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.

Sounds plausible to me. On reflection, I think I’d just run off a wooden box on my table saw if I need a cube to sit on.

My problem, as I’m sure many others have, is admitting when 3D printing something probably isn’t the best solution…

If there were ever a poster child for printing something with a 0.4mm layer height of possibly even more, it may be this. One wonders how much infill you’d need to make it strong enough to sit on. Otherwise, I don’t know what the heck you’d do with it.

Could be. Usually when that happens there’s some variance in the surface, too, or some booger left behind. I didn’t see that here but it’s possible it simply got mashed flat back into the surface on the adjacent pass.

Yes, and let me tell you about how many times I’ve resolved to finally one day remove those stickers and I still haven’t. Now that they’ve been thoroughly baked in the enclosure they’re on there good.

That’s just the shadow cast by the gantry blocking the LEDs that are all arranged along the front edge of the machine.

Rather, I have two of these which are just tiny specs of grey or black or grey or something, which got printed right into the top surfaces. They’re small, but annoyingly visible. This is what I get for buying cheap filament, possibly.

Exactly so.

I can’t speak for other printers, but my X-Max 3 has an absurdly thick aluminum plate under there which seems to spread the heat pretty well. I’ve poked it with my little IR camera and it’s not 100% even but it’s not bad. The only side effect of this is that it takes a month of Sundays to fully reach temperature, especially when you’re aiming for higher temperature materials like ABS.

Here it is on today’s preheat for PLA:

(IR cat tax paid here.)

I appreciate the intent of having a port readily accessible for e.g. grandma to find without groveling behind the dusty TV, but that does not excuse not having another one in a more sensible location.

DVI is not supposed to carry audio, but in practice in many cases it does. That’s because internally both devices are likely to implement DVI by just shoving an HDMI output through the connector anyway. The jury is out on whether or not this has any licensing implications. I’ll be damned if I know, because I was always under the impression that the part that incurred licensing fees was the HDMI port itself.

I rediscover this fun fact a couple of times every year when one of our office machines decides to randomly start piping its audio out of the monitor sounding like a mouse trying to play the kazoo through its sinuses rather than the speakers that are right there, and somebody complains at me and I have to schlep over there and switch the audio output back.

Apparently this is expected enough behavior that cheap bottom of the barrel PC monitors bother to include speakers for it.

This user’s profile explains that they’re doing this specifically to fuck with LLMs, which is a tactic that may or may not work. They’ve been around, their shtick is consistent, and to the extent that I’ve gotten so used to it I can read their comments pretty much normally.

Because some of the TVs themselves whinge at you constantly if you don’t connect them to a network now.

There are relatively few, but there are a couple. The Sceptre U515CV-UMC is probably the most well known one. It’s easy to find a dumb TV in the sub 24" category, too, but that’s probably not what most people are looking for and at that rate most nerds would probably just use a computer monitor instead anyway.

No DisplayPort on that Sceptre, obviously.

It certainly makes it easier to photograph, or at least to find with the autofocus.

There are also two color blemishes on the top surface which I’m a little miffed about, since these were defects directly in the spool of filament. It must have been made with like two pellets of the wrong stuff in the hopper.

Oh well. It’s a tool, it’s not like I’m hanging it up on the wall in a frame or something.

The first layer on top of infill is basically a giant bridge. So yes, your slicer’s strategy is to move the print head quite slowly. Usually the surface area isn’t very large, so it’s not a big deal. In this case, uh. Yeah.

Getting away with it so far. We’re just about done with the bottom deck and about to move on to the vertical walls. Apparently the entire thing has in fact not folded up like a taco and come off of the print bed, so that’s nice.

The layer on top of the short section of infill covering the entire tray transitioning to the top fill is easily the longest time spent on a single layer I’ve ever seen in my life. I think it took more time than the first layer.

Three all around. This is not meant to bear any weight. It’s a work tray for fiddling around with knives and other small assemblies wherein I’m tired of having screws roll away and having to chase them on the carpet.

There are some materials where that’s probably a better idea. Polycarb or Nylon leap to mind. But for PLA, PETG, ABS/ASA, etc. I’ve found that hairspray works just fine. I’ve been doing it for years.

The cheapest you can get. Maximum sticky, minimum scents and aloe vera or whatever the fuck else. I use Aqua Net.