It’s great being in a time zone where it’s already April 2nd when the Americans start pulling this shit. You think you’ve made it through the nonsense and then BAM, here’s another day of it except ramped up to 11.

I’ve been able to freely export .step files for anything I’ve made in Onshape. As another commenter said there are catches, like all your files are public if you’re using the free version and there are premium features that require payment. But it’s currently not locked down like it seemed Autodesk were preparing to do, where all your files live on their cloud only and can never be exported. For sure there is potential for the same enshittification with Onshape though, which is why I hope the freecad devs soldier on.

Also if you’re worried about your files being public, just name them with codes indecipherable to anyone but you. It doesn’t seem like the public file repository actually gets searched that much in general, and with a meaningless code the odds of someone finding and stealing a specific design are probably near zero.

Time to give it another try I guess. I used Fusion almost exclusively until I switched to Linux (and have also used Solidworks in the past), and I found freecad 1.0 to be an exercise in frustration.

I gave it a very solid shot, but after many hours messing with it and watching tutorials I decided to try Onshape instead. I was able to become comfortable and productive in Onshape in less than half the time it took me to lose my cool with freecad.

The 1.1 update looks to be addressing some of the pain points, so they seem to be on the right track. I hope they keep that momentum going.

What about all of the site-to-site VPNs?

The Ender was good when it worked, which it did really well for a year or two after I spent a lot of time and energy getting it sorted. But then things started to go downhill. In the hot end I had the heater cartridge, thermistor and cooling fan all fail separately but fairly close together. I had Z screw runout issues and had to replace the brass nut. The extruder housing cracked and had to be replaced with an aluminum one. Limit switches failed. V rollers failed. It suddenly developed adhesion issues with the glass bed and glue stick I’d been doing for years. Scuffing up the bed didn’t work, replacing it with a new glass bed didn’t work, scuffing the new glass bed didn’t work. I switched to a magnetic PEI bed, that worked but it conforms to the horrific banana shape of the Ender’s factory bed and I can only print on a single quadrant of it at a time because of the massive dips in between the screws.

This is just the stuff I remember from years ago. I enjoyed tinkering and upgrading the Ender in the early days but I’m older now and have other stresses on my time. I just want something that works.

Thanks for the advice everyone. I’ve been researching the suggested printers, though options are somewhat limited in my area and pricing varies to US retail. I’d hoped the Ender 3 price tier had approached a more turn-key experience by now, but it seems pretty hit or miss with the Ender 3 V3 SE as far as I could tell. It looks like out of what’s available the Qidi Q1 Pro gets me what I want and is the best bang for buck in local pricing.

Of course that’s a thing now. Yeah I would very much not like to be locked into a vendor ecosystem.

Balena started collecting telemetry without disclosing it to anyone, reportedly including information about what images you were flashing. Apart from a general distaste for unconsensual telemetry, I think people were concerned the data could be used for things like helping to de-anonymize TAILS users.

Where I live grocery stores are a terrible example, all the plant proteins are jacked up in price with marketing about how it’s organic and vegan and will cure cancer yada yada. And then the wheys they sell are blends with low actual protein content and/or poor aminos.

I buy my protein from a bulk supplements supplier, and soy is 75% of the cost of the cheapest whey, gram for gram of actual protein content.

Creatine is still very much a thing, but I think everyone actually knows what it is and what it does and it’s not treated as a magic bullet any more.

Mainly what seems to have changed is that steroids and TRT have exploded in popularity, and a scary number of under 18s are doing it.

Apart from that I couldn’t tell you, it’s all happening on Insta and TikTok now and I don’t participate.

More research isn’t a bad thing, but this really isn’t news. If you’re a nerd who’s into lifting you’d already know that soy protein is a top tier source of all the important amino acids for muscle gain. And it’s cheaper than whey.

It’s also not very popular because the manosphere tells men that consuming it will feminize them. Yes, really. They took the “soy boy” thing very literally and ran with it off the deep end.