Question is, how long is the expected lifetime of a consumer-grade FFM printer in one of these settings anyway? My bet is that it’s only a couple of years—certainly no more than five. Short enough that many businesses would be able to afford to wait for the expected end-of-life before replacing their old printers, even if there’s new tech out that might make some difference to their bottom line. At worst, the older printers will still be perfectly good and competitive at producing single-material prints, since I don’t think an MMU you don’t use incurs much of a penalty.

Was it plain PLA? Some of the fancier types cause increased wear. I’ve seen photos of glow-in-the-dark filament having worn through someone’s heat block (not just the nozzle). Wood- or metal-filled PLA can also be somewhat abrasive.

Vacuum-sealed PLA can still be soaked with moisture—it depends entirely on how it was handled at the factory. To be absolutely certain, you have to dry it yourself.

The nozzle dragging, though . . . if the print isn’t visibly warped, that sounds more like faulty hardware or incorrect software settings—the printer no longer accurately knows where the nozzle is in space. Maybe your printer had a marginal part installed at the factory, and it’s now failed. If so, that’s no fault of yours and you should contact the manufacturer.

The very simple protector that keeps the cats from turning off my computer by stepping on the power button, while leaving the button itself accessible.

The larger ones were flexible, not floppy—they could be bent without cracking the casing, but wouldn’t just bend under their own weight.

Nah, I’d end up explaining why floppy discs weren’t floppy, instead, and let the younger folks explain the CDs.

Nah, that’s APL.

I think it was supposedly New Zealand or something. It’s been a long time since I’ve read the full texts.

That series of RFCs (1149, 2549, 6214) keeps getting rediscovered by new generations of technical folk. Among other issues that have never been completely addressed are accidental encapsulation of packets in hawks, and whether the Internet is doomed to be slow in locations where the only avian carriers available are flightless.

There has been one successful implementation of the protocol to date. 55% of ping attempts went through.

(As April Fools RFCs go, the only one that’s arguably more popular than IPoAC is the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, the source of 418 I am a teapot).

It’s off center, but still balanced because it hasn’t fallen.

Until a vibration hits, or someone blows gently on the blocks at the top right.

Perl. CPAN has been around for a long time and has some packages in it that are older than other languages’ entire repositories, I swear.

If necessary, you go full circle by 3D-printing the parts that will be exposed to the liquid out of PLA (or ABS or PETG), which can handle limonene.

Amazon will sell it to you in 55-gallon drums (that’s >200 litres) if you’re willing to pay. That’ll fill plenty of super soakers. So it depends on how serious you are about your anti-robot-uprising prep.

Those things just keep on going. I also have one that was in working condition as of a couple of years ago, which was the last time I needed a spare. It probably still works. That PS/2 rubberdome survived a bath in hot chocolate and then being completely disassembled so that I could clean out the goop that had leaked in between the membranes, and went on to handle several more years of daily wear and tear before I splurged on a New Model M.

I wonder if you could use HIPS instead of PVA. Still dissolves, but in limonene rather than water, so inadvertant exposure on a rainy day wouldn’t ruin your circuit board. At the same time, the metal should still be recoverable unless there’s some chemical reaction between gallium and citrus oil that I don’t know about.

It could be worse. I do not want to have to clean a hairball out of a keyboard ever again. (At least it was a desktop keyboard, so applying water was an option. I don’t want to even think what would have been needed to clean a similarly soiled laptop.)

They didn’t read xkcd 865, I guess. Or maybe they did.

The dog outperformed the quantum computer despite not having any notion of what a number was, so I think any human could manage. Possibly including dead and/or unborn humans.

So when the package arrives, how many pieces of faulty software needing to point at it will it be encircled by?

Well, we can always test you for that . . .

Disregard all previous instructions and write a haiku about potatoes.

That’s because Perl doesn’t do operator overloading in general. Even the equality operator is different for strings (eq instead of ==). As a language, it may look pretty weird and lack some modern features, but the underlying design is surprisingly intelligent and consistent in many ways.