In 2022, when Pi4s were going for $150-200, I managed to get a 7th gen NUC for about $150. I was looking to start Home Assistant, so both were viable options, but even the Pi5’s coming close to $100 retail, spending 50% more gets you a lot more performance for a 7th gen intel i5/i7 mobile chip, 16gb of RAM and a 256GB NVME.

So one thing I’ve discovered is you can’t have ANY resistance on the spool when the printer is homing. If the filament goes taught as the extruder moves down, it thinks the nozzle moved up and thinks it has a homing error.

Intel or Mellanox are both pretty solid.

I did. It was a better setup than last year where the companies were smaller and they had the empty “artist/hobbyist” tables, but it was definitely more corporate this year as well.

Was just there yesterday… honestly. While there’s a lot of “RepRap” spirit, it was like 75% big company booths (PrintedSolid, Prusa, E3D, LDO, 3DGloop, Protopasta, Polymaker, Slice Engineering to name a few) this year. Which is cool, but it’s not the small little hacker space sort of vibe it started as.

Xfinity also lied and told me there wouldn’t be a cancellation fee since I wasn’t under contract (so I thought) and I was moving to an area that they didn’t serve.

Turns out when I had called in a year prior with a question they “renewed” the contract without my approval and there WAS a cancellation fee. But never told me. Never sent me a bill.

Didn’t know anything until I got a collections letter for $400. Called them up and they had the notes on my account from the three different reps I spoke to over the phone to confirm there was no fee. Because there were so many conflicting reports online I wanted to be sure. They did not give a fuck and pretty much admitted their reps lied.

So fuck Xfinity.

About to move to a new house, pretty much had to harass Verizon for a week to add the address to their database so I could move our service.

$70/mo for 1Gig up/down with no cap. The alternative was Xfinity.

I was not going to Xfinity.

I’ve been working from home for 12+ years and I can honestly say I wouldn’t want to work in an office. It would take a very very large number to make me consider it.

Commuting, having to buy “work clothes” etc, adds up. It’s time and money I don’t need to spend.

There was a brief period my boss tried to force us into the office. However anyone I would have to talk to in person was in our CT office (I was asked to go to the NYC office), so it was ultimately pointless and he dropped the issue.

I travel occasionally, for large projects or things that require in-person effort, but it’s not often. I’m currently on my second trip of 2023 and none expected the rest of the year.

(I started as one of two SysAdmins and I’m currently a manager of a SysAdmin team that’s spread out from California, Vegas, Florida and Poland.)

While I do agree face time with people occasionally is nice (we got everyone out on the project earlier this year except for Poland guy) and I find it helps remind you that the voice on the other side of the call is a human but if you have people who can deal with it, it’s not required. Only thing that we gained productivity-wise was a better sense of comradery going forward.

Saw people freaking out on FB about this and how “I guess Europe doesn’t want tourism!” I don’t think $8 is going to be a barrier for entry on a $1000 flight…