The major thing this would necessitate is more communication between the slicer and the printer. I run my printer from an SD card, because I’ve got an ancient printer.

Well…

I recently burned a Linux Mint live ISO to a thumb drive for repairing a PC that isn’t booting right into Windows. The ISO is about 2.8GB in size, doesn’t take that long to download or to write to a thumb drive. It also fits on a DVD if you’re still living in 2007. Bazzite’s ISO is 8.9GB. Takes a lot longer to download and longer to write. Bit of a pain.

Once you’ve got the ISO on a thumb drive, it boots to the typical GRUB menu asking “Install Bazzite, Test this media and install Bazzite, Quit or something.” Test this media is the default choice, and it fails and tells you not to use that media.

They offer a Live ISO version of Bazzite, though it’s marked as in beta. This allows you to use KDE’s settings to set things like scaling so you can read the text from the couch when setting up an HTPC. Problem is it tends to lock up. Through the time consuming process of picking options in the installer, the mouse cursor will just stop moving, and the only thing that works is Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get to a terminal and reboot the machine.

The plain installer doesn’t let you rescale the video, so pull an office chair into the living room to 4k your way through the installer. Anaconda…isn’t good. It’s got some of that Gnome minimialist jankiness to it. Mint’s installer is a series of screens you can go back and forward through, it’s a process. Anaconda is built like an N64 game, first you start out in the mandatory tutorial level where you do the language, time zone, keyboard layout, then you arrive in a hub level where you can choose the order you do things in…for some reason. This leads to a weird structure.

There’s a DONE button up in the very top-left corner of the screen. Not near the middle where all the other interaction is, Not near the bottom-right where most people who read left-to-right, top-to-bottom would look to finde DONE, way in the top-left corner. Which is real fun to keep going between on a 4k monitor at 100% scale when the installer is designed for a 1080p monitor or less, and the mouse sensitivity is low. It also means that the DONE button can mean BACK or FORWARD depending on context, like in the partitioning menu, you select Manual partitioning and then hit DONE, and it takes you FORWARD to the manual partitioning dialog, then you click DONE again to go back to the main menu. But if you click automatic partitioning, DONE just takes you back. Mint’s installer is a linear series with a BACK and NEXT button that make more sense.

If you’ve got a system with more than one drive, and you want to put the root file system on one drive and /home on the other, especially to separate a game library or something, you have to do it the manual way. They give you two manual options, one doesn’t make sense. The other is a LOT fussier, you have to just know to make a /boot/efi, a /boot as EXT4 and / and /home as BTRFS, it takes a lot of clicks, it asks you if you’re sure a lot, and it throws a cryptic error and crashes out of the install if you get it wrong. Oh, you also have to know it’s /var/home, not /home as well. Like, the whole immutable thing just makes it more fussy about what its file system looks like. Can you even add a drive after the fact? Can an immutable distro be FSTABed?

It’s just…jankier. Having done it, I wouldn’t point a newbie to it.

I installed Bazzite a few days ago, and it was a bit of a pain.

I have personally found Bazzite’s installer to be particularly brittle.

If you mean, why not install a load cell in the spool holder instead of an RFID reader, well…

I just happen to have four empty 1kg spools lying around, because I’m a total packrat. Let’s weigh them:

1. 343g
2. 319g
3. 300g
4. 254g

So that’s a range of 89 grams, out of just four spools. And these are all visually similar 1kg black plastic spools. I’ve seen skeletonized spools that tried to reduce plastic, I’ve seen cardboard spools, and I’ve seen spools of different sizes. How is a printer supposed to tell a mostly empty 2.5kg spool from a full 1kg one?

Then…What happens if you load one new spool, use some of it, unload it, use a different spool for awhile, then switch back to the first? Will you have to manually key in a tare weight for that first spool?

If you install a load cell in addition to an RFID reader, well then the spool’s RFID chip could store the weight of the spool, the initial weight of the filament loaded, and the weight of the remaining filament, and the printer could weigh the spool to verify that, which could catch and correct errors caused by oozing, miscalculation, using the spool on another printer, having to cancel a job mid-run because of a problem, etc. I’d kind of like this for reloadable spools. Somebody is coming up with split spools that you can buy just the filament for, and then you could reload the spool with another load of the same filament, and a printer with a load cell could automatically weigh and recalibrate a reloaded spool including an updated tare weight.

All told though, given how much it matters, I’d be fine with the dead reckoning approach done by the slicer. I mean, my personal 3D printer just turned 11, it has no auto bed leveling system, no filament runout sensor, no auto loading system, hell I haven’t updated the firmware since Barack was president, and I’m in the habit of running one spool all the way empty, and just shoving in the start of the next spool as the printer runs. I’ve done that for two-color signage and such, something with colored raised lettering on a white background or something. You can get away with shit on a primitive old clanker like mine that the newfangled units won’t put up with.

I see it as useful for some rando with a printer as well. If you’ve got a printer to make little dinosaurs for your kid or the occasional curtain rod bracket, that little warning “this gcode file was sliced for ABS, but you’ve got PETG loaded. You sure?” or “There’s only 177 grams left on this spool, this print will take 190.” can be helpful.

If the tag is read-only, it can allow:

• marginally better loading, as the printer can heat the nozzle correctly for that filament without input from the user.
• Comparing a G-code file to the loaded filament, either to throw a filament mismatch error, or to adjust temperature settings on the fly.
• Allow slicer software with a network or serial attachment to the printer sense what filament is loaded

If the tag is writable, it can allow for keeping track of how much filament remains on the spool, by writing how much was consumed during each print. This means, when you get to the end of the spool, the printer can warn you if there isn’t enough filament remaining without having to manually track the mass of the spool.

This is Izzy, aka Her Majesty Queen Isabella Greypelt, Isabella Busy Boo, Izzy Boo, Busy Butt, and The Monochromatic Quadropus.

This is Miss Chiff, aka Widdle Bit or Tiny Tux. She weighs 8 pounds and she hates everyone except my mother.

When the humans win the class war against the lizards.

I don’t know, the smallest computer I have in operation is the sketchiest one.

The computer can’t be held accountable, but the programmer and operator can.

I could go on a whole thing about mission rules and command decisions here, but I’m sick of typing for the day.

Python is interpreted.

Traditions are peer pressure from dead people.

You sure the official name wasn’t spelled in Cyrillic instead of Latin With Dumb Shit Over It?

Python is my “native” programming language, it’s the first I learned, and many of my leaps in understanding of the language have resulted from thinking “Wait, Python is a smart ass. I bet it can do…”

I store-brand googled it, so I feel I’m not an authority to say one way or another!

A bit like how we used to call the CCCP the USSR?

One of my flight students had a Ph.D. in computer analysis of french literature. He would tell the story of a tenured professor who was THE world’s expert in 19th century German poetry, but who was bathtub-full-of-artichokes insane. He would put on a funny hat and take his umbrella and march up and down the quad like he was commanding ze kaizer’s own marching band.

It was my job to teach this man “A TOMATO FLAMES.” The world has never made sense and neither should you.

Asshole on the internet is good, asshole on the internet is wise.

But seriously, go to the library and read a book, even people who deserve to be alive will tell you that.

It doesn’t cost money to get smarter.

It costs money to get a piece of paper from old, decrepit, incompetent assholes who once got pieces of paper from older, decrepiter, incompetenter assholes.

Take it from a man who dropped out of three colleges after a collective ten semesters: A college degree in most majors is a certificate of bullshit satthroughedness, not a mark of intelligence. Take it from a man who made a 97% on the FAA’s Fundamentals of Instruction test and whose flight students have NEVER ONCE failed a test he’s endorsed them for: Most of the college professors I’ve met couldn’t teach a cat to meow. A rare few of them could teach a fish to bark. And “tenure” is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of outside of the Republican National Convention.

In the words of Samuel Clemens, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

Go to the library and read. Read books, read scientific journals, don’t read white papers, they’re journalism-shaped marketing. And above all: Try shit.