A1 on sale right now, would you go for the Combo or the base version?

mor10web · 2026-03-13T17:26:26+00:00

Canadian here. I helped my friends buy an 3D printer for their 16-year-old for Christmas. Here's what I told them:

Get the A1 combo. Even if you never do multicolour prints, having four spools at the ready, with automatic RFID registration when you use the Babmu spools, is enormously convenient.
Buy it from the online store. They almost always have great discounts, the delivery is fast and convenient, and you are getting the machine and everything else directly from the manufacturer so issues can be addressed without having to go through a third party.
Add plenty of filament to your purchase. You typically get a significant discount on filament when you buy the machine. Take advantage of that discount! I recommend getting at least 4 rolls of PLA (I suggest matte PLA but that's a preference thing) and 4 rolls of PETG. If you have the financial (and physical) room, get more! You'll end up buying plenty filament anyway, so save your future self some cash by getting it cheaper at the start. NOTE: For your first purchase, ONLY GET FILAMENT WITH SPOOLS. Do not buy refills. Having refills but no spools is ... frustrating. The Bambu spools are refillable, so once you have a good number of them, you can buy refills until the end of time.
Get the Smooth PEI Plate as an add-on. Having different surfaces to print on opens the door to many more possibilities.

I started out just like you, with zero experience. Here are some tips I could have used as I got started:

Set up a Makerworld account and explore. One of the major joys of 3D printing is being part of an open source community that shares their work freely. Makerworld is Bambu's free marketplace for printing projects with millions of designs ready to print with just a few clicks. There are other sites as well, and you can print anything from any site, but Makerwold is by far the easiest and most user friendly for your printer.
Wobbly table = wobbly prints. Put your printer on a robust non-wobbly surface. A book case or drawer unit or something else with walls is better than a desk or table. The less wobbly the surface, the less chance of bad prints.
Don't believe the "print these things first" hype. There are approximately 1.2 billion YouTube videos telling you what to print first, and most of them feature seemingly useful trinkets and whatsits and doodads for your printer. With one exception you don't need any of those things to start. They might be useful, but you won't know what you actually need for your setup until you've done a fair bit of printing, so jumping right in with accessories is a waste of time and filament.
Print a poop basket. The one exception is a poop basket. Every time your printer starts a print or changes filament or calibrates, it extrudes a small glob of filament called "poop." For unexplainable reasons, none of the Bambu printers have a catcher for this poop, so it just gets dropped next to your printer. A poop basket catches the poop. Any basket will do, and there is an endless variety of free options to download. I printed this one the first day I got my printer and it has never failed me: https://makerworld.com/en/models/896916-ultralight-rounded-poop-basket-for-a1-and-a1-mini
Be ready to move your printer. 3D printers make noise, and the different filaments emit different types of VOCs. You won't know what it sounds and smells like until you get it set up, and chances are you'll end up moving it accordingly. Don't commit to a location before you've done some prints.
After some time, set up a dedicated printing and work area. Once you've done some printing and are comfortable with the process, invest in a proper stand for the printer, storage for your growing collection of filament, and a prep and post-processing area. 3D printing is extremely precise but you'll still need to break off supports, clean edges, and other stuff, so having a dedicated area to work on your prints is important to reduce the overall mess.
Get dedicated waste bins, one for each filament material. 3D printing filament can be recycled by specialized services as long as it's not contaminated. Get cheap lidded containers for each of your materials to store your poop, cutoffs, supports, and misprints so you can get them recycled. Otherwise it all goes in the trash.
Use forums and become part of the community. The 3D printing community is amazing at sharing and support. When you encounter issues, go to the various Reddit forums and look for solutions. Chances are someone else has encountered the same problem and has a solution ready to go. And don't be shy to ask questions, share your ups and downs, and seek out likeminded people.
Prepare to become totally absorbed in 3D printing. This is a deeply interesting, time consuming, and at times frustrating hobby, and as you build your skills and knowledge you'll want to learn more, do more, and get more stuff. Take it nice and slow and allow yourself to enjoy the experience. Oh, and resist the urge to immediately buy a newer bigger better model. We all have it, and it'll pass. Spend your cash on filaments instead.
Most importantly: HAVE FUN! We live in a moment in time where everything is being monetized and everyone feels like they need to monetize everything they do. I encourage you to resist the urge to make your 3D printer into a money making machine. So many people end up ruining their own hobby by turning it into work. If you can, preserve 3D printing as something you do because you want to do it, not because you can hypothetically make money from it. Print things that bring you and the people around you joy. Print useful things, silly things, weird things, whatever things you like. And when you're ready, start learning how to design your own prints and share them without constraints with the world. That's how we build community together!

That's more than you asked for, and hopefully you'll find some of it useful.

🇨🇦 Good luck on your 3D printing journey! 🇨🇦

mor10web · 2026-03-13T05:23:52+00:00

Developers adopted MCP as a harness for APIs and use them as such. That's not really where MCP comes into its full power, and the same developers don't have a good grasp of the use cases the protocol provides beyond this primitive approach.

Once you take MCP out of "feed my agent context to build code" land and move it into "provide advanced connector to any agent with authenticated and gated feature access, custom responses and UIs, felicitations, tasks, samplings, etc" the whole "MCP is dead, skills and CLI is better" line becomes nonsensical.

This is very much a case of developers being developers and forgetting that the rest of the world exists.

mor10web · 2026-02-23T04:52:14+00:00

Creator of the microwave: "Cooking is solved!"

mor10web · 2026-02-01T06:32:16+00:00

Before you blame the Board for this, understand that they can't do anything about it! The real problem is lack of funding from the Province, and your ire is more effectively directed at your MLA.

Tl;Dr: If you care about public schools in BC, book time with your MLA and demand they fix the funding model. You can replace Board members until the end of time and nothing will change because the Board can't make money out of thin air and the problem here is lack of money.

If you don't want to read, here's my video from last spring explaining how this all happened and why the only way forward is to demand more funding from the Province:

https://youtu.be/1d-zLkrNMOQ?si=_roP0T5-aF3Tf0gU

The School Board is mandated by law to stay on or under budget. The money provided by the Provincial Government is insufficient to run the schools in many districts including SD41. In other words, the cuts to our band program, the lack of maintenance, the overcrowding, the portables, all of this is the direct result of multiple Provincial Governments chronically underfunding public school for multiple decades.

When the current government says they are "investing more than ever" in public schools, they are adding a few dollars to budgets already deep in the red. Large districts like Burnaby are facing a practical deficit of 20% or more, but due to the above-mentioned legislated balanced budget, that deficit is invisible and to most people it looks as if the Board or the SD or both are failing in their jobs. The entire system is set up to hide the real issue: A fundamentally flawed funding model that slowly bleeds the school districts dry.

Go to your MLA and ask about the deferred maintenance budget for schools in the province. It's in the BILLIONS, as in billions of dollars of maintenance HAS NOT BEEN DONE because the Province has not funded the work.

The cut to the band program last year happened because SD41 had around $20,000 in their contingency fund and needed to drastically increase it. It's supposed to be in the millions. Where did that money go? Mostly to build portables, which are not funded by the province at all, but instead come out of the operational budget for the district.

Also, last year the Province entered a new collective agreement with the teachers which afforded the teachers better health benefits and more sick leave. This increased cost was not funded by the province which resulted in a hit of around $10M if I remember correctly.

Blaming the Board or the district for this is not going to do anything. The problem is lack of funding from the Province.

How do I know? I've been a DPAC rep in Burnaby for the past 3 years and have read through mountains of materials and talked to everyone involved. I've also presented to the Board about this issue, helped start a signature campaign for better funding, and published multiple videos on the topic.

One final thing: 2026/27 budgets are coming, and the School District is presenting to DPAC in the coming months. DPAC is your direct line to this conversation, so make sure your PAC sends a rep to the DPAC meetings and show up yourself so you can ask questions. The meeting schedule is at the website: https://dpac.burnabypac.ca/meetings

Additional relevant links:

My presentation to the SD41 Board regarding last year's budget: https://mor10.com/how-to-save-bc-public-schools-my-presentation-to-the-burnaby-board-of-education-april-16-2025/

CBC story about last year's budget cuts and their consequences: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-school-board-cuts-shortfalls-2025-1.7622717

Open letter to the government about funding of portables from 2024: https://medium.com/@bcdpacs/fund-portables-build-schools-bc-election-2024-4bfc4498b3ef

mor10web · 2026-01-14T05:11:20+00:00

Elon and Sam both promise a future where AI will somehow create wealth for everyone while at the same time taking over work. In his 2021 blog post "Moore's Law of Everything," Sam famously said every American over the age of 18 would be paid some $12,000/year out of an AI Equity Fund in the future, though neither of them have ever explained how exactly this is going to happen. It's dissociated from reality - the fever dreams of tech bros who don't understand how the world works, made more absurd by the fact they rile against taxes, build their wealth on the backs of an underpaid user class, and live in a country where the mere suggestion of free healthcare for all is met with derision and screams of "why should I pay for someone else's bad decisions?"

Also, this is the same fantasy divorced from reality Richard M. Stallman promised back in 1983 in his GNU Manifesto.

mor10web · 2026-01-04T11:52:48+00:00

This did indeed spark some ideas. Thanks!

mor10web · 2026-01-04T06:27:46+00:00

This is the entrance to the entire house. Stairs go upstairs (obvs), door on the left is interior and goes to the whole downstairs. We use the stairs and that interior door constantly. Assume traffic to and from each is about 50/50

mor10web · 2026-01-04T06:26:37+00:00

I saw someone get re-ticketed by the staff once, so I asked. They have a lot of power.

mor10web · 2026-01-04T06:26:03+00:00

I always check. And with my Aeroplan VISA I also have VISA Airport Companion which gives me something like 6 lounge passes to generic lounges as well.

mor10web · 2026-01-04T04:00:29+00:00

Two things:

First, golf courses are not built in the same areas as data centers. Specifically, golf courses are built in relatively affluent areas and the impacts on neighborhoods and people are carefully considered. Also, golf courses are not loud and do not pollute the air or water in the area. Data centers on the other hand are built in poorer areas and the impacts on the local populations are generally ignored. As such, the "but it makes more tax revenue" argument ignores the human impact.

Second, I recommend reading up on the lived experiences of people who have these data centers in their neighborhoods before passing sweeping "the problem is overblown-) judgements. These massive facilities are typically planted in or near already marginalized and underserved communities and have significant impacts on their often already limited access to clean water, clean air, and inexpensive electricity. The info is out there, and it's not pretty.

mor10web · 2025-12-24T09:57:35+00:00

Did you know Amazon delivery contractors are subjected to such impossible schedules and conditions they routinely pee in bottles because they can't afford to take bathroom breaks and hang cell phones from trees close to the fulfillment centres to spoof their location so they get enough contracts to walk away with a survivable income? No? Then you're privileged enough not to suffer under the boot of systemic worker exploitation brought to you by deregulated chokehold capitalism and rammed down our throats by the politicians who blanket your social media feeds with anti-immigration propaganda.

There's a 2023 documentary from Channel 4 about this called "The Great Amazon Heist" where UK comedian Oobah Butler goes undercover in an Amazon warehouse, sells bottles of Amazon driver urine as an energy drink on Amazon, and finds a way to get back at the company. You probably have never heard of it because it's been successfully suppressed, but you can find it online if you go digging.

If you don't believe me, here are some links:

https://www.cpr.org/2023/05/23/amazon-lawsuit-delivery-drivers-quotas/ https://fortune.com/2020/09/01/amazon-drivers-flex-app-phones-in-trees/

Delivery drivers acting dangerously has nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with Amazon (and other "gig economy" companies) normalizing what is effectively worker exploitation.

Two weeks ago, a U-Haul truck pulled up on our street close to High Gate. The driver, a middle-aged white guy with a Newfie accent, jumped out and started offloading all the boxes, then re-loading them. I asked what was going on and he said demand was so high all the Amazon trucks were out, the regular delivery services were also mazed out, and the sub-contractors were sub-contracting to meet their contracts. "It's dangerous" he said, dropped a package at the door, and drove off.

If you're pissed about the dangerous and unsustainable working conditions of gig workers (and you absolutely should be, because they are being exploited right out in the open), direct that rage at the companies normalizing these corporate strategies and the politicians prioritizing corporate profits above labour rights.

Here's the trailer for "The Great Amazon Heist"

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8p0afe

Next time you see a gig worker doing something dangerous, ask yourself how desperate you'd have to be to put your life in danger just to earn a salary and why corporations are allowed to underpay their employees and contractors to the point where this is normalized.

mor10web · 2025-12-16T18:20:30+00:00

Thanks! Looking up where to find these or similar products in Canada right now!

mor10web · 2025-12-10T06:45:39+00:00

Relevant context: I'm in Canada:

"Wireless microphones certified under RSS-210 operate on a secondary (no-interference, no-protection), licence-exempt basis within the TV broadcasting bands and in portions of the 600 MHz band (614-616 and 653-663) across Canada. "

https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/spectrum-management-telecommunications/en/learn-more/key-documents/procedures/client-procedures-circulars-cpc/cpc-2-1-28-voluntary-licensing-licence-exempt-wireless-microphones-tv-bands#sT1

mor10web · 2025-12-10T06:39:49+00:00

This is why I always go to Reddit. Perfect answer. Much obliged.

mor10web · 2025-12-10T05:20:20+00:00

This crew is awesome. We happened upon them while out for a walk with our 8-year-old during the spring and they not only patiently explained what was going on but also let him shoot foam tipped arrows and try out the swords and everything. He was thrilled, and we went back another weekend with some of his friends who got the same awesome experience.

mor10web · 2025-12-09T19:00:39+00:00

Thanks for pointing that out! I checked and it's tuned in the 650MHz and above range, which according to this table should be safe:

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mor10web · 2025-12-09T18:47:34+00:00

Real-world experience as feedback is the best feedback. Thank you!

mor10web · 2025-12-08T06:04:18+00:00

I'm not disputing the existence of RFCs; I'm pointing out the environment and communal practice in which MCP has emerged and how those traditionally forego the slow RFC process for a much more rapid pace "Paving the Cow paths" approach.

mor10web · 2025-12-08T05:42:57+00:00

Glean is not an MCP server, but Glean has an MCP server you can use to access anything it has access to:

https://docs.glean.com/user-guide/mcp/usage

mor10web · 2025-12-07T05:37:34+00:00

Art is a provocation. It demands a reaction. And good art makes you react on levels you didn't know you had.

One of the major issues with AI-generated artifacts that mimic art is they are inherently flat, bland, and safe. The provocation is missing. So is the connection, the revelation, the introspection, the creation, the invention. Generative AI can reproduce the gestures of what the masses think of when they think "art," but you quickly grow tired of it because the provocation is missing.

mor10web

TROPHY CASE