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PC gaming fan Steven Spielberg says he "can't do controllers," prefers keyboard and mouse
  • It could totally be setup to feel/work like a trackball, remember playing a bunch of warframe with mine and being able to "throw" it and have it stop when you touch the pad again, took getting used to but substantially more flexible than a regular analogue stick.

  • Nvidia RTX technologies now supported in 'more than 600 games and applications' including GreedFall II: The Dying World
  • I thought it looked amazing in cyberpunk, definitely enough to justify performance hits (which still runs totally fine at 3440x1440 on a 4070ti)

    Lighting in general makes a huge difference imo, lumen (global illumination) in satisfactory looks fantastic to me, and I'm fine limiting to a lower framerate in a game like that.

  • Does anyone actually use the windows key on their keyboard as intended by the OS?
  • Use it constantly, as others have said windows -> type is the best way to use windows, and I do the same thing on my linux machines, actually a lot of the ones I use regularly are the same or similar in KDE (can't recall if it's out of the box or if I configured that)

    CTL+windows+arrows to swap desktops (which have been in windows for a while now and I swear no one else uses), lots of ones around those are super useful. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/keyboard-shortcuts-in-windows-dcc61a57-8ff0-cffe-9796-cb9706c75eec for reference.

  • Emotional Support Vehicles
  • Would have loved one of those sprinter vans when I did field work, used our utility trailer a lot, but something with a small workbench, lighting and conveniently located inverters would have been amazing.

  • Would you consider making a sandwich to be "cooking?"
  • Just for the heck of it, if you heat protein enough to denature it but have no Maillard reaction (let's say you've just made a hard boiled egg), would that not be considered cooking by that definition?

    My understanding is that denaturing is a physical structure change, not a chemical one (and according to Wikipedia can be reversible in some cases), not a biochemist or food scientist though so totally accepting that my understanding is incorrect/incomplete.

  • Using GPT-4 to generate 100 words consumes up to 3 bottles of water — AI data centers also raise power and water bills for nearby residents
  • I would be really surprised if anyone is cooling data centres with city water except in emergency, that's so unbelievably expensive (could see water direct from a lake though but that had it's own issues too). I recall saving millions just by adjusting a fill target on an evaporative cooling tower so it wouldn't overfill (levels were really cyclic, targets weren't tuned for them), and that was only a fraction of what it'd have cost if we'd've used pure city.

  • Python in Excel – Available Now
  • Oh seriously? When there were rumblings of it coming years ago, I just assumed it would be implemented as a VBA successor, have everything local but just baked into excel. I guess I shouldn't be that surprised though...

  • Robot begins removing Fukushima nuclear plant’s melted fuel.
  • Be really interested to know what it's made out of. Had a coworker who used to work in forgings and did some stuff that got sent to nuclear plants, they said that they had really strict requirements on material compositions, specifically needed to ensure that the (think it was steel, may have been something else) material had basically no traces of cobalt in it because the cobalt would becomes radioactive over the service life.

  • What’s your “I can’t believe other people don’t do this” hack?
  • Wish that the mirror designs you see on trucks for towing was standard, having that second parabolic mirror with a standard mirror is amazing and I've had that as my setup forever now on a small car, can see everything in those.

    Something like this setup also takes getting used to but seriously worth it.

  • It took 50,000 gallons of water to put out Tesla Semi fire in California, US agency says
  • Totally fair, awareness is a big thing too, fire crews are professionals so I do think they made the best choice with what they were given, every firefighter I've met will absolutely do an assessment before doing anything.

    Don't know their situation, were they just told vehicle fire not lithium fire? Maybe more lithium specific crews/equipment in the future, maybe battery compartments that can help contain? (As I said, with lithium batteries I've worked with in the past, pressure vessels, if they went off it was at least contained to inside that, they'd vent gasses still but at least the threat of fire was minimised)

  • It took 50,000 gallons of water to put out Tesla Semi fire in California, US agency says
  • There's already tools to deal with lithium fires, class D fire extinguishers, sand and vermiculite. When I worked heavily with lithium non-rechargables we had lithium disaster plans for fires, explicitly in that was alerting fire fighters that it's a combustible metal fire so they can react accordingly, those fires need to be smothered afaik, water was a big no no.

    Generally though, the plan was, escape and enforce a quarantine zone because primary cells give off nasty stuff, if you can drop it in a bucket of vermiculite if it's out of the containment vessels and pretty much let them do their thing. Then once it seems like it's done, wait more time to make sure it's actually safe with 30 minute gas tests, then package them for safe transport.

  • I could make a great PC for that...
  • I've seen it mentioned that ryzen is more memory speed sensitive, seen Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 X 8GB) DDR4 3600 MHz CL16 kit for £35 on UK amazon, see a 32 GB kit for £60 for 3600, £52 for 3200. 32 is super overkill for most people still (shit I recall when 16GB was considered overkill), but it's cheap enough that it's harder to say it's a waste imo.

    Side note, GOW is what sold me on hdr and was the game that got me to upgrade from a 780ti and 3rd gen i5, literally couldn't even run the game.

  • For My Local Town it’s Almost Exactly 55% to 45% cop Funding to Everything Else. What’s Yours?
  • My region breaks it down per property 100k of property value, could get actual numbers but as a % looks like 36.5% for police services for the whole region. Looks like total tax levy is $483 million for the region.

    Parks and conservation 1.3%, public health 9.9%, community support 18.1%, transit 7.3%

    Actually looking into it, those numbers aren't accurate reflections of total budgets, total budget is closer to a $1 billion with provincial/federal funding and wastewater charges, policing looks to actually make up ~22% of that total, community services ~46% ~14% public health, parks 0.7%, housing ~3.7%, transit ~8.4%.

    Gotta say, the breakdown for property taxes as the big summary I'm not a fan of, just give me overall expenses.

  • It's official: consoles cost as much as gaming PCs now
  • With exchange it's closer to $950 cad, best bang for your buck is probably used. Quick glance at kijiji and I saw some 3070tis for sub $400, heck if you're fine with slightly older hardware just saw a ryzen 3700x + 2070 super, ram, full system honestly for $650 cad. You'll probably get quite a bit of mileage out of that CPU, I ran with a 3rd gen i5 for nearly a decade

  • What is a product that sounded promising but ended up being very underwhelming?
  • I recall talking to a vendor back... 8 years ago? Who had a colleague trialling hololens augmented maintenance. I personally felt it would be amazing to be able to look at equipment, bring up a model and explode it to get a look at (Yeah I know you can do that with a laptop, manufacturing lines have notoriously shitty wifi, not to mention greasy around equipment), assisted procedures were a cool idea too, helps people who may not be super familiar with your specific equipment, like shift or loaner maintenance people.

    Over a decade ago, different company, they had a bounty on video procedures, you'd strap a go pro to your head and record something like changing batteries, replacing o-rings, removal of electronics etc for a cash bonus. I'm a text and photo person but I totally see the value in video documentation.

    Microsoft had a demo at an ignite conference in 2020 if I recall of hololens doing ar metrics, person looked at things like the elevator and would give them real-time performance data, definitely a gimmick but I still think AR could be useful in an industrial setting.

  • Republicans threaten a government shutdown unless Congress makes it harder to vote
  • What issue is it trying to solve? To my knowledge electoral fraud is so extremely rare in general (article cites figures in the double digits since 2000) let alone non-citizen voting, what this is though is anti-voter legislation, part of their election denial bullshit

  • True Suffering
  • I'm pretty sure you're right it was season eight, think it's from that documentary they did, there's a clip in that of Conleth Hill reading Varys' death apparently and looking disgusted, only clip I could find was reddit

  • Recommendations for STL sculpting tools or guides (FLOSS preferred)

    Quick question to the community, does anyone have some good tools to sculpt stls or step files?

    Context, I'm working on some decorative keychains and have a vector image and text I want to add to the base object. I've used aolidworks for both in the past with alright results but I've switched over to freecad this year, haven't had a lot of luck adding in there, vector image is a tracing of a dog that I was provided, it's simplified but still has a lot of components.

    I did look into blender but be honest I'm totally lost using it and have no clue what I'm doing coming from parametric modeling, I'm not an artist at all, my comfort zone is functional parts usually, but was approached by a friend. I did do some mockups in prusa/superslicer where I've added my image and text as negative volumes and merged into a single part. It works but it feels like a really hacky workaround (relevant XKCD) and would prefer to do it right. Any suggestions or resources would be appreciated!

    If interested, here's the mockup that I've done a few test prints on, found I needed to change the line width of my vector a few times and made some features exaggerated so they'd come out more. I've (poorly) covered some identifying text on the back, left the rest as to get a feel for what I'm trying to do, did do some rough sanding on the below pictures. There's a pocket on the top edge that accepts a keyring, it's kinda chunky, about the size of a pog slammer or a thicker poker chip.

    !Rough Sanded Front of keychain with image of a Bernese Mountain Dog!Back of keychain with some details obscured

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    FYI - Octoprint (with a plugin) and Klipper support cancelling individual objects while printing

    Just as an FYI because it's saved me grief in the past, both klipper and octoprint can be setup to exclude certain objects while printing. You need to setup your slicer to provide gcode that enables the feature, but it allows you to stop printing a bad object, can reduce wastage in the case where only one part has failed but the others are ok.

    Prusa/Superslicer are what I have experience using it with, I used a preprocessing script to output compatable gcode but apparently there's a label objects option directly in both slicers, the klipper link below goes over enabling that feature.

    AFAIK Octoprint needs a Plugin Klipper has native support

    2
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)MO
    morbidcactus @lemmy.ca
    Posts 2
    Comments 411