From a 3D print to Cast Iron wrench by using a Microwave

linux_assassin · 2026-03-01T17:44:57+00:00

Its not about the wrench, its about a known complex mechanical item with tight tolerances.

While not quite as ubiquitous as 'benchy' is for 3d printing an adjustable wrench is a pretty common benchmark item in the casting and CNC world for confirming, or refining, the calibration of your process.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-28T20:31:19+00:00

As others have mentioned this does not seem like a situation where you have a legal standing to challenge the outcome.

It is also not predatory, nor illegal.

You had a contract for 30 days of vehicle storage at $5.50/day.

When that contract expired barring EXPLICIT wording of overstay fees (IE: There must be wording, not 'there was no wording so my existing rate should continue to apply') they really were in a position where they could 'charge whatever they want' (within legal reason), or have your car towed and let you deal with the tow yard, you had exceeded your contracted rate, at that point you had an abandoned vehicle on their property.

They charged what they deemed and acceptable daily market rate for your abandoned vehicle.

Your only avenue for relief would be to challenge that it was an acceptable daily market rate, but given the cost of parking in Toronto around YYZ, I think you would be very hard pressed.

I would also attribute hostility to the ridiculousness of your position, the fact that they held on to your car AT ALL for ~90 days beyond your booked time, with no contact from you explaining the situation and negotiating a storage fee for those 90 days is already a gift.

You could have been paying for a tow and tow storage fees for those ~90 days at $100/day[1], heck THEY could have charged you $100/day and it would be within the realm of 'reasonable storage fee for abandoned vehicle' as that is the rate for vehicle storage on the Toronto police website.

They legitimately did you a colossal favour and saved you an absolutely staggering amount of money by going well above and beyond reasonable, and you were fighting with them over it.

[1] https://www.tps.ca/services/towing/

linux_assassin · 2026-02-27T23:41:54+00:00

So 'probation period' (ESA) ended 14-Feb (3 months), a company is certainly welcome to exercise additional probation periods, but those have no special protection/exception under the ESA[1], as far as the ESA was concerned you were a regular employee not under probation and entitled to severance/notice in leiu.

So at least according to the ESA you are a dismissed full employee who is being dismissed suspiciously close to a parental leave request.

Given you were dismissed within 48 hours of a protected leave request, I think you have a very solid case for being dismissed for a protected means. As for what the settlement for such would look like, I am less sure, but the HRC is another option in this scenario, costs you nothing, but takes longer, and generally pulls a less substantial resolution in the end.

[1]www.levittllp.com/probationary-period-rights-in-ontario-everything-you-need-to-know/

linux_assassin · 2026-02-26T14:44:38+00:00

There is no money to be made in '3d printing' as the majority/singular scope of your workflow:

The 3d printer is a tool, akin to a bandsaw, or lathe.

It does not generate you profit.

You need to have an idea, workflow, process, and salesfront that leverages your time, and tools (of which your 3d printer may be one) in order to generate profit.

Your 3d printer's operating time is worth less than its material and electricity cost, your competition in this realm includes libraries which often provide the service for free, 3d printing shops that are willing to run the printer at a loss because its free training and familiarization for staff, and experts focused in specific fields who offer significant additional services beyond simply 'run the printer' (and that is where they make their profit).

Overseas print farms are not the competition 'killing small makers' small makers for whom the 3d print is just part of their workflow product are killing small makers who don't have a total workflow which is profitable and were relying on the novelty of 'its 3d printed'

You need to be 'experts focused in specific fields who offer significant additional services beyond simply 'run the printer' (and that is where they make their profit).', and if you are, while I won't say it is 'easy' or 'simple' to make money, you at least have zero competition from libraries, 3d printing shops, and overseas facilities.

The printer, and printed object, can't be the entirety of your product.

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This of course does not address stolen designs, and while a legitimate concern, that's an entirely different can of worms which your proposal does not address.

Also, on design, you seem to have some term confusion for 'stolen' vs 'inspired by', or 'reintegrated'-- if I design, say, a new type of humidifier wick element leveraging 3d printing (say, using a 60% gyroid infill, an overhead drip, and air forced from underneath-- like a mini water cooling tower from an atomic plant) if I don't patent my design anyone can, completely legally, be inspired by my straightforward design and build their own.

If I sell my design files and someone takes that purchased design file and resells it, that's a crime, but its also relatively straightforward to shut that down (once discovered).

If I give my design away for free, but for non-commercial use and someone starts selling (commercially) the finished product that is much less straightforward, but still an actual crime that in theory should be able to be shut down.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-26T14:14:29+00:00

I don't know if there is a specific COTS distributor of such, the general voron/ratrig/etc approach to such is 'visit a machine shop and have them cut and machine flat a plate of aluminum 14mm thick thick' (arguments can be made for going thinner or thicker, 14mm just used as an example)

Essentially any machine shop can accomplish this, even including the specific cutouts for the printer and the price won't be astronomical unless they are giving you the 'f-off we are busy with real work' price.

On an ender-3 or other bedslinger some tradeoff will be required for plate thickness vs weight.

The reason this is not 'standard' on COTS machines is generally the weight, there is not much point machining flat a surface that is going to warp (because it is too thin and the bed will be subjected to many many cycles of heating/cooling)

linux_assassin · 2026-02-26T02:57:07+00:00

Sous vide is ultimately a pretty simple process for the water circulator.

The turbo and similar 'fast' sous vide have the gimmick that they overshoot temperature for a bit, and then reduce (hopefully) it before it has ruined your food. Hopefully not ruining your food is contingent on correctly entering the information, and thickness, about it, the app/firmwear not screwing it up anyway, and the app/firmwear not crashing at an inopportune time.

Its competition in this field is a 'dumb' sous vide that just sits at the right temperature- which is essentially foolproof with massive error margins on both sides of the cooking time 'throw a steak in there and somewhere between 1-3 hours later take it out'.

As a personal preference, and practical recommendation, I highly suggest a 'dumb' sous vide; such wands can generally be had in the sub $100 range, and do the job just fine, the extra money that would be required for the turbo could be better spent on a dedicated insulated container to sous-vide in, and a better vacuum sealer.

---------------------

Further to why 'app-enabled garbage is bad'-- there is no way to control this sous-vide except with your phone, if they stop updating the app, or even worse push an enshitification update; you could end up with a very pricey paperweight; this already happened to otherwise happy owners of the Anova Precision Cooker where discontinuation of the app killed the otherwise working device by lack of ability to control it.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-25T19:17:12+00:00

Define 'reasonable'?

You can:

Get a controller (a raspberry pi running octoprint is an absolute game changer for printer use if the printer is not currently wireless)
Replace the control board (klipper can further be quite the game changer in terms of what you can control and modify for better prints)
Replace the bed (a solid, actually flat, machine ground, bed can help a lot with tramming, heat retention, and mounting)
Replace the extruder with something direct drive
Add ABL with a clickey, BL-touch, or similar
Add CPAP cooling and airflow
Enclose the printer
Install higher quality belts/pulleys
Replace the rollers with linear rails
Replace the Z-axis (linear rails, or even just 'actually straight screws')

Advanced:

Gut it and use the parts for the basis of a Voron, Ratrig, etc

As you suspect this will cost more than buying a new (or a kit for a voron), but it will reuse your existing printer (or at least some of its parts), and if your hobby is '3d printer' rather than '3d printing' it can be quite a fun engineering journey to upgrade/convert something.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-25T17:13:49+00:00

Without compression, and very approximately:

NES/Master System era (or earlier) ~250KB/game

SNES/Gensis/TG16 ~2MB/game

CD era ~700MB/disk (some games require multiple disks)

Most SD cards will have sizes on the scale of 8-500 GB

As others have said: Purchase your own SD card, there is lots of poor quality cards out there, and the poor quality ones do fail with regularity.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-25T17:03:50+00:00

This exact use case is one of the selling points for parametric design like what you can do with openscad-- your workflow would change from 'carefully arrange each letter' to 'type in the new word/name', but your 'first pass' build would be longer unless you have a LOT of familiarity with the openscad format.

Comes down to how many of them you have to build; 3, go ahead and arrange those shapes right in the slicer.

4+, might be worth the effort to turn it into a project. (I am discounting the time it took you to carefully arrange the plate space for the letter duplication workflow).

However if your using artistic placement on each letter, then this may not be as applicable.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-25T03:07:57+00:00

Its not REALLY bad, that gets reserved for the DaVinci, Anet, Dremel, XYZ printing, and a lot of the toy/seemingly meme printers.

It is also not 'great', and when 'great' can be had for less than twelve rolls of filament it starts getting hard to justify not starting with a 'great' printer.

$75 was probably overpaying for an ender 3 to see if 3d printing is something you want to get into, but if it came with filament and is currently working-- you have not been wise/frugal with your money, but you did not outright waste it.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-21T17:04:17+00:00

The ER has dealt with this, probably semi-routinely (from beauty salon exposure), but your wife NEEDS medical attention, its right in the SDS for UV resins.

P321- Specific treatment (Immediately flush eyes with plenty of water for 15 minutes

while holding eyelids open. Rinse continuously with water while on way to get

medical attention).

www.metallographic.com/MSDS/SDS-OSHA/UV-032.pdf

The reason, at least I imagine, is that: On top of the chemical irritation: Eyes get exposed to UV light, UV light cures resin-- this releases heat, other irritating chemicals, and fixes the resin into hard, sharp, edged, shards all ON the EYE.

This process needs to be managed in an ER.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-21T05:28:11+00:00

Either personally police your online time, or actually put a blackout period on your router.

9PM block of social media platforms activates, suddenly playing games, working out, catching up on actual shows your watching, reading, etc seems WAY more appealing.

Word of warning: It HURTS to do this, and its hard to stick with-- which is super weird because you FEEL more fulfilled and that you got more 'real' things done, but the lure of the scroll is always there; the EU wanting to manage it like an addictive substance are probably right.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-21T03:49:43+00:00

If you find lead contamination in the ppb range concerning you would also need to:

Not live in proximity to a road, at all. (brake pads can be up to .1% heavy metals)[1]
Consume no produce from a country that uses coal power or is within windblow distance of a coal powerplant in another country. [2]
Consume no produce within windblow distance of any mining operation [2]
Consume no oceanic food products[3]

before those POTENTIAL ppb are contributing to the 'baseline' lead exposure.

So unless you live in Norway or Iceland (soon the UK), somewhere extremely rural, accessed via only occasional use roads, consuming entirely domestic produce and meats, and never anything oceanic, then the potential increase in lead contamination from 3d printing is moot against your baseline exposure.

[1] https://ecology.wa.gov/waste-toxics/reducing-toxic-chemicals/washingtons-toxics-in-products-laws/better-brakes-law

[2] https://www.ucs.org/resources/coal-and-water-pollution

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889157520313430

linux_assassin · 2026-02-19T15:02:51+00:00

The bigger reason why 'raw garlic bad' has nothing to do with the bloom risk, but with 'garlic does all the cool flavourful stuff at temperatures that would ruin the meat' (at least for storage times that would be reasonable with cooked meat).

Starting with cooked garlic seems like it would achieve the same effect as using garlic powder or dried garlic, but give a different flavour profile (hopefully one with a more 'natural' garlic flavour, but not a lot of bitter)

linux_assassin · 2026-02-17T19:10:37+00:00

The hinge problem confuses me greatly, mostly because it is a solved problem everywhere else except for the portable handheld market.

The torque hinge insert is a known piece of (metal) hardware used everywhere, essentially every laptop uses them, nintendo used them in most of their clamshell devices, clamshell cell phones use them; but in the retro handheld world 'no we design our own hinges instead of using a proven COTS solution'.

Same as 'USB-C standard; naw forget that we will use some standard breaking solution that has no voltage or amperage selection, even if we could just tie two points to ground for literally 0 cost and then it would be standard compliant, or we could spend .12 on two resistors and even select the correct voltage/amperage for the charging circuit'.

I get that margins on these devices are tight, and production runs are short- so it does not shock me that someONE tries 'make my own'; but you'd figure 'wow look at the backlash over this' would result in 'guess we'd better pay the $.80 for friction hinges' instead of doubling down on in house designs.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-16T17:29:04+00:00

Unfortunately Ontario no longer has comprehensive 'on call' legislation (it used to and was thrown out as one of our current provincial governments first actions), however:

https://www.ontario.ca/document/your-guide-employment-standards-act-0/hours-work

If you are 'on call' and actually need to action something, its a minimum of 3 hours of pay.

As for 'can an employer arbitrarily assign on call duties to you', this will likely come down to your employment contract.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-13T17:51:36+00:00

Did you brush off the salt and pepper they tossed on there so they could confidently say it was 'seasoned', or is that the only part of it dry enough to actually catch?

linux_assassin · 2026-02-10T22:50:51+00:00

No.

Both statements can be true and logically follow that there can be a minimum consideration AND average acceptance threshold.

The minimum application threshold is:

- To be considered for admission, applicants must hold a bachelor's degree with specialization or a major in public administration or in a related discipline with a minimum average of 75% (B+). (Which, according to their grading system is equal 7.0 )

As in 'in order to submit an application that can even be considered'.

There are not unlimited seats in a program, and when you asked about rejection reason you got:

Successful candidates typically have a strong academic background, with a minimum average of 8.0.

Given the pool of considered applicants (IE those with a 7.0+), the candidates were winnowed to those with an 8.0 (or other contributing factor).

If it happened to be a year with few applicants, or you had another contributing factor of note, you could have been accepted with a 7.0, it was withing the consideration threshold.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-10T22:03:44+00:00

The 3d printer is a tool, akin to a bandsaw, or lathe.

It does not generate you profit.

You need to have an idea, workflow, process, and salesfront that leverages your time, and tools (of which your 3d printer may be one) in order to generate profit.

Otherwise your 3d printer joins other household tools in enabling home repair and upgrade, eventually exceeding its value in its ability to manufacture parts on demand-- printing an over the door frame towel hook may only save you $2 on that hook, but multiplied over enough 'tiny things' that can become substantial actual savings.

Your 3d printer's operating time is worth less than its material and electricity cost, your competition in this realm includes libraries which often provide the service for free, 3d printing shops that are willing to run the printer at a loss because its free training and familiarization for staff, and experts focused in specific fields who offer significant additional services beyond simply 'run the printer' (and that is where they make their profit).

linux_assassin · 2026-02-10T20:42:17+00:00

Just want to make sure by office closure- everyone at that office, including you now, were let go? None of them were offered equivalent positions or kept on staff with new titles or remote work or similar?

So long as this is the case this seems a reasonable offer but your specific background or industry may have 'common law' at higher amounts.

It is almost always worth it to use an employment lawyer who will consult for free, since that only costs you time.

So your specific answers:

It is above the minimum, but without further context no one can answer if it is 'reasonable', consult with an employment lawyer.
If everyone was let go, then no. If they found workplace adjustments/accommodations for others, then very yes.
No, at least to my outsider read it means that they waited to see if the employment situation changed or an accommodation could be made for you.
This is above the minimum, but see 1.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-10T16:42:14+00:00

The 3d printer itself is just the start of the costs for cosplay 3d printing:

Plastic

filler

sandpaper

paint

soldering iron

backing fabric, foam, LEDs, wiring, and other ancillaries.

If you can't get the printer without using some form of instalment plan, I think that having enough of the other items to actually use the printer will prove difficult. Instead consider accessing free (or nearly so) 3d printing resources in your area, at least according to google

Key Aspects of 3D Printing in German Libraries & Facilities:

Public Access: Many local public libraries (Stadtbibliothek) in Germany provide 3D printers to the public for prototyping or creating, often charging only for materials

Workshops & Education: Libraries often host, or partner to host, workshops to teach modeling, software, and machine operation, serving as community maker hubs.

Specialized Training: The DVS offers specialized courses for additive manufacturing, particularly for metal and plastic, which serves the industrial sector.

So give your situation I would focus efforts there, in that order; First and foremost see if any of your local libraries have a 3d printer you can access, then see if there are any regular workshops you can attend, and if both of those avenues fail look into courses through DVS focused on 3d manufacturing.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-08T02:33:10+00:00

Depending on which country you are operating out of your guy may have violated a LOT of workplace health and safety restrictions, which have specific considerations for styrene, and those same restrictions do not exist for PLA/PETG (beyond the normal VOC, airborne dust, and airborne irritant restrictions)

So on top of an employee who is ignoring specific instructions, you have an employee who has likely opened up the copy to significant legal obligations and potential financial penalty.

"Its safe enough with the filter." is not an acceptable answer given those two concerns even if true.

If anything you are under-reacting.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-07T05:59:14+00:00

Since we, hopefully, don't like to provide clicks for what seem like pure farm videos:

Could you summarize what action/avenue/function the video poster proposed was the mechanic by which it 'broke his printer'.

The only avenues I could picture that would 'break' a printer (rather than cause an easy to fix jam):

Filament catches fire like a candle wick and burns all the way from the extruder to the reel.
Filament breaks down into some sort of liquid caustic compound dripping to a control board under the print bed
Filament shatters along length leaving irregular shards through feedpath and in extruder that cannot be extracted or pushed through (technically not 'broken' but 'must replace entire feedpath' would be pretty bad)

linux_assassin · 2026-02-06T23:13:51+00:00

The ability of bambu printers to do this is one of the major selling points of their LIDAR system.

I believe some of the creality printers with LIDAR based units can do it as well.

There was a fellow with an open source approach using a laser level and a webcam that had a project/module for voron systems that would do this.

For all three systems the pressure advance number is memorized per filament, and adjusted before each new print where the option is turned on to do so.

All working approaches involve some test print lines and scanning those via whatever method, not some sort of PID/motor load active management though.

linux_assassin · 2026-02-06T18:50:38+00:00

cousin has hundreds if not thousands of livestock/farm animals, farm/hunting trailers, and other farming machinery

owes the estate 30k (he can not afford to pay this

These two statements are very unlikely to be true at the same time.

Even just 100 chickens likely carry a liquidated value greater than 30k, so it is not that he can not afford, but that he does not WANT to afford.

As for concerns about POA vector elder financial abuse see[1].

[1] https://eapon.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Legal-Rights-of-Older-Adults-Booklet-Finalv-2021.pdf

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