• 5 Posts
  • 868 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • Total agreement.

    Btw: If you want to smooth your prints, get a hot-air soldering station. Set it to 300°C and carefully melt the surface. Then use a flat piece of metal and carefully push it to the molten surface. You have to be careful to only melt the outer perimeter without melting the inner structure, so that the shape stays intact. It smooths much better than sanding while at the same time annealing the plastic and creating a much stronger layer bond.

    And it’s much faster than sanding.

    In general, these hot-air soldering stations are perfect for reworking plastics, not only 3D prints.

    The sauce shelf in my fridge cracked apart due to too many sauces being jammed into it. I used the hot-air soldering station to weld the broken pieces together.

    I paid around €50 for mine, which is a very nice temperature-controlled one that goes up to 480°C. Can only recommend.


  • I got into 3D printing 7 years ago and I design most of the things I print myself, so I know what kind of useful tool it can be.

    The reason I am posting this is because pretty much everyone I know who has a printer and kids prints toys all the time, and any time I’m at any event where someone can shoehorn a box of give-away low-poly-pokemon in, there is one there.

    And all that is plastic waste and nothing else. These things often make a happy-meal-toy look like quality by comparison.




  • The fragile part is easily fixed by changing the print material and/or infill percentage. You’re right on all other points though.

    You can make it clunky, but then it’s not appealing any more. That’s why I said that it’s a trade-off between clunky and not interesting on the one side and fragile and not durable on the other side.

    infill percentage

    Btw, perimeters do a huge amount more for stability than infill.

    3d Printing can lose it’s luster over time if you don’t make the effort of learning 3d CAD software and making new designs. -This is my current struggle as FreeCAD is a painful piece of software to use.

    I’ve been 3D printing since 7 years now, and I mostly design the things I print myself. For functional parts and prototyping, 3D printing is amazing. I am specifically talking about toys here.







  • The bigger issue I see here is that pedestrian access received exactly 0 minutes thought when this road was built, even though there’s clearly enough foot traffic to form a desire path on the patch of grass on the left side of the picture. That doesn’t happen without foot traffic, but not only is there no pedestrian crossing of any kind, but there isn’t a foot path on the island on the left, even though there’s a footpath leading up to it that just ends without anything to connect to.

    What do they think people would walk there for? To just stop at the intersection and turn back?



  • According to more realistic data, e.g. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-202406-202506 the market share has been around 4% for the last year, even slightly declining in the meantime.

    But that doesn’t make for nice, sensationalist headline stoked by wishful thinking.

    Sorry to say, Linux isn’t going mainstream anytime soon and by and large the end of Win10 just means that the comparatively small group of users still running 5+ years old hardware will just buy a new PC or keep using their outdated OS.

    In fact, if you combine the market share of outdated Windows versions (XP-8.1) you get a market share very close to the market share of Linux.

    As much as we all would love it if the Linux market share goes to 50% in fall, it’s not going to happen.

    The main issues with Linux adoption (it’s not preinstalled and most people have no idea which OS they are using and really can’t be bothered to reinstall) are just as present now as they were for the last 30 years.





  • Listing already exists, but in practice it’s quite impractical, mainly because it’s either not granular enough or too granular.

    If the listing feature allows me to allow/deny on a domain basis, then allowing Wikipedia for example would mean that I’d also allow all the non-child-friendly content on there too. Like the literal full-length porn videos or the photographies of genital torture that are on there. And if I block all of Wikipedia, I also block all of the hundreds of thousands of informative and totally child-acceptable pages on there.

    If, on the other hand, I allow/deny on a per-page basis, then using the internet becomes nigh unmanageable, because each click of my kid requires me to allow/deny the next page. It’s not that often when using the internet that you access the same exact url every day without clicking to sub-pages.

    A header would solve that issue. That way I could e.g. allow all Wikipedia articles that are rated for ages 6 and that’s ok. The rating should of course be like for movies, so that it doesn’t mean that a child would understand the articles, but that there’s nothing child-endangering in there like the videos and images (and accompanying texts) mentioned above.