Pretty sure you can be charged with something if you do it on purpose and just leave it there. Littering, maybe.

Actually, it would probably be more appropriate for the municipal website to display the location of any vehicles he owns, and what speed they’re travelling at if they’re in motion, at all times. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and all that. Automated software that watches the page and tickets him every time he exceeds the speed limit is optional, but recommended. Additional intrusive software on his phone that tickets him if he uses it while driving is also optional but recommended.

The A150 is too small to mount the rotary—you need at least an A250, but there were no longer any of the midsize units available by the time I hit the kickstarter and I didn’t have the space for the A350, so I opted for the smallest model.

Embarassingly, I’ve used it mostly as a 3D printer. The blue diode laser originally shipped with the unit is a decent etcher but too weak to cut through anything very thick (best I’ve heard of anyone managing was 1/4" of wood, and that took a lot of passes and patience on their part), and it has some limitations on what materials it will handle (I’d have to scour the forum for details, because it’s been a while). I didn’t buy the more powerful laser that later became available as an add-on. Unless their software has improved a lot since the last version I downloaded, you’ll need 3rd party software to make the most of it.

I never actually tried milling with it because of potential dust removal issues, but according to reports it once again suffers here from being a compromise device with limited software. The frame isn’t quite as rigid as a dedicated CNC, the bits are Dremel-sized and a bit fragile due to that, and the provided software I have won’t, for instance, handle what should be simple tasks like drilling all-vertical holes or doing multiple passes with different-sized bits. Unlike the laser, I can’t recall any reports of anyone using alternative CAM software for the CNC, but it’s been a couple of years since I last looked.

In the end it’s kind of like a Swiss Army knife: great if you have limited space (my issue) and just want to try stuff out, but if you can manage it you’re better off with dedicated machines for each function.

Unless they’ve changed in the past few years, most parts are proprietary and will have to come from Snapmaker or their resellers. Swaps are usually at the module level. So the flexibility in parts sourcing is much lower than your Ender 3. On the plus side, they’re usually good about honouring warranties.

Nozzles with other aperture sizes are available from Snapmaker for the U1. It’s possible that the nozzles are a standard size (my older Snapmaker 2 uses the same nozzles as your Ender 3), but I can’t find a specification anywhere.

TL;DR: If your priority is varied parts sourcing for longevity, maybe look at a different manufacturer.

I do see that page referencing their app, so it could go either way, depending on whether their app is a mandatory part of the pathway.

It looks like you can control it with vanilla Orcaslicer. See the last post in this Snapmaker forum thread, for instance. It may or may not be willing to take gcode through the USB port—the specs indicate it has one.

It looks to me like they’re continuing in their usual direction of fairly open software on mostly proprietary hardware.

You’d have to indicate “I also support these optional bits” for this to really work, which would lead to truly massive headers.

I prefer the idea of slapping people who put up pages that cater to Chrome rather than reading and following the standards upside the head with a large dead fish. People who write faulty WYSIWYG web design software get smacked once for every bad site deployed with their help.

The first one that comes to mind is Qt (the widget toolkit). While I’m not sure the current owners still do this, Trolltech offered the earlier versions under both the GPL and a commercial license that I think included paid support. I assume any sales under the commercial license were to companies who wanted to include it in their closed-source software.

As the owner of a Snapmaker2 A150 (that is, one of their second-gen multifunction devices, fairly old now), I can say that my experience with it has been decent enough. It speaks a lightly modified Marlin dialect and can be run completely offline. New firmware requires user permission. They did release the source for the firmware and for their custom slicer (not worth it), and some of the more adventurous owners did manage to flash it with modified firmware. There were a few complaints at the time about the hardware not being as open as people had hoped, mostly because of custom connectors and the like.

Hardware-quality-wise, it was kneecapped by needing to be solid enough for CNC, so it’s slower and heavier than a purpose-built printer would need to be, but the prints are of decent enough quality for a device of its age and type.

In the general case, the person or persons who distributed the binary would then have done so illegally. In order to distribute, you have to follow the terms of the license. So them attempting to go after anyone downstream of them at that point is sort of like calling the police because someone stole your drug stash. And if there’s an upstream beyond the illegal distributors, they’re practically waving a “Sue me now!” placard in their direction.

The originator of the code, above whom there is no upstream, is allowed to offer it under more than one license (including a mixture of free and closed licenses), but the specific license in force has to be specified with each distributed copy.

No surprises here. Well, at least the items it ordered this time were kinda-sorta-maybe-almost plausible to stock at a café, unlike the tungsten cubes in the vending machine.

Reason #### not to allow random untrusted sites to run Javascript on your system. (I’m not actually sure how many reasons there are, but I am sure we must be into four digits by now.)

Sure it can (most of the bits, anyway). You can go the opposite way around the world or around the edge of Africa, for instance. Latency will go up, and it’ll add to the congestion of other trunk cables, but rerouting is certainly possible for any location where the cables in the strait aren’t your only route out. The real damage will be to the middle-eastern countries served directly by these cables, and it may be a bit of a headache for people who maintain Internet infrastructure.

Although Iran might cut the cables regardless, since one of the countries they appear to serve is Iran itself. Easiest way to control the news is to limit the flow of information across the border.

Your Internet obviously does not look like my Internet. I can’t remember ever seeing a site that didn’t belong to Google or Microsoft that required their login garbage (I see commercial sites that offer it as an option for lazy people who are unable to understand that using it is not in their best interests, yes, but every single one I’ve encountered thus far has also had a local username/password system).

As for the hyperscalers, that’s starting to break up a bit because of the number of countries the US has pissed off recently. People want to move their stuff back inside their own borders. It’s a drop in the bucket so far, admittedly, but every little bit helps.

Using hg-git everywhere reinforces the idea that Mecurial is a second-class citizen. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that an option for interoperability exists, but I wish it weren’t needed.)

Definitely. The last time I checked, your only hosting options if you wanted to use Mercurial directly were Heptapod and ($DEITY help us) Sourceforge.

If I were talking just about devices I myself use, I would say yes, get rid of all forced updates, but unfortunately, smart TVs are not bought only by the technically adept. (You should see my mother trying to use hers, and given her age and general incomprehension of technology I doubt her understanding is going to improve.) Their devices still have to be patched to keep the botnets from going after the rest of us. I don’t particularly like forced updates, but for security updates on consumer devices they sometimes are the lesser of two evils.

That becomes a problem when we’re talking about the 1% of updates that are sent to prevent your smart TV from becoming part of a distributed botnet, though. Some people might even complain about the 9% of updates intended to keep up with churn in the APIs of 3rd-party services that are part of the functionality the device was purchased for.

What we need is something that restricts forced updates to those categories. That requires regulation, which likely means starting in the EU, since that’s the only major jurisdiction that’s (sometimes) pro-consumer. We also need regulations on labeling that force the manufacturer to indicate on the outside of the packaging in big letters exactly what advertised functionality of a device will break if it’s kept off the internet.

Fair. Two wrongs don’t make a right. (And to be honest? If it were me, I’d actually just drop out of those channels. I’m used to venues on the Internet being easy-come-easy-go.)

Well, there’s always the ancient method that teens used to get their hands on alcohol when I was that age: pay someone who’s down on their luck for ten minutes of their time.

The article notes (along with names of shops—vote with your money, if you’re in the UK), that the ID system being used has the usual racial bias (has a hard time with anyone who isn’t white) and also a gender bias (has an easier time IDing men). And that the provider was careful not to mention this until after people started complaining.