What do you mean message board. I’ve got my board right here.

But it is an illumination round

It is being fired at residential zones in broad daylight

Anything in that price range will be fiddly. You can spend a little more (eg. Bambu, Prusa) and gain reliability and support. But I’ve used $200 Enders and $50,000 commercially maintained Stratasys Fortus machines and aside from printing ABS and dissolvable support material, my cheap hand-tuned POS outperforms it in every regard. We just replaced the Fortus with a couple Utilimaker S7s at work and I’m still watching mechanical engineers print spaghetti at least once a week.

Upstream is adopting many of these changes. A 1.0 release candidate fully integrating the toponaming changes from RealThunder’s branch is supposed to be released within a week or two. There are many other convenience features in the RT branch (like better section views, live updates to chamfer/fillets, non-contiguous bodies, etc) but backwards compatibility with existing models is much more important in upstream than it is in experimental forks like RealThunder’s. Basically, it just takes time.

I’m reluctant to make a strong recommendation because the tech moves so fast and I haven’t been into it for a couple years.

Same. I can say what worked for me, but there are certainly better options available now. The only thing which has interested me in the meantime is the Voron 2, but that is ABSOLUTELY not a beginner recommendation lmao (it is a design that you have to source and build yourself, sometimes partial/complete kits come and go but they are expensive).

These entry level ones are a pain in the ass to find tune, though (which has to be done frequently). I don’t know the cost of the cheapest automatic one, but I’ve got a friend with more expensive Bambu Labs and they’re so much closer to “set and forget”.

In my experience, these things are like bicycles. There are hundreds of them. They all have wheels, handlebars, breaks, pedals. Some have shock absorbers and bells. If you buy a bike at Walmart, it will work, but the person who assembled it will never put as much love into it as you possibly can. Or if it comes in a box and you have to assemble it yourself, you’ll follow the instructions and get it working, but it will still kind of suck until you take various bits of it apart and put it back together a second or third time.

If you want a perfectly tuned machine, you have to actually use it first and observe how it’s performance falls short. The more expensive ones will (should) have higher quality components and be less finicky, but no matter what you get, it is going to require maintainence. I work in a machine shop on CNC machines which cost a quarter of a million dollars and I still have to tear these things apart and do all sorts nutty maintenance tasks (above and beyond the documented “preventative maintenance”).

It wasn’t until I disassembled my printer beyond the flat-pack state it came in and put it back together, after about a year of dicking around with it, that I got it to a state where I can start it up after months of idleness and still nail a print on the first shot.

We need a strong Republican Party!

Recent thread: https://hexbear.net/post/3153755

I bought myself a Creality Ender-3 v2 for $200 a few years ago and am still running it (despite it sort of being a Ship of Theseus at this point). At this point, there are budget printers with more available features (offered by Creality, as well as many other vendors). I highly recommend something with a Z-probe (for mesh leveling), and with some viable (i.e. observed in the wild, not just advertised as a feature by the vendor) method to run 3rd party firmware on the machine. I also recommend getting something somewhat popular, as this will make it easier to find replacement parts, printable mods, customized and fine-tuned firmware, as well as troubleshooting advice.

PLA and PETG are pretty easy to print. PLA is the easiest, PET(g) is a bit more sticky / messy, but is much stronger, tolerant to direct sunlight, and doesn’t require an enclosure like ABS. You should have no problems printing these on any budget “bed slinger”

Mostly for familiarizing myself with the tools.

Cura might have better tree supports, but I’m a PrusaSlicer dead-ender personally. At some point you many want to learn how to use some modeling software, whether to create bespoke designs, or to modify STL files you find on Thingiverse/Printables so they can work with whatever materials / problems you have on hand. In particular, a lot of designs which require magnetic inserts or nuts/screws will only work if you have the exact magnet/screws on hand, but this can be fixed with a little elbowgrease.

If I were to choose one app, it would probably be Matrix due to the fact that is supports E2EE not only in private messages, but in chatrooms, and due to the fact that you can self-host it (this is a simple requirement which all these other “apps” fail). But it Matrix isn’t a panacea either. From my understanding, while the cryptography is considered to be sound, the protocol itself reveals a lot of metadata. If I were going to use Matrix for ninja shit, it would absolutely not be on a publicly federated server. It would be a private, unadvertized server which only the cool kids get told about.

If it were a matter of life or death, the only thing I’d really trust is GPG and dead drops.

The Russia stuff didn’t really take off until after the Democrats blew it. Its purpose was not to get out the vote, but to blame everything on forces beyond their control and prevent the Democratic Party from being justifiably decapitated by its constituents. In the end, it worked. They lost to Donald fucking Trump and all of them got to keep their jobs.