Mechanismatic

The Ender 3 was the frustrating entry point for so many people. I’d love to see a survey all Ender 3 owners to see how many gave up on 3D printing and how many switched to better machines.

Prusa published an article about it: https://help.prusa3d.com/article/watertight-prints_112324

Here’s a link to his blog version of the same thread I referenced. Seems like a hop issue among other stuff.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/14/compartment/

Doctorow recently said on Bluesky that the reason he’s such a prolific writer is that he’s constantly in pain and sitting down to write is an activity that helps him ignore it or get through it. So he said that’s why he wrote 7 books during the pandemic.

They also like cat treats. I provide both. Some of them at my work prefer cat treats and look at me with a tilted head when I toss a peanut and just stand there waiting for the treats.

Or Linda Hamilton’s in Terminator 2, except literally.

It’s a partnership and the INDX isn’t a separate printer, just a new extruder, so it’s not like Prusa has no involvement. I would say “completely” is inaccurate here. If it were solely the effort of INDX, they wouldn’t need to partner with Prusa. There are other third parties that release mods for printers that aren’t collaborations with the original manufacturer.

If Prusa hired the INDX engineers from BondTech instead of partnering, would you still consider it completely separate? A company is just composed of current employees. At what point is it Theseus’ ship of development?

And that’s not even considering the CORE One, the recent CORE One+ update, the CORE One L announcement, the OpenPrintTag, et al. They’ve been announcing more new stuff in the last year at a faster rate than previous years.

Ever seen The Prestige?

Granted it’s from a partnership, but the INDX extruder seems to be on the cusp, so the idea that Prusa is behind seems odd. And the fact that they’re more open and consumer friendly than Bambu is great. There are a lot of affordable printers that have benefited from Prusa’s development while Prusa is still dropping new developments, seemingly at a greater rate now than previously.

I’ve been doing some simple python scripts on a raspberry pi 5 that I’m currently using for a cyberdeck project (designing a printable bigger case for a 65% Bluetooth gaming keyboard and shoving the pi and other devices into a 3D printed skull that will mount on the keyboard case), but even then I at least plug the pi into a full screen rather than use the 7" display I have for it when I’m actually working on it. The 65% isn’t bad though. Even came with a wrist pad.

It was definitely a nostalgia purchase. If I ended up doing any development for it, I’d still probably emulate and transfer files to it. But I never did anything more than play games on it as a kid, so there would be a time sink and learning curve if I wanted to do more with it.

I’ve been showing it off in my makerspace to the college students who weren’t alive in the 80s (or 90s). All the new features are welcome additions — USB, HDMI, WiFi, etc. And there are some modern chiptune applications included.

I’ve vindicated my childhood by discovering that the games that were difficult and confusing back then still are, and maybe some of them were just poorly designed in the first place.

I still love the soundtrack to Rock N Bolt and a good playthrough of River Raid though.

Not anti SA per se, but I learned to type on a Commodore 64 as a kid and recently got the C64 Ultimate, so the clunkiness of the experience is just fresh. This is a lower profile than the Commodore 64 though, so probably not as bad.

Do we celebrate with wrist braces or some other therapy for repetitive cramped typing injuries?

I do this probably once a day at my makerspace. Sometimes it is the manufacturer’s fault and sometimes it’s just that the roll has gotten a tangle while being moved from machine to machine or machine to rack.

I don’t put my finger on the tangle, but usually the tangle isn’t obvious in the spool so you can’t even if you wanted to.

It’s really just a matter of spinning the filament around the roll enough to get some slack, then you pull it over the side and sort it out. Usually the fix involves pushing the filament around the spool to unbind it.

This is another one of those issues that you typically detect by hearing an abnormal sound since you’re not watching every print all the time across multiple printers.

Definitely consider if you’ll use it enough to justify the purchase, but buying a new one and spending the effort that you would have used trying to mod the old one could be better used on the new machine getting functional prints and advancing your skills.

The same amount of fiddling, accompanied with the uncertainty of the success or practicality of the mod, could be spent assembling a new printer and then printing and assembling new mods for the new printer that aren’t as essential or structural. The appeal just depends on how much focus and patience you have.

This is one of those “technically true, but missing the bigger picture” pedantic gotchas.

Yes, Hercules is the Roman name not the Greek name. Yes, barbarian as a term originally meant not-Greek or not-Greek-enough for some Greeks.

But it’s not like you’re going for full historical accuracy already (or even could if you wanted to). It’s just a subjective scale of how accurate do you want to be in what ways that you think are important.

You’re not going to speak ancient or koine Greek when playing the game. You’re playing game rules that aren’t based solely on Greek mythological cosmology. Barbarian isn’t a term in DnD for non-Greeks the same way chai tea in English doesn’t mean “tea tea,” but rather “a spiced Indian tea.” Words have multiple meanings. Those meanings can change over time. Those words can have a different meaning in a different language even if adopted from the same source.

Yeah, that makes sense for your frustration. I get stabbed under my fingernails trying to take PETG remnants off the textured beds. I typically just deal with it because the solutions I’ve found are more time-consuming, but I guess it might depend on how much.

I’ve had people suggest heating the bed as high as it will go. PETG’s glass transition temperature is usually less than 90° C. I’ve seen some people print over bits to try to merge them to make them pull up easier, but that just seems like a waste of material to me. I generally don’t care for solutions that involve applying liquids or gels to the bed.

What material and what kind of plate? PEI textured plate or smooth plate? PLA, PETG, something else?

Not what you’re asking for, but I’d recommend using a laser cutter with a sheet of acrylic if you can get access to one since you’ll get a better quality stencil than 3D printing one. A vinyl cutter like a Cricut or Silhouette machine might also be able to do a better job of it on something like chipboard if you don’t have access to a laser cutter.