy - something like enabling octoprint control via network instead of USB for the mk4 would be way nicer.