I went with the Qidi Q1 Pro and I’ve been very happy with it. Orca Slicer’s built in profiles for it have worked great so I didn’t have to tinker. It runs Fluidd so once it was connected to the local network I could monitor and control it that way (and it will display directly in Orca Slicer).

There is a setting in the printer’s interface to restrict it to local network only (and just to be absolutely certain I blocked it in my firewall as well). There are no penalties for not connecting it to the internet.

It’s great being in a time zone where it’s already April 2nd when the Americans start pulling this shit. You think you’ve made it through the nonsense and then BAM, here’s another day of it except ramped up to 11.

I’ve been able to freely export .step files for anything I’ve made in Onshape. As another commenter said there are catches, like all your files are public if you’re using the free version and there are premium features that require payment. But it’s currently not locked down like it seemed Autodesk were preparing to do, where all your files live on their cloud only and can never be exported. For sure there is potential for the same enshittification with Onshape though, which is why I hope the freecad devs soldier on.

Also if you’re worried about your files being public, just name them with codes indecipherable to anyone but you. It doesn’t seem like the public file repository actually gets searched that much in general, and with a meaningless code the odds of someone finding and stealing a specific design are probably near zero.

Time to give it another try I guess. I used Fusion almost exclusively until I switched to Linux (and have also used Solidworks in the past), and I found freecad 1.0 to be an exercise in frustration.

I gave it a very solid shot, but after many hours messing with it and watching tutorials I decided to try Onshape instead. I was able to become comfortable and productive in Onshape in less than half the time it took me to lose my cool with freecad.

The 1.1 update looks to be addressing some of the pain points, so they seem to be on the right track. I hope they keep that momentum going.

What about all of the site-to-site VPNs?

The Ender was good when it worked, which it did really well for a year or two after I spent a lot of time and energy getting it sorted. But then things started to go downhill. In the hot end I had the heater cartridge, thermistor and cooling fan all fail separately but fairly close together. I had Z screw runout issues and had to replace the brass nut. The extruder housing cracked and had to be replaced with an aluminum one. Limit switches failed. V rollers failed. It suddenly developed adhesion issues with the glass bed and glue stick I’d been doing for years. Scuffing up the bed didn’t work, replacing it with a new glass bed didn’t work, scuffing the new glass bed didn’t work. I switched to a magnetic PEI bed, that worked but it conforms to the horrific banana shape of the Ender’s factory bed and I can only print on a single quadrant of it at a time because of the massive dips in between the screws.

This is just the stuff I remember from years ago. I enjoyed tinkering and upgrading the Ender in the early days but I’m older now and have other stresses on my time. I just want something that works.

Thanks for the advice everyone. I’ve been researching the suggested printers, though options are somewhat limited in my area and pricing varies to US retail. I’d hoped the Ender 3 price tier had approached a more turn-key experience by now, but it seems pretty hit or miss with the Ender 3 V3 SE as far as I could tell. It looks like out of what’s available the Qidi Q1 Pro gets me what I want and is the best bang for buck in local pricing.

Of course that’s a thing now. Yeah I would very much not like to be locked into a vendor ecosystem.

Balena started collecting telemetry without disclosing it to anyone, reportedly including information about what images you were flashing. Apart from a general distaste for unconsensual telemetry, I think people were concerned the data could be used for things like helping to de-anonymize TAILS users.

Hydrogen, even with fuel cell/electric, is not suitable for rural car owners. It’s only really suitable for vehicles that are constantly running, like freight trucks. Why? Because hydrogen leaks out of any vessel you try to put it in. It’s the smallest element in the universe so it slips past the molecules of whatever sealing material you are using. It will even permeate through solid metal, making said metal brittle in the process. And this problem of course gets worse at higher pressures, which you have to use to get any energy density.

So not only do you have to contend with the terrible efficiency loss of using electricity to create hydrogen only to turn it back into electricity again, a whole bunch of your fuel is constantly leaking out during transport and storage. And then if you use cryogenic hydrogen for the best energy density it gets worse again because you can’t keep it cold enough. It’s constantly boiling off and has to be vented to prevent your tank from exploding.

So even if you solve all the myriad other implementation problems with hydrogen, you’re never escaping the fact that you need to use all your fuel quickly or you’re setting money on fire as it leaks. Not to mention potentially getting stuck because you didn’t drive your car for a few days and now you don’t have the fuel to reach a fill station.

Hence why, if it ever matures enough to become actually viable, it will almost certainly be limited to freight and courier type vehicles. They run near constantly and so burn through fuel fast enough that the leakage isn’t an issue.

This isn’t the first time such a vulnerability has been found, have you forgotten spectre/meltdown? Though this is arguably not nearly as impactful as those because it requires physical access to the machine.

Your fervour in trying to paint this as an equivalent problem to Intel’s 13th and 14th gen defects, and implication that everyone else are being fanboys, is just telling on yourself mate. Normal people don’t go to bat like that for massive corpos, only Kool aid drinkers.

Crowdstrike bypassed WHQL because the update was not to the driver, it was to a configuration file that then gets ingested by the driver. It’s deliberate so they can push out updates for developing threats without being slowed down by the WHQL process.

And that means when they decide to just send it on a Friday with a buggy config file, nobody is responsible but Crowdstrike.