I was thinking of JLC3DP, PCBWay, Shapeways, and Slant3D. I’ve only bought from PCBWay and JLC3DP from among those.

I’m not in this business, but I have purchased prints from a print farm before. There are already at least 4 large, high quality printing companies that offer to print any model in any material. I think most of the competition is now on speed and price. There are also many smaller printers I have purchased from. Most offer ~10 products, have them already printed, and sell those items to fulfill a specific need. As far as I can tell, those smaller printers either design their own models, or paid for models that are not readily available. Once model files are available, the general purpose printing companies can deliver the same part.

Unless you have ideas for models no one has made before, and you want to try to profit as much as possible off those, I don’t see the upside to a small print farm.

I distro hopped about every 4 months from ~12-22, never really feeling like I’d found the right platform. Sometimes I would dual boot (or just run) Windows, and for a while I had Windows XP in a state I could tolerate.

For several years after 22, I ran Windows at home, and kept Linux for work. I basically just wanted to game, and Windows was good enough for that. Finally, something came up that I needed a home server for, and I chose Arch, based largely on my experiences from several years ago. Arch had been more stable for me, and when it did break, it always felt like the tools to fix it existed. Ubuntu and derivatives broke for me mostly in “Oops, system is dead. Maybe reinstall?” ways, which I didn’t want on my server. Other distros gave me an assortment of problems, from updates taking too long, to lacking support for a WM I enjoyed, to driver issues.

Once I was regularly SSHing from Windows to Arch, I missed the things I could do on Linux (more than just games), and steam had made Linux support from a lot of games better, so I reinstalled my gaming PC as Arch too.

I added a lot of things to my server, and had more problems with some third party tools every time e.g. elasticsearch, mongodb, or postgres updated, so I added a kubernetes cluster with an immutable OS. I tried 3 before settling on Talos, and now when a workload on the server breaks, I move it to kubernetes. That pace has worked out for me, but now the server does no heavy lifting, so I’m experimenting with local LLM on it.

I suspect this is the (non-word) singular form of the noun “electronics”. If there’s a better term for such words, and you let me know what it is, I will give you my thank.

Ideas can only be patented, not copyrighted. If a company designs something novel enough to qualify for a patent, and so good that people willingly pay for the feature, that’s impressive, and arguably still a good thing. If instead they design a better user experience, or an improvement in performance, the ideas can be used in open source, even when the code cannot be.

Ok, so I think the timeline is, he signed up for an unlimited storage plan. Over several years, he uploaded 233TB of video to Google’s storage. They discontinued the unlimited storage plan he was using, and that plan ended May 11th. They gave him a “60 day grace period” ending on July 10th, after which his accouny was converted to a read only mode.

He figured the data was safe, and continued using the storage he now isn’t really paying for from July 10th until December 12th. On December 12th, Google tells him they’re going to delete his account in a week, which isn’t enough time to retrieve his data… because he didn’t do anything during the period before his plan ended, didn’t do anything during the grace period, and hasn’t done anything since the grace period ended.

I get that they should have given him more than a week of warning before moving to delete, but I’m not exactly sure what he was expecting. Storing files is an ongoing expense, and he’s not paying that cost anymore.