Qidi X-Plus 3. If it’s anything like my Max 3, which is the bigger version, it ought to be plug in and use (after running the included calibration). It’s on “sale” right now for $500, but it’s always on sale. It’s also not made by Bambu, and if I were you or anyone else I would not give one rusty penny to Bambu for anything.

The draw with this thing is it comes with a fully enclosed chamber with a heater and PID to control it, and it’s the easiest time I’ve ever had printing ABS and PETG if that’s what you want to do. You can slap a 0.2mm nozzle on it easily enough if you want to print tiny stuff.

If you don’t care about high temperature materials you can get the X-Smart 3 which is based on the same system but is smaller and minus the heater, and is even cheaper.

Well, if we’re ruling out PET and PETG – PET would probably require the temperatures you describe and would be impervious to acetone, as well as extremely flexible – there is an outside possibility it could be HDPE.

HDPE filament is damn rare, though, and I’d doubt anyone would be giving it away as samples given how difficult it’d be to print with most consumer machines. HDPE’s signature tell is that it feels somewhat waxy if you e.g. scrape at it with your fingernail.

The other point here is that if the lenses a user gets don’t quite match the frame you could always just tweak and reprint the frame a bit to match the lenses. That’s not really the end of the world, but I don’t count on any opticians to understand that. The concept of a user being able to so easily self manufacture a set of frames is probably completely alien to them.

Ditching the PETG would probably go a long way. Try it in ABS or even PLA and you’ll have better shape definition and a whole lot less stringing.

Rather than reproducing the pattern in the original wholesale, you could also consider stealing the idea from e.g. this, which has a “mesh” outer wall that’s a continuous loop and thus doesn’t require a zillion retractions every time there’s a gap.

I hope you meant PLA. Printing in PVC is a hilariously bad idea unless you do it inside a lab grade fume extractor or something. There’s a reason barely anyone makes PVC filament.

PVC releases chlorine when heated which is not only incredibly harmful for you, but will also oxidize with and corrode all the metal parts in your printer and probably eventually embrittle its plastic parts as well. This is also why you should not make bongs out of PVC.

The problem there is the government already has most of the guns and are very, very willing to use them.

Data is indeed read from the inner ring outwards, as anyone with a CD burner in the late '90’s and 2000’s is very familiar with.

For audio and video playback, the disk is spun faster at the beginning and progressively more slowly towards the outer edge, a process known as Constant Angular Velocity playback, because more linear distance is covered at the same RPM the larger your circle gets, i.e. the closer you are to the edge. This is no problem for audio playback at “1x” speed because this tops out at a paltry 500 RPM or so.

For data reads, however, most drives use Constant Linear Velocity and spin the disk at the same speed all the time. That means your data throughput is higher at the edges of the disk. The prevalence of 2x, 4x, 16x, 24x, 40x, 52x, etc. PC CD (and DVD, etc.) also means that those drives will spin a disk way faster than a regular CD player will which can definitely cause a problem with irregularly shaped disks like the one in OP’ photo. They would also inevitably only achieve their rated whatever-x speed when reading at the very edge of a full disk. (You mean the marketing department was deliberately misleading??? Say it ain’t so!)

Those little business card disks were nonstandard but would work in most tray loading drives, and held a whopping 30 megs.

The 80mm minis were envisioned as “CD Singles,” and they actually were defined as part of the official CD standard. Therefore most CD players and drives including slot loaders actually were and are designed to work with them without incident. Typical tray loaders have a smaller indent below the main one to accept the smaller disks, and pretty much all horizontally oriented slot loaders will take them as well.

This would play just fine in a snap-in (like a Discman) or tray loading CD player. It might give slot loaders some trouble but it looks like it still describes most of a 120mm circle so it would probably work fine in those as well.

For audio playback. At 1x speed.

The real problem with these novelty shaped disks is when you stick them in a fast PC CD-ROM drive, they’re usually badly unbalanced and when your drive dutifully tries to spin them at 8,000, 15,000, or 20,000 RPM when it indexes the disk or when someone tries to copy it – not outside the realm of possibility for a commodity 40x drive – the disk will warp and vibrate like crazy and in some cases eventually crack and then outright explode inside the drive.

I once had to disassemble somebody’s drive and tweezer out the sparkly bits of a Ranma 1/2 CD that I discovered, when rearranging the pieces back together on the workbench like a jigsaw puzzle, was one of these damn novelty disks that was shaped like Ranma-chan’s head. The largest fragment left over was smaller than a dime, and surprisingly the drive still worked after I unjammed it and got all of the glitter out of it ultimately using compressed air.

These were uncommon, but not unheard of. For instance, Metallica also infamously released this fucking thing:

…Which actually was balanced, but only until your garden variety careless owner snapped the very tip off of one of the points.

And nerds absolutely will find each other and bond over whatever their thing is. The world is full of stories like this one. People who met their spouses in World of Warcraft, and so on and so forth.

But boy, am ever I glad us M:tG nerds had much more subtle ways to signal our dorkitude. At least I think we did.

Hmm…

I’m using a diamond tipped nozzle, 0.4mm. I understand that smaller nozzles like 0.2 don’t play well with filaments filled with solid materials, and the glow stuff suspended in this is indeed a solid material.

Temperature may be an issue, but I wouldn’t know. I print PLA typically at 230° C, including this filament, which I am certain many people will find jowl-flabberingly appalling but that’s what I do. My machine goes pretty fast and I found that gives me the best results.

Speak for yourself. I have a full set of chainmail. Have at you, ruffian.

I think most gamers would have been perfectly happy with a trip to the Borealis just for the closure of the thing, even if the gameplay brought little to nothing new to the table other than some nice new visuals and arctic setpieces.

Instead we got Half Life: Alyx which was a stunning albeit niche experience in the same old City 17, which retconned Episode 2’s cliffhanger with another, different cliffhanger. For fuck’s sake, Gabe.

My account is so old I have (or had, before they normalized the format) a four digit steam ID. I “owned” Half Life 2 for like four months before it released thanks to getting a code free in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro back in the day. For a short and glorious flash of time in the summer of 2004, I was guaranteed a copy of the most hotly anticipated game ever, even though nobody could play it yet, and also owned an example of the fastest video card on the planet. Damned if I didn’t mow a fuckton of lawns and reinstall Windows and Outlook an a horde of septuagenarians’ computers to afford that card.

And no, they do not stop asking about your age.

Neat, but.

Even HL: Alyx left us with just as much of a cliffhanger as the end of HL2 Episode 2…

I have had multiple people claim this at me this over the last few days and when challenged thus far nobody has actually be able to articulate how he or for that matter anyone else in his entourage plans to do this, especially in light of Republicans consistently and steadfastly working against any and all minimum wage increases at least since Nixon.

So, the ball’s in your court.

“Trump will raise wages.”

Okay, smart guy, how?

Ask the Filipinos, who are the ones who both invented and named it. “Butterfly knife” is a western neologism for it.

For mysterious undiagnosable seemingly hardware related issues, the power supply is always a good place to start.

Be aware that Dell has a nasty habit of using “proprietary” power supplies that have the pins switched around on the ATX connector, and thus won’t work unless you either buy one of their stupid OEM supplies or get a pinout chart and rearrange the pins on your new supply before you plug it in. I don’t know if that model is one of the ones that does this, so you might want to check first before you potentially smoke your board.

Every once in a while my machine requires cleaning, not just reseating, the RAM and/or video card edge connectors and slots for no readily identifiable reason. I have no idea how any kind of crud or oxidation manages to accumulate in there given that my PC never moves, it’s not in an especially humid environment nor one with temperature fluctuations, and as far as I can tell the air in here is acceptably clean. But it does nevertheless, and when it gets into that mode it will randomly reboot or blue screen with no rhyme or reason until I remember to hose everything down with CRC contact cleaner. I have to do this once about every 2-3 years. (Yes, I have had this build long enough for this to happen more than once…)