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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)MO
Posts
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603
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I'm a mechanical eng turned software, computing and the like are super visible but there's been a huge amount of advancement in physical things in our lifetime, Steel in particular. By no means an expert, some of this I've been out of the industry for a while so just operating on memory, totally welcome any corrections!

    I'm not a metallurgist, but worked with them, there's lots of grades out there but some of the stuff being used in automotive is seriously interesting (I think they're boron grades but I can't recall), needs specific treatment like hot stamping but they can easily hit into the 1-2 GPa range for yield strength once it's processed. It's allowed material to be rolled thinner for the same part strength so you end up with lighter vehicles.

    Coatings too have changed a lot, non-chromium passivation is a thing, galvanised materials are no longer just zinc + a bit of aluminum, there's aluminum + silicon coatings that are supposed to offer decent corrosion resistance at high temperatures, those fancy automotive steels get coated in it for things like mufflers. Construction there were zinc+magnesium coatings starting to show up, supposed to be resistant to coating damage.

    Processing has changed a lot in a century too, steel is substantially metallurgically cleaner these days, probably actually cleaner too with more electric arc furnaces and hydrogen direct reduced iron.

    It's oldish these days but pipeline inspection was increasingly using Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer (EMAT) tools when I worked in that field. It let you do ultrasound inspection of steel pipes without needing a liquid medium, so things like cracks and material defects that are hard (or nearly impossible) to find using Magnetic Flux Leakage tools are a lot more accessible to gas pipeline operators as they don't need to do things like plan around liquid batching.

  • I have a 512GB card in my steam deck, seen listings for them upwards of 2 TB, reliability scares me a bit with that much data but still, it's impressive how far flash memory has come. I remember being excited about a 64MB thumbdrive and buying my first 1GB one.

  • You're golden then, I do Wii and earlier on mine, 360 games run but I haven't really played much with them. I quite like the deck for emulation and it runs old titles well (and recent stuff too, I really liked Nine Sols, it's not a demanding game though, apparently cyberpunk plays well on the deck, not tried that though)

    I bought an LCD model when they were really cheap, still a good model and solid device, but I got my partner an oled one as a gift, I highly recommend that one if it's in your budget, it looks better, has HDR and a better battery life.

  • Bit of a, bit of b, thermal protection on printers sets a minimum hotend and bed temperature, it's configurable but 0c is pretty common. Drop below that and the firmware will trip an emergency shutdown in klipper, some (mk3s) set off an alarm beeper when that happens.

    Higher ambient helps with chamber temps too depending on what you print. I let my printers heat soak for at least an hour before I print anyhow, the space heater gives some stability in ambient temps.

    Also done prints where I've just blasted the hotend and build plate with a heatgun to get above the min temps to be able to get a heat soak going. Vorons have a decently powerful bed heater (~600w if I recall), my mk3s isn't nearly as powerful but still capable of sustaining itself (would definitely benefit from insulation)

  • I don't live in the coldest place but it'll hit -20s c at the coldest in the winter with -10 +/-5, summer is 30 +/-5. My garage isn't climate controlled but not the largest, a space heater is enough to bring ambient up enough to be comfortable, certainly enough where the printer firmware doesn't kick out on low temperatures.

    I have enclosures so it helps some, mk3s doesn't get super warm as it's currently setup but I do regularly successfully print abs on it, petg and pla aren't an issue at all, voron gets substantially warmer. Summer, enclosures need to be open to print pla depending how hot it is. Even with all that, I'd recommend it, I do it primarily for air quality reasons, I've printed abs indoors without an enclosure in the same room exactly once a long time ago, 0/10 don't recommend.

  • I worked in primary metals for a while, core business applications still ran on mainframes, they had a project to move some of them to SAP that apparently had the same timelines as nuclear fusion (perpetually x years away).

  • Paper is a edtech company that has a bunch of contracts with school boards for tutoring. They fired AFAIK all of their Canadian tutors last year, coincidentally after they had unionised in both Ontario and Québec. Not sure if they still are getting public funding but may be worth adding to your questions.

  • Stuff that's in use I try to keep inside the enclosure, no humidity control in my garage so at the whims of humid continental climate, gets nasty in the summer. I keep things vac sealed with silca gel for long periods and print from dry boxes or enclosure mounts to take advantage of the lower humidity while printing.

    Working on a powered dry box using solid state dehumidifiers like used in this, hope that'll help with humidity issues.

    Some filament isn't super sensitive, my experience pa6>petg>abs=pla.

  • Probably, it's not pleasant stuff afaik, was looking at it earlier and it seemed like you could probably source it domestically fairly easily too, didn't seem like you'd need special licenses or anything. Not stuff I want to keep around though, not that a lot of solvents that work on thermoplastics are nice to be around for one reason or another.

  • Mine had a bunch of iMac g3s, eMacs came toward grade 8.

    Games weren't explicitly forbidden, just needed to finish work first, new Cross Country Canada, math circus and Oregon trail were the games I recall the most of. There was this one game though I can't recall the name of but the concept was interesting, you played as a time travelling velociraptor and had to save dinosaur eggs from extinction, was like a 3rd person shooter, I have no idea why that was on school computers

    Edit: was Nanosaur

    In the distant year of 4122, a dinosaur species, Nanosaurs, rule the Earth. Their civilization originated from a group of human scientists who experimented with genetic engineering. Their experimentation led them to resurrect the extinct dinosaur species; however, their victory was short-lived, as a disastrous plague brought the end of their civilization itself. The few dinosaurs resurrected were lent an unusual amount of intelligence from their human creators, leaving them to expand on their growing civilization. However, as the Nanosaurs were the only species on Earth, inbreeding was the only possible choice of reproduction. This method largely affected the intelligence of the various offspring, and slowly began to pose a threat to their once-intelligent society.

    The Nanosaur government offers a quest that involves time traveling into the year 65 million BC, where the five eggs of ancient dinosaur species must be retrieved and placed in a time portal leading to the present year. Their high-ranking agent, a brown Deinonychus Nanosaur, is chosen to participate in this mission. On the day of her mission, she is teleported to the past via a time machine in a Nanosaur laboratory.

  • Was a kubuntu person for a long time, I haven't really loved the default Ubuntu DE for a while, but that's personal preferences. At the end of the day, use what you like.

    I personally like debian (swapped from Kubuntu over time) but keep mint on my thumb drive for family who needs something on older hardware, especially those used to windows it seems to be an easy jump. I love that there are so many options available to people with various levels of prepackaging and configurations.