As I understand it, most enterprises have an agreement with Microsoft for commercial licensing of Windows that lets them pay per user instead of per machine. Given that most enterprises tend to lock in a contract with their hardware provider of choice, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had something in there to omit Windows since they already pay for it directly. Plus enterprises windows has features for managing windows at scale (group policy, centralized auth, etc).

I worked for one of the IT departments at my university and we got Ubuntu machines straight from Dell on occasion. I recall those machines being somewhat quirky if we tried to flash them with Windows later (might have been missing a TPM header, or equally arbitrary hardware requirement, but it’s been like 10 years).

In the consumer space, Framework will also let you skip buying a windows licence as well.

Same. My sister bought a kit of two 16gb sodimm sticks back in October for ~$100. I regret trying to wait for holiday deals…

According to Wikipedia, the F series occupies the same low/ mid tier that the A series does, but is sold exclusively in India

Monster Truck Driver has to be to in the top 15 at least.

Steam absolutely charges sale tax in addition to the base price in my area (I think my state passed a law some 10 years ago to capture lost tax revenue from online sales).

Most of my hardware is from before I switched to Linux and I don’t see the need to switch anything that’s still working. I have a pair of Sennheiser 6xx’s that I use at my desk (my usage is occasional enough that I haven’t been able to justify buying a dedicated DAC/ Amp) and a pair of Sony WH-1000XM6’s that live in my backpack for when I’m outside the house.

For mic I usually use the mic built into my webcam (Logitech c920) at my desk, it’s nothing fancy, but it works well enough for the occasional voice/ video call. I don’t think I’ve had reason to need to use my mic while away from my desk, but I’d probably fall back to the one built into my laptop or use the XM6’s mic.

The only thing that might need software is the XM6’s, but those can always fallback to using a wired connection in a pinch. Plus, since they can be paired to both my phone and laptop at the same time, I can use the android app to handle settings tweaks (usually just adjusting the noise canceling mode).

I always get a kick out of the overlap between philosophy and math when it comes to formal logic/ proofs. Like, the underpinnings for dissecting an argument are exactly the same regardless of whether the discussion is about number theory or what it means to have consciousness.

Woo! Congrats on pinning down the source!

I’m taking a complete shot in the dark, but it’s happening on the X and Y axes and what looks like similar spots every layer, which makes me think that’d it be something mechanical that’s only manifesting under some condition (like flow rate or speed). Maybe check your bolts, belts, and rails? My gut says loose toolhead/ extruder (wiggling could cause weird lines like that), but that’s more a guess than an “I’ve seen this before” kind of thing. Failing that, I’d be curious to see if that pattern shows up in a flow rate test.

I know many folks have sworn off Discord, but if you haven’t, maybe try asking in the Voron discord too?

Maybe it’s because this is the Fuck Cars comm and they (much like you) completely failed to read the room?

Yeah, some places have shitty infrastructure, but it doesn’t have to be bad, that’s kind of the fucking point around here.

Hi and welcome! Do you have a budget and a rough idea of the kinds of things you’d be looking to print?

Naively, I’d second the core one recommendation, assuming that the price tag isn’t a problem and that you aren’t looking to print multi-color (it’s still possible on that machine, just not something that comes stock).

Pretty much the same. I’d be curious to try PHA, but can’t justify spending 2-3x the cost of my cheap prototyping PLA (Zyltech) or functional ABS (LDO or Polymaker).

West3D stocks Ambrosia PHA for $35 /kg. They also occasionally do sales (just had 20% off for the 4th), so you could probably get it cheaper if you’re willing to wait.

It’s something of a local solution, but MusicBee supports custom tags/ filters and has auto-playlists that sounds a lot like what you’re asking for.

I’m not sure if any of the streaming services have anything similar though. It boggles my mind that Spotify is a billion dollar company and there’s no way to say “make a playlist with the discographies of all my favorited artists and keep it updated as they put out new songs”.

Mmm, there’s nuance with a bit of ambiguity here and I’m not deeply familiar with onion routing (security isn’t my specialty, I know enough to say that I’m very out of my depth).

Let’s back up to what a VPN does: it’s effectively a detour for your network traffic. Instead of traffic going from your client (I’m grouping computer/ phone and routers tougher, because you can do VPN routing at either level) and to whatever you were trying to go, the VPN server acts as a middleman. (Assuming secure traffic ssl/ https) A VPN masks your traffic from your ISP (because they just see you connecting to the VPN instead of your destination) and from your destination (because they see the request as coming from the VPN server*).

As I understand it, onion routing conceptually similar to chaining multiple VPN hops together, such that each hop is only aware of where to go next. (I think technically, each packet is sent along a different random path).

So. There’re a couple of ways to answer your question, depending on how you interpret it or how you layer technologies.

1. Onion routing on its own would theoretically already have the privacy advantages of a VPN- because of the way requests are bounced and split up, the receiving end doesn’t know where the call came from. That assumes that whatever the client is trying to talk to accepts onion traffic and can talk back over the same protocol.
2. Otherwise, you have to have a client on the other end of the onion route to accept your traffic, make a call to whenever you were trying to go and send it back to you. At that point you’ve more or less made a VPN.
3. You could go through a VPN first and then onion route, effectively this would decouple your machine from the onion network, but it does put you back at 1 or 2 for actually getting the data you want.

All that said, the major downside to onion routing is speed, it’s incredibly slow to break your request apart, bounce it around the network a bunch of times, reassemble it on the other end, and then turn around and do it again for the return trip.

* That also means that some sites, like reddit (fuck u/spez), will block traffic from VPN servers because multiple people’s traffic all coming from the same place looks a lot like spam.

Unless I’m mistaken, also problematic

You can totally self-host your own VPN, a lot of folks will do that so that they can access their home lab remotely (without having to open ports or set up a reverse proxy).

That said, self-hosting kind of defeats the purpose of using a VPN service if the goal is to anonymise web traffic or bypass regional restrictions/ content blocks.*

* Technically you could use a hosting service and host your own VPN in another region, but it’s probably not going to be cheap, and it’s kind of a stretch of the self part of self hosting.

Aww dang that’s tragic (if you’re into fantasy, video games, or over the top absurdist humor, it’d probably be right up your alley). Would it help if I made up lies to un-hype it?

It can be both. The three RAM manufactures (Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix) have a historical record of price fixing and collusion (I believe Gamers Nexus has some excellent reporting on this). It isn’t just supply and demand, it’s that three sketchy companies have the world over a barrel and may well be using the demand spike to keep prices (artificially) high with the knowledge that nobody else can enter the market and that it takes YEARS and a truly ridiculous amount of money to scale up production to increase supply.

Lego City Undercover, Marvel Superheroes, and DC Super-Villains. Definitely not the primary gameplay focus, but all three have an open-world map that you hop on a Lego motorcycle and cruise around between levels. There’s even some racing challenges here and there to put your motorbike to good use.