Hi all.

My venerable ender 3 has likely printed it's last benchy. Plus side, the tech has advanced significantly since I bought it. Down side, I've not kept track of the newer options.

Can anyone give me a rundown of which are worth looking at, and which to avoid?

I'm mostly concerned with reliability, but a speed boost would definitely be welcome. A heated chamber and/or multi material would also be very nice to have.

I would like to keep the costs closer to £500 ($680) but can stretch that, if there is a machine worth it.

I also have a complete no on bamboo printers. I don't like what they've done regarding abuse of the open source movement.

Thanks all!

Edit to add. I'm not against non open source printers. I just have an issue with companies trying to burn the ladder behind them and lock their customers into a bubble.

Double edit: The snapmaker U1 seems like my best option. Ticks all the boxes, while remaining well in budget.

°F Vs °C

Does anyone have much experience with robot lawnmowers? I've been considering one, but trying to find info now involves digging through a lot of AI slop.

Id prefer one that plays nicely with HA, as well as not internet dependant. It's also for a small garden (50m²).

The best bet I've seen so far is to modify a yardforce mower with open mower. What other (good) options are there?

Edit to add:

I ended up going with the Worx Landroid Vision. I'm quite pleased with it. It's not perfect but it's flaws are reasonable. It doesn't do edging very well, unless you tell it to explicitly. It's mow pattern is also upsetting. It wanders in a semi random pattern. It gets everywhere evenly, but the OCD part of my brain doesn't like how! It also didn't bother stopping when the weather got too cold. That might have been my fault however. I built it a little shed, so it couldn't sense the rain.

My daughter (6) is aggressive abusive to her shoes. Trainers seem to last about 6 weeks before the toe is destroyed and the sole delaminating. Sketchers, or boots seem to last a bit longer, maybe 2-3 months before being annihilated.

Has anyone found a brand or range that actually holds up to the abuses a small child can throw at them? I've reach the point where I'm eyeing up composite toed builders trainers. That seems overkill however, and she doesn't like the designs available in her size (UK size 2/3).

Has anyone else ran into this problem and found a viable solution? It's getting both expensive and embarrassing. Oh, and before it's suggested, my wife has vetoed the boots from a suit of armour.

The challenge is, can you figure out where it is.

My daughter is 5 now. She's discovered the joy of telling jokes. Unfortunately, her repertoire is painfully small. I've also realised most of my jokes are either not age appropriate or too situational.

What are best/worst kids jokes? Extra points for any that would make her teacher groan. Apparently she LOVES jokes. 😁

I need some advice, and the amount of marketing spam had made sorting the wheat from the chaff annoyingly difficult. Hopefully you can help.

I've a young daughter, who uses an old tablet of mine to watch netflix etc. unfortunately, it was old in the tooth when she was born, and it's now become extremely annoying to use.

She currently has a Samsung Galaxy Tab A (2016). The size (10") works well, but it's gotten slow as sin, and only has 16Gb of internal memory.

Preferences wise:

• 10" screen (±2")

• 64Gb+ storage.

• Long expected lifespan (inc security updates).

• Headphone socket (adapters are asking to get broken, Bluetooth go flat)

• Decent WiFi (more than just 2.4Ghz).

• USB C charging preferred.

• Wireless charging would be very helpful but not required.

• Lower budget preferred (£200 range).

What would people recommend?

For those of you in the UK, IKEA currently has a steep discount on their GU10 bulbs. I've just picked up several dimmable, colour temperature controlled bulbs for £5 each.

They play nicely with HA via a sonoff dongle and ZigBee2MQTT, even down to firmware updates.

I've been using Ubuntu as my daily driver for a good few years now. Unfortunately I don't like the direction they seem to be heading.

I've also just ordered a new computer, so it seems like the best time to change over. While I'm sure it will start a heated debate, what variant would people recommend?

I'm not after a bleeding edge, do it all yourself OS it will be my daily driver, so don't want to have to get elbow deep in configs every 5 minutes. My default would be to go back to Debian. However, I know the steam deck is arch based. With steam developing proton so hard, is it worth the additional learning curve to change to arch, or something else?

I'm upgrading to a new laptop (unfortunately, a desktop is not viable for me right now). It's a VR gaming machine, with some potential work with machine learning (me learning about it). I've got a system option, but it's into price flinching territory, and wanted a once over, from those more in the know.

Are there any obvious flaws in it, and is it reasonable for the price?

• Display: 1 x 16.0" IPS | 2560×1600 px (16:10) | 240 Hz | G-SYNC | 95 % sRGB

• Graphic Card: 1 x NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop | 12 GB GDDR6

• Processor: 1 x Intel Core i9-13900HX

• Ram: 2 x 16 GB (32 GB) DDR5-5600 Samsung

• SSD (M.2): 1 x 1 TB M.2 Samsung 990 PRO | PCIe 4.0 x4 | NVMe

• Keyboard: 1 x Mechanical keyboard with CHERRY MX ULP Tactile switches

• WLAN: 1 x Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX211 | Bluetooth 5.3

It prices up at €2,809.31 (£2,484.57 or $3,130.80) including shipping and taxes.

It's worth noting the system comes with an optional external water cooling system, so the CPU and GFX are less thermally limit, when it's plugged in. It also has a proper keyboard, not the normal membrane ones.

What are people's opinions? It is a reasonable price, or am I way too far up the diminishing returns slope?

https://bestware.com/en/xmg-neo-16-e23.html

My Google-fu has completely failed me. I've got an RGB addressable led curtain. It has 20 strings of 20 LEDs in a square arrangement. I initially assumed it had a wire feeding led data back up, to go to the next drop. On checking however, they are T jointed.

Apparently the address is hard coded into the RGB controller in the LED. I've found a few places where others have talked about them. I've also found that adafruit had some available,, unfortunately they lacked any info on how they are programmed, or where to source them from.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/4917

Anyone got any info on what the chip name of these is? Even better if you have any info on how they are programmed etc!

Might not be the best place to ask, but nowhere else reliant seemed alive.

My old laser printer has given up the ghost. What are people's recommendations on a replacement. As far as I'm aware, Brother are about the only company both making reasonably priced printers and not playing stupid games. Beyond that though, I'm not up to date on what's good and what's not.

Requirements.

• Colour laser.

• WiFi

• Works with both windows and Linux

• No need for scanner etc.

• CD/ID card printing nice, but not required.

• Photo quality nice, but not required (we have an ink sublimation printer for photos).

I'm UK based, which can mess with availability.

Thanks in advance.