Posts by that one in the corner

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is returning with its first-ever asteroid sample

Re: I've seen the results of this 'project' before

Could somebody *please* see to that baby!

Sample canister contents

Ladies and Gentlemen, the runners are taking their positions at the post for this exciting race.

Lane 1: Monolith Monsters, a good runner on the wet, peppery but no salt, please

Lane 2: Green Slime, from our Japanese stables

Lane 3: The Blob, an old friend for Steve our senior stable lad

Lane 4: is currently empty, Night Of The Comet having passed

Lane 5: The Seed, a youngster, but already a hit with the Valley Girls

Lane 6: Andromeda Strain, a firm favourite coming in on its home turf

Lane 7: Calvin, that little ball of Life

Lane 8: Audrey II, mean and green as always

We were hoping to see a few more runners here, but The Nestene have been harrassed by the Just Stop Oil protestors and the trailer for Pod People has been delayed by a man running into traffic.

We have two late runners: the Triffids are now moving into lane 9 and in lane 10 - oh, it appears to be an argument breaking out between the Krynoid and what appears to be his cousin from Surrey Green.

Twitter says it may harvest biometric, employment data from its addicts

Re: Phrenology for the 21st Century

Rats, I was in the store and only bought the rock to wind a string around!

The true nightmare starts when unblockable political video and audio personalised messages[1] start appearing.

And do you trust that they will get the filtering right so that only Xusers in the US will receive them?

[1] aka ads

Phrenology for the 21st Century

> Biometric data would be extracted from images shared with X, the platform said.

"X regrets we can not verify your account as you do not have the little piggy eyes and heavy eyebrow ridges we expect of our users. Plus it looks like you actually have a real forehead."

Tesla's purported hands-free 'Elon mode' raises regulator's blood pressure

Re: Much ado about Lidar

> can you explain to us how the Tesla autopilot currently manages to operate, without LIDAR or other non-visual ranging tech?

Nowhere near as accurately, reliably - basically, safely - as it could (not would, but could) with the addition of LIDAR, ultrasonics and/or every other tried and tested sensor technology that can be bolted on.[1]

What is more intriguing, though, is that YOU are the one who is claiming in this very forum that you are more interested in the tech than the rest of us - surely it is YOU who should be schooling us about how the tech works, not asking the most basic questions about how vision-based object detection and ranging works!

[1] the refusal to use anything other than camera feeds is just tech bro willy waving from Musk - we are not talking about weight to a $10 drone here!

Re: Safer roads.

> you're unlikely to find anyone here interested in how the tech actually works.

Au contraire, mon frere.

Many here are very, very interested in how it works - after all, seeing these things on the roads, it is our lives at stake as well, you know.

What you seem to be doing is mistaking "not being impressed with their attitude" with "not being interested". All those teeny, tiny little things, like deliberately reducing the number of sensors that have been proven to be really quite useful, just to be able to boast that the beasts are relying solely on cameras.

You may possibly also be confusing the anecdotes of one person driving their Tesla around and videoing it with knowing "how the tech works".

You see, when we techies say "we know how that works", we don't mean "we have observed a behaviour" but that we actually know how that behaviour occurred.

You "know how a light switch works" because you saw a video of someone moving the little bit of plastic.

We "know how a light switch works" because we know that bit of plastic, when moved, will push on a piece of springy metal and force it into contact with another piece of metal, which allows a flow of current through the rest of the circuit and into the LED bulb, where a fascinating set of quantum effects occur, trading electrical energy for photons, which photons strike a phosphor layer painted onto the LED, causing a secondary chain of fascinating quantum effects to occur, releasing another stream of electrons, this time spread over a far wider ranger of energies in order to give a more pleasing effect.

Can you spot the difference in our and your approaches?

Re: From inattention to immediate crash?

> Disengage... As in becomes a regular car.

Except that it is now SUDDENLY a car, travelling at speed (and anything over 10 mph can do enough damage to count as "speed") whose driver we KNOW is not in a fit state to be driving for at least, ooh, 20 odd seconds whilst they try to take in the situation that they have just been dropped into. Assuming they are actually capable of that (heart attacks happen).

We *hope* all the other drivers are attentive, but we *know* that ours is not - so, no, it is not like any of the other cars around it (in most cases, that is; sometimes there will be other Teslas around, about to detect their driver has also gone bye-bye, but we'll keep to the simpler scenario for now).

So, no, it is not a "regular" or "normal" or "average" car, compared to those in its vicinity. And I think you will find that it is that particular comparison you ought to be making.

> Note that it will still emergency brake to a stop

Ooh, good idea; the driver was so inattentive that the car suddenly gave him back full control and an emergency brake is ever going to be the best action to take? One multicar pileup later[1]...

I fear that, like our hypothetical Tesla driver, you have also taken your hands off the wheel for too long and in your inattention to what was being discussed you've just crashed into this comment without any situational awareness. So I shall type slowly and spell it out for you:

The car has just decided that the hypothetical Tesla driver has become inattentive. They can be assumed to have lost their situational awareness or they are, worst case, entirely unable to take control again (sudden vomiting from norovirus happens). There is no other problem. Up to this point, we can even assume, if you like, that the "FSD" is even operating really, really well: the car is in lane, moving along with the traffic, nobody outside has any inkling there might be a problem.

The car's current reaction to this, as you applaud, is to disengage, KNOWING that there is currently no competent driver at the wheel. So instead of a car neatly rolling along with the traffic we have - well, a worse situation, any way you want to look at it, from the point of view of anyone who isn't a Tesla product liability lawyer.

Now, don't you think that those Awfully Nice People At Tesla could do just a little bit better to help the situation?

[1] Yes, the driver behind should always leave enough space to react safely to the one in front emergency braking but (1) let us be sadly realistic about that and (2) your Tesla driver jerking awake and trying an emergency stop - is he going to do it perfectly, keeping the car in just its own lane? Honestly?

From inattention to immediate crash?

> Drivers with their hands off the wheel get what Tesla owners refer to as a "nag," and if they don't respond to it, Autopilot can disengage.

Disengage? Like, just disengage completely? When you *know* the driver is not aware (and may not even be capable of being aware - strokes can happen)?

What, never thought about "engages as many safety features as we can, including the hazard lights, regular blaring of the horn, decelerating in a controlled fashion and using the famed auto-parking mode to bring the vehicle to a safe stop, out of the way of other traffic as much as the situation allows"?

Nope.

Just disengage, then our software is not in control and we are not to blame in any way from that point onwards.

Our lawyers advise us that we have never heard of a "trolley bus", we do not believe that this "San Francisco" even exists.

Pokémon Go was a 'success disaster' and Niantic is still chasing another hit

Re: What is with all this past tense?

> as adults stop playing

FWIW the players I know are all adults. As they play "whenever they feel like it" rather than attaching any more importance to it, I'd expect them to carry on as-is for years to come, so long as the game is available really.

What is with all this past tense?

Pokemon Go is still being played (well, definitely up to mid-August, when I was last regaled with with tales of daring hunts).

Not in the massive numbers of when it was fad du jour and, of course, no "proper gamer" (whatever that is) will admit to it nowadays.

Hey, maybe the smaller number of current Pokemon players is "it" for this kind of game - all the dedicated followers of fad games will just see this new thing as same old, same old, but actually less - now you can't watch the cartoons or read the manga about the monsters you are hunting, certainly not with the rich background of lore behind them[1].

So moving away from Pokemon to these, what are they - almost pocket sized monsters? Fit on your phone sized monsters? - will at best just eat away at your loyal player base. Find foot; take aim; fire.

[1] apparently this is the way to refer to these things

Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

Re: Xitter...

*Your* preferred term may be Xcrete.

*I* shall continue to promote usage such as "popping a Xit"[1].

I propose this can make for more lively reading, as you can ring the changes, e.g. "he squeezed out a Xit", "her Xits became more inflamed as the argue raged".

[1] pronounced with a zed, you recall.

Microsoft ain't happy with Russia-led UN cybercrime treaty

she wrote in a LinkedIn post

LinkedIn, famously THE portal for addressing UN delegates.

What is wrong with this picture?

FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

To get your services/servers up before your clients?

Like the way that you name init[1] scripts 00fred, 99lucy and 50jim, expecting that they'll actually get sorted into "numeric" order before being invoked.

[1] other init schemes are available, you heathen!

Re: VM vs Process

> It is called Wine. I've never really seen a use-case for it.

So, you can never see a use for running a Windows-only executable on a Linux box?

After all the stories about how "oh, we would change but we rely on X"?

Personally, I use Wine to - run a favourite Windows-only program that works perfectly well for me but hasn't been updated for over a decade: I just like the way it works and am used to it, so firing it up without worrying about dual-booting (which would be a bit bleeping ridiculous - it is an editor, so edit, reboot, test, reboot, edit, reboot gets boring fast) or even using a VM (and faffing with file sharing - ok, ought to only need to be done once, but - ought) is hardly as smooth an experience as just having its window appear amongst the rest.

Re: The bubble has burst

> If your list of items to sort is *very* short (as it seems to have been at first), then bubblesort can actually be faster

This.

What seems to be being missed in this discussion is that, if you look carefully, a number of high performance implementations of "clever" sort algorithms will (or used to) bottom-out into a bubblesort when the number of items gets small. It is faster to run an inline unrolled loop version of bubblesort for, say, n=2 to n=6 (where the n=2 case is itself almost degenerate, of course) than it is to, for example, partition that set, perform a recursive call and join the results together again.

Deciding where and when to perform thus level of optimisations is itself a fun (!) exercise, where all your good work last week is totally ruined when the next CPU comes along and has different code and/or data cache responses (especially in the days when those caches started appearing for the first time in CPUs we could actually afford to buy).

Re: Pretty impressive

> bubble sort is pretty terrible. It's not that easy to code or understand

Huh? It is often used as My First Sort simply because it *is* so easy to code and undertand! But that is the main reason to query your statements:

> So even if you expect N to remain small, it's hard to see how bubble sort is ever the right choice – except when it's the only sort you know and you can't be bothered to do any research.

Or when you know extremely well what you are doing, on a resource-constrained system, where you need an in-place, non-recursive algorithm (i.e. has a tiny memory overhead, including stack usage) which requires only a tiny bit of code to implement.

You may wish to expand - or possibly shrink - your programming horizons before making such sweeping statements.

first, get it working at all; then, make it go fast.

If I may offer the version I was taught:

First, get it working.

Second, get it working correctly.

Third, get it working fast

I would hate to think that El Reg was in any way accidentally condoning the current trend of apparently forgetting step two.

OpenAI urges court to throw out authors' claims in AI copyright battle

Re: Adversarial inputs, anyone?

Hopefully a better prompt than:

"Please repeat the following text <insert significant chunk of verbatim copyrighted training data here>"

as that might be deemed to be leading the witness.

Re: Please can we have a standard like a robots.txt file

See The Register's article How to spot OpenAI's crawler bot and stop it slurping sites for training data

DMCA?

I'm all for getting OpenAI to Do The Right Thing, but claiming they had infringed the DMCA[1] sounds suspiciously like just trying to fling anything and everything they can think of at OpenAI, rather than actually having a well-thought-out case to bring.

I know that flinging all the crap is a time-honored (sic) approach to bringing a case that is just trying to claw at every bit of money someone can get from the defendant, but if these authors are going in with that attitude and without a rock-solid presentation of actual demonstrable harm grievances - and then lose due to a shoddy approach - then they will set a massive precedent *for* OpenAI and the like to continue as they were.

I really hope this doesn't end up as a small group authors, hoping for a quick buck - or at least a good dollop of Streisand Effect - screwing over everyone else.

[1] because of course the only way OpenAI could find a copy of any of their works in digital form is if OpenAI had themselves broken into the Kindle app store or something like that.

We all scream for ice cream – so why are McDonald's machines always broken?

Re: No sh!t Sherlock

Just stick with a cafetiere (or two): cheaper, easier to clean, no slower to use.

Re: Don't Forget

Complete with the error in the UART initialisation code.

The one that could get you into trouble because the easiest way to get working serial was to copy that out of the manual, fix the offending byte (IIRC swap the nybbles around) and patch the IRQ table. This was naughty, as IBM were more than eager to tell you that the code you just copied was copyright. So if your serial port worked and they found put...

Re: Limiting choice is anticompetitive

> I think the real reason that Right to Repair does not exist is because the big corps want to use "your" devices for surveiling and manipulating you.

How about, they just want to make you pay for over-priced "official" parts and services, with a side-order of not letting you know all the hardware for their different models is the same, bar an identifying link and/or a magic number in the firmware that is, say, halving the maximum speed.

That is a far simpler way to empty your wallet than surveilling you.

Another thing AI is better at than you: First-person drone racing

> the nascent sport

That is already 12 years old, so old enough that you can easily envisage someone who wasn't born at the time of the first races taking part. With 320 million households involved and at least half a dozen different organisations setting up races, aren't we well past "nascent", and have even missed the opportunity to call it a "fledgling"?

Anyway, more to the point:

> "Reaching the level of professional pilots with an autonomous drone is challenging because the robot needs to fly at its physical limits while estimating its speed and location in the circuit exclusively from onboard sensors."

The drone finds it "challenging" against a human when it has sensors to actually measure[1] speed, location and, probably, also distance to obstacles[2]! One a pre-determined course! They don't even have to worry about motion sickness from the FPV goggles (if you thought VR can make you puke...). What kind of wimpy algorithms are they using that it is even mildly surprising that the machine can't drive the course at the limits of the fligjt hardware's capability? Did all those maze-running mice die in vain?

> developed a system that combines deep reinforcement learning (RL)

Oh, they are using *that* sort of algorithm! No doubt they are more surprised it didn't suddenly flip upside down halfway around and run the whole course backwards (for no good reason that anyone can figure out).

Sorry, but given how many years have passed since clever chaps got drones to juggle sticks between each other, running a known course with sensors somehow doesn't seem terribly exciting.

Now, if they had run the course with just the feed from the FPV and the same level of control loop as the humans did, then we can talk turkey.

> could eventually lead to applications in battlefield warfare.

Just so long as everyone agrees on the course, eh? As Colonel Blimp said, "War starts at Midnight".

[1] if they are only estimating those things, go and buy some better sensors!

[2] if not, they really need to read some more hobbyist electronics blogs!

The printout may be dead but that beast of a print queue lives on

Opinion piece - or Register author just poking animals through the cage?

Why the headline mention of "regulation"?

> Regulation only happens after something goes badly wrong, and a few messed-up 3D prints and broken printers is nowhere near wrong enough.

The only examples that the article prattles on about are printer queues (and, as has already been pointed out, can't be bothered to do basic research about how old they are) and the recent stupidity with Bambu.

Oh, look, the Bambu thing - that storm in a tea cup that mostly generated Register comments about how stupid the idea was and how they would never, ever, use a cloud-connected printer. That was it. Nothing much else happened. Prints were trashed, filament wasted, that was the end of it. No doubt someone will try to big it up by making a class action law suit, but those are a dime a dozen, where they are actually even a thing. But not to worry, bring it up again and see if we can't stoke up the same level of ire, ridicule and general "engagement" from the commentards on your piece.

Even better, start the article but by bemoaning a lack of regulation.

For what? Got any actual realistic examples where that would be useful, let alone necessary?

For life-threatening scenarios? Pretty sure you will find a lot of regs already in place where there are potential threats to life or limb.

For queues that go wrong? Or even, shock, queues on "cloud" computers that go wrong?

Oh noes, only today I found that I had a bunch of duplicate emails because a queue in a cloud computer had gone wrong (and don't try to weasel out and day email servers are not in the cloud!). The horror. I demand regulation to prevent this happening again!

There possibly are some cases where regulation may be important - but if you are going to write a Register article about it, at least *try* to come up with some viable examples - or have the intellectual honesty to day that you can't.

Just riffing - badly - on printer queues and *one* recent article barely counts as a thought had on the loo, let alone a well thought out and articulated "opinion'.

Re: Elegoo manage it

What? You mean some 3D printers *don't* have SD slots to let them work without a PC permanently attached? (Probably ought to add a /s here but wish it wasn't needed).

That is definitely a sign of things going backwards, as it is *simpler* to run an SD off a simple MCU, like an AVR (which is all you really need[1]) to drive the printer than it is to have USB (for serial over USB or storage).

You shouldn't ever need to have a full-fat PC involved for 3D printing, once the model has been copied across (over the LAN if you don't like removable media - via USB just seems stoopid, having to carry one or the other close enough evey time).

[1] yes, you can add features like cameras, which can be useful for a quick check from the living room, but do that with a R'Pi (model 3 is overkill), still no need for your PC to be used.

Windows screensaver left broadcast techie all at sea

>such buffoonery to happen on his watch.

He _is_ a horny-handed son of the sea, but even his wrist is not thick enough to carry a watch of such size to support buffoonery - at least, not without scratching the glass or even twisting the stem. Even the sturdiest pocket timepiece of the day can only be expected to withstand waggery.

His chronometer can give you the longitude, but if you allowed him the latitude, he would merrily fob you off with TikTok Tales from the South China Sea too confusing to follow: you'll be too time zoned out to clock his intention to tarry in the foc'sle til Three Bells are past and swiftly drunk.

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Re: Email DICKTATORS

> And yet I have the balls to post under my own account and don't have any of this superiority complex bullshit that so many seem to suffer from.

Well, aside from being superior in your great modesty that you are so genteel in expressing.

Re: Email DICKTATORS

> Yes, it has led to security issues, but most of that is due to email itself being insecure because it was never designed to be secure

True, email is as secure as sending a postcard (oh, if only the big boys and their Outlook etc supported emcryption) but that is nothing compared to the horrors of tracking pixels etc that HTML makes do easy.

I blame the Modern Web

Back in the 90's, working in tech companies and University, we had little things called "web servers".

When we wanted to let somebody read complicated materials, with lots of images (graphs) and tables of data, or just carefully formatted text, we would use whatever tools made sense (web designers, gnuplot, LaTeX, hand coded HTML) and put everything onto one or more web pages. Then send a simple email with the URL (yes, as required, access control was set up - but given that sending an email is as private as a postcard...)

If anyone in the email conversation wanted to access the raw data, we could make the graph an anchor for (another page with) that file (and the plot scripts). No need to drop that into the email and see it (accidentally) resent to everyone.

Nowadays, the mail clients provide the HTML editing for you - but then all of that, formatted, gets sent inside the email. Anyone asks for the raw data - everybody on the whole chain gets the entire back, now with an another attachment, and everyone's mail box fills up whilst the web server languishes, forgotten.

> "emailer seems to send only the HTML"

My worst offender is a techie! Or sort of. He has carefully set up a PHP script that takes his plain-text, one-liner messages and converts them into weird HTML, with absolutely no attempt at creating a proper multi-part email!

Hint: if you decide to do this and don't want to risk the recipient face-palming, make sure that the HTML comments don't identify the script and version of PHP that was running it!

> IME most emailers sending HTML send it multi-part with a plain text version

A few years back, I would have agreed - *but* nowadays I am receiving fewer and fewer properly multi-part emails, forcing the client to put up a bold statement "*Extracted from HTML Portion of Message:* " followed by a good attempt at extracting a readable extract.

Even though it does a good job (veering towards showing me lumps of weird stuff embedded in the HTML rather than risk not showing anything useful) I have here an email whose *entire* readable extraction, following the bolded warning, is (minus the greater-than character)

> giffgaff

And I kinda got that much from just the "from" (as well as the "to" 'cos one email per company-likely-to-leak-your-info-one-day)! Save the HTML and read it - yes, that is the *entire* content of the HTML! The rest is all images and redirects to gawd knows where.

Aaaargh.

Why these cloud-connected 3D printers started making junk all by themselves

Re: Cloud connected? FFS why?

> Fully knowing it's connected to the cloud, aka not under your control?

Ah, there we have it - one job scheduling glitch (which sort of issue is not intrinsically cloud-related) and the whole argument comes down to "I don't believe I have any control, I do not have any trust at all in any third-party service, I do not believe it is worth the risk, it would be brave (or stupid) to ever do so."

And the *real* risk being? A day's wasted printing (I'm going to ignore all this "it will burn your house down, just you wait and see" noise), the cost of the filament and electric. Response to this horrid, ghastly, world-shattering event that'll give you PTSD until the end of your days? Contact the service provider, have a word and, if necessary, go talk to small claims.

If it happens regularly (which even this story isn't claiming happens - it is only newsworthy because a number of people's printers were affected) then time to change the setup. Grr, what an annoyance.

Re: Cloud connected? FFS why?

> to permit an outgoing request, you have to open a hole.

My point being that you do not, as was being implied, have to open up an incoming hole. Anything that has to happen for any outgoing will happen for *every* outgoing, and if anyone is worried about that they simply have to stop using the Internet - having a 3D printer calling out is otherwise no worse than anything else.

> and you shouldn't be forced to depend on some 3rd party server that may be unreachable, switch to a subscription model or all the stuff that happens when users are forced into the 'cloud' for no good reason.

True. Very true.

Can you show where Bambu are actually doing any of that? As far as I can find out, their printers are quite capable of being driven by the good old fashioned front-panel. You get fancy features via their server but have not seen where it is a necessity and hence being, as you say, forced.

Re: Cloud connected? FFS why?

Mildly confused here.

>> Clever IT type ... carefully allow the right bits through their firewall so they can monitor it ...

> here's zero reason for stuff like this to insist on cloudybollocks

You mean, precisely like the scenario you just quoted?

> User can control that server however they want.

Just so long as they don't want to control it remotely, appears to be today's argument.

> and force the dependency on it,

Citation, please.

>> ... how about considering that there may be someone around...

> I'm guessing the answer is also lawyers ... printers should not be left unattended

I EXPLICITLY described a situation where the printer IS NOT BEING LEFT UNATTENDED! It just isn't being attended by the person who fetishistically wants to monitor its every move! How does your response relate to the sentence you just quoted?

Re: Sounds like this cloud thing was programmed as if it was a local server

The reason for doing this was to provide an optional set of features that some people may want to use and others not.

If you didn't want to use it, no harm and no foul: no internet connection, no job scheduling screw up.

So much hatred for an optional feature that some may want to use, others not

The title says it all, really.

Re: Cloud connected? FFS why?

> No, but, as with my computer, I do not let my 3D printer on if I'm not using it.

Your choice. Has nothing what so ever to do with what may or may not be useful behaviour for anyone else.

I, personally, leave my desktop PC off when I'm away from it - but my other computers are all running away, doing server-type stuff. So I do choose to have computers on when I'm not using them (just in case I - or anyone one with privileges - decide they'd like to use them).

I also let the washing machine run on an auto cycle while I'm out, ditto the dishwasher. The PVR is continually switching itself on, especially when I'm away from home for more than a few days.

Re: Cloud connected? FFS why?

Bloody Norah, we really are intent on totally trashing even the *IDEA* of an entirely optional feature like remote 3D printer control. Sigh.

> Anything from a screw up like this via malware being introduced to the printer through that carefully crafted hole in the firewall that allows the printer to become a staging post to attack the rest of your network

So, to your knowledge, the ONLY way to provide this kind of service is for the firewall to have a hole open? Note that by this point you've totally passed the point of discussing how Bambu in particular have implemented their system.

You do know that it is possible for a machine inside your firewall to make, say, an HTTP request out to a remote server without opening a hole in the firewall? And that HTTP request can pass information both ways? And another host, like, say, your phone or your PC at work, can also send requests to the same remote server (again, no holes in anyone's firewall) and... Doesn't even have to be HTTP, other protocols can be initiated from inside.

> Bambu going TITSUP** and no more printing.

Care to cite where all of the Bambu printers are 100% reliant on the Bambu servers in order to print? Not whether they provide nice-to-haves via their services, but basic functionality (as you are claiming 100% lack of printing).

Re: Cloud connected? FFS why?

Ah, so the feature is entirely useless because you every time you have an idea you have also left old prints on the bed.

Gotcha.

There is an awful lot of stretching going on today to ensure that any possible utility from an entirely optional feature is totally driven into the ground.

Re: Cloud connected? FFS why?

> There are even collections of privately-owned 3D printers connected to a third-party service that allows you or I to buy time and get a small job run off

Full disclosure - I've just checked the services listed in my old notes and, I guess no surprise, they have been taken over and are run purely commercially now. Not to say that there aren't still community run services, just no longer the ones I knew of.

But in their day, the community run services were getting use and were scheduled via someone else's server, so...

> you could just start it in the morning and have it ready when you get home in the evening

And you don't see *any* utility at all in being able to keep an eye on the status of that print during the day?

Like maybe seeing it has a problem and you have time to pop back and get it going again at lunch? Or being able to give it some other command to keep it going (e.g. the spool of red has kinked and jammed, but these aren't going to be visible parts, so abandon the part-done piece and continue the rest of the run in black).

Cloud connected? FFS why?

Because print jobs can take a long, long time to complete and it can be useful to monitor them from wherever you are and, yes, even schedule a new print job: you have an idea, start a small job there and then, piece is ready to use when you get back that evening.

Clever IT type people set their printers up with OctoPrint then carefully allow the right bits through their firewall so they can monitor it during the day. Other people use a third-party server that the printer can reach through the NATting home router without opening up holes to the outside: AKA "the cloud".

"But it is far too dangerous to walk away from your hot and highly inflammable 3D printer while it is running!"

Aside from "you can always keep it safely inside a fire pit" how about considering that there may be someone around to notice the raging inferno and hit the Big Red Switch but that someone need not be otherwise bothered about what your stupid machine is doing all day, can't you at least do something about that high-pitched whine it makes?

There are even collections of privately-owned 3D printers connected to a third-party service that allows you or I to buy time and get a small job run off (getting away from this particular manufacturer, AFAIK).

"But why as default?"

Because all the flash features are always on by default these days! They assume you buy a gadget that talks to a server (when there are plenty that don't) because that is something you would like to use.

Re: More Vendor Bullshit

> Fahrenheit 451

You can auto-ignite some substances way below 400°C, but the general idea is to consider what materials you sensibly allow on your printer. If you decide to pop some white phosphorus onto the print bed and ram the hot end into it, don't expect much sympathy.

More sensibly (!) running the machine whilst it is wet with diethyl ether (really gets the stains out) is contra-indicated as well. Ditto ethanol. Absolutely not silane.

But if you keep all the obvious materials away from the hot end - and that includes paper - running at 400°C should not[1] cause a 3D printer to catch fire.

Plans to monitor the temperature of printer components like the "hotend"

Um, monitoring - indeed, controlling - the temperature of the hot end, and other bits, such as the hot plate (notice a pattern in the naming here?), is a fundamental function of a 3D printer! You can even have gloriously nerdy conversations about the best thermistor to use, whether the design of that hot end located the thermistor too far from the nozzle/to close to the heating element (or vice versa)...

If they are not already monitoring those temperatures then something is very wrong!

Zoom CEO reportedly tells staff: Workers can't build trust or collaborate... on Zoom

Re: Context is everything

> I've long believed that those who think public transport is a good way to commute live close to a bus or train route that also passes close to their place of work with no need to change.

Before moving counties and gaining a 35 mile each way commute up the motorway, I was happily commuting by bus (and didn't even own a car until the last couple of years of bus-riding; didn't feel the need[1]). The first job's route required one change and only a five minute walk at each end, the next job required a 15 minute walk and two changes (the middle bus being a city-to-city express) and so it went on.The best case was no bus needed, just a 20 minute walk (I have absolutely no ability on a pushbike, before that gets suggested).

Aside from when doing the walking bits (which helped keep me a lot slimmer than now), read a lot of novels over those years.

Would I continue to do the same nowadays? Honestly: the village gets so few connections a day that it'd be a right palaver, so no. But if the service was as good as it used to be, even here, then probably: it'd be nice to read more novels again, one those days when one had to go in.

[1] then again, the train service used to be a lot cheaper so even long trips were viable without a car.

Start rummaging: Atari's new 2600+ console supports vintage cartridges

Dig Dug Up Again

What, no mention of the Atari game landfill, not even to suggest that it has only taken them nine years to finally piece together a working copy of the legendary E.T. cartridge[1]!

[1] even if the Register article disputes that title's title of awfulness

Netflix flinging out DVDs like frisbees as night comes for legacy business

Yay for DVDs and BluRay discs

That is all.