Both friends with Bambu printers bought them because they were cheaper than Prusa, and they wanted "a tool, not a hobby" (which I think is marketing invented to disparage an open source, repairable printer).
Three years later, they have unreliable printers that are difficult to maintain.
I have a five year old Prusa, still working very nicely, and it's still a tool and not itself a hobby.
Prusa are clearly tools: you can fix it, modify it, and still have warranty apply. You can get after-sales parts, and service.
Bambu are appliances. They can work great out of the box, but appliances do not have upgrade paths. You do not upgrade a microwave, you throw it out and get a new one. Or maybe it's more like a fridge, you can limitedly repair some bits, but you cannot wholesale upgrade from V1 to V2.
Anyways bought the core one a few months ago, on kit, and did the whole assembly. The assembly was fun, and the resulting printer has been great. The print fails I had were all easily understandable, entirely due to adhesion issues to a dirty print plate.
I also ordered the indx and am looking forward to capabilities that are not possible with the AMS system. I'm more of an artist though, so I'm looking for interesting and cool ways to make things, not just 3D printing figurines or sculptures etc.
I gave a bonus tip to a tour guide in one of these countries.
I'd brought USD notes from Europe to spend and as an emergency fund. They were all brand new (sequential numbers) $50 notes, just what my bank gave me.
At the end of the trip, I swapped about $300 of old notes the tour staff had for $300 of new notes. This included a very slightly damaged $100 note which the tour guide said had been a tip, which he was unable to use because of the damage.
It's been a while since I've tried to change money but even as recently as 10 years ago, money changers in a lot of places wouldn't accept even slightly wrinkled bills or bills older than a specific series. Every time before a trip I'd have to go to the bank and ask the teller for notes with series > X and not wrinkled/showing signs of being folded.
To save a file, I think (and this is over 25 years ago) I would typically open the Filer window to where I wanted to save the file. Remember this might involve swapping floppy discs.
That would leave me with the Filer window open over the top of the application/document. Middle clicking anywhere on the document wouldn't raise the application's windows over the Filer windows, so dragging the file to the destination was easy.
At the time I preferred it to the Windows 3.1 alternative, which gave you a completely different UI to the general file-browsing tool.
The button on the top left (next to close) on all the application windows is "Send window to back" (of the stack), which would be useful for showing any Filer windows opened earlier.
I last used RISC OS regularly around 1996, and occasionally for a few more years, at school and at home. Roughly age 3 to 13.
> I still can't figure out what problem the "Adjust" button solves. It's semi-analogous to CTRL + Left-click on modern systems
Yes, that sort of thing. I think I most often used Adjust to open directories/files while closing the previous one, rather than leaving a trail of open windows.
Or, Adjust-clicking entries in menus and keeping the menu open.
Or, selecting multiple files/directories in the Filer to move/copy/open multiple files at once.
> Double-click "Select" on an application icon to launch it and... nothing. Its icon displays in the Icon Bar, and that's it.
This is the procedure described by the RISC OS Style Guide [1], the UX guide for programmers. Unfortunately, it doesn't explain why.
I think most application developers followed these UX recommendations closely, even games would often launch this way. (A game might have a settings menu accessed from its Icon Bar icon.)
> Drag-and-drop really seems to be the RISC OS idiomatic way to manipulate files.
Yes, that was how people worked. If you were working on an existing file you can just click "OK" to overwrite it with updates, or you can drag it somewhere else to do what we'd call "Save As" nowadays.
Possibly this was to support an OS that originally assumed floppy-disc-only use. Unlike Windows 3 (I think…) you could have Filer windows open for multiple floppy discs. You could drag a file to one of these, and the OS would prompt you to switch discs if it wasn't the one currently in the drive.
> Everything you set up to customize the system, like desktop icons, window positions, desktop resolution, and other settings is reset every boot unless you manually tell the system to save the current state as the "boot file."
Anything you change in the !Configure application should be persisted in CMOS RAM, check your emulator if this is not happening.
Otherwise correct. Users with a hard disk would typically set up a !Boot file. On our family computer we each had one, but not loading on boot. They were in our personal folders, so opening that folder loaded our settings.
(Maybe floppy-only users did something similar, but we had a HDD from when I was about 7 years old so I don't remember.)
> Pipedream.
We had !Fireworkz installed on the family computer, but I think the most I would have done with it was make an army list for Warhammer.
It's nice to see what this software was capable of.
> The emulator itself expects some specific keyboard, with the \ | key situated between LEFT SHIFT and Z.
Keyboards with this key are using the ISO/IEC 9995 Europe physical keyboard layout (this extra key + a tall enter key). It's used by most European keyboards; having \| there is the British version.
I still miss both proper context menus and adjust-clicking in them to get things done without needing to thread the same hierarchy umpteen times. I've had arguments with people over this! My comeback: "You just haven't seen it done right!" :-P
Set up a saved search on eBay so you get emails if one is listed.
They come up fairly regularly.
Be cautious of any that aren't shown to be working, especially if they don't include photographs of the area around the CMOS battery. These could leak after 15+ years and damage the board.
If you double clicked on a file it would load the associated application and open the file.
The only reason I can think of is to not disrupt the user's flow by opening a window on top of the Filer windows. Maybe they intend to open multiple applications to use together.
There was a carefully written programmer's guide for UX. That might have an explanation.
The cabin crew stand at the front of the plane, and either play a recording or make an announcement saying you can buy a lottery scratchcard for €2 or whatever, with some of the money going to charity. They then walk down the plane "scratchards? scratchcards?"
They repeat this with a collection for charity (no scratchcard), a promoted drink, and some sort of food.
I think this is mostly unique to Ryanair (in Europe), I don't remember Wizz Air, Norwegian or EasyJet doing this. Part of Ryanair's marketing is to make the experience worse than it needs to be, so you know you're saving money.
ive never experienced that on ryanair? I fly it pretty regularly, its just the food cart, and even that feels halfhearted, I see maybe 3% of customers actually getting something, so most of the time they dont even bother asking, just roll right on by unless you go out of your way to ask for something.
The only bad upsell they do is in the booking process. Are you sure you don't want a hire car?
If you search "Ryanair scratchcards" you'll see recent news articles about them.
I've used Ryanair once in the previous 5 years, so my experience might be out of date. There was a time my job was taking me to "holiday" destinations for meetings, back then I used Ryanair more often as they often had the only direct route. Maybe the scratchcard sales are more common on those flights.
googling it it seems like its still a thing. I reckon it must be on certain specific flights, maybe ones that are likely to attract a certain crowd, liverpool to malaga sort of flights maybe. Ive definitely not heard about it, but I do usually fly the same routes so
Yes, Ryanair is the undisputed leader in finding new creative ways to take advantage of their captive audience and saving a few pennies here and there (e.g. I'm not aware of other low-cost carriers that have advertising on the overhead bins or put the safety instructions on seat-back stickers because it's marginally cheaper than using cards for that). Not to mention only flying from airports in the middle of nowhere to save airport fees.
...while other low-cost carriers try to distinguish themselves by not being quite as bad as Ryanair.
I kinda' like Ryanair as lowcost airline? They're fairly efficient (boarding, serving etc), they _actually fly_ the advertised flights (with relatively few exceptions), and the food is reasonably priced. During COVID they would just give your money back, no shenanigans like "they're in our company wallet". Sure they have their quirks but they don't seem to go out of their way to deceive you, they're pretty open about what you pay and what you get.
Now Wizzair is "mostly not an airline" for me, because they have all the negative traits I hinted above. E.g. they'll happily advertise flights they have no intention of flying, make refunds hard, are as misleading as they can be about pricing, make it impossible to checkin online a few hours before the flight so that you have to pay their high fees, etc.
I wouldn't want the Ryanair experience for long-haul flights; but for short 2-3h ones within Europe, they're fine, I'm always considering them. Not for the perceived cheapness, but for the "I expect them to actually fly AND be on time" part.
> During COVID they would just give your money back, no shenanigans like "they're in our company wallet"
Generally I agree with your view that Ryanair is decent at what it does, but COVID refunds happened only after the regulator stepped in to threaten them over their original "no refunds" and then "refund in the form of a voucher, with a short expiry date on it" policies actually being unlawful, and even allowing for the scale of its operations it received more complaints to the UK CAA than anyone else about refund handling during COVID.
In Romania I think they just gave back the money (or maybe it was on a voucher with "if you don't use the voucher by date X, we'll refund the money"). which is in stark contrast with how other low-cost airlines like WizzAir behaved. Perhaps it was regional policy; or perhaps it was due to their previous interactions with UK regulators? But for me, they gained a lot of respect for them back then (whereas WizzAir is on the "only if absolutely no other choice" list - and I think I only used it once, for a business trip where it had a good direct flight AND I didn't care if I actually made it to the destination, or if I got stranded there for a few days - since the company would've been paying)
Ryanair have been regulated into compliance very effectively by the European authorities- everyone knows they are scumbags and make sure they don’t get away with nonsense.
Literally how regulators should work. They look at the outrageous things they try to do and make laws to prevent them. It’s worked very well and also hasn’t ended Ryanair (which is the usual anti regulation argument , that we can’t have cheap things with regulations).
I personally never fly Ryanair because I’ve had to sue them (and won) in the past, they really do suck.
When's the last time you tried to claw back your EU mandated clawback for things like delayed flights from one of these airlines without fighting tooth and nail and threatening legal action? Perhaps this has improved in recent years, but when I was flying EU regularly several years ago getting that refund has always been an uphill battle.
Hah, I tried when BA had to cancel my flight due to a computer system outage. Coincidentally, some “activists” handcuffed themselves to a fence on the runway at the exact same time, which was an act of terror or whatever and thus not covered, so I did not receive my money back.
I actually like wizz. They are dirt cheap which is the only thing i care about. The ground crew don't openly despise you, unlike easyjet, they tolerate you and their cabins are all right. Just they don't have any customer service if anything goes wrong.
"Wizz; Not the worst airline you've ever flown on"
The safety card thing, and lack of seatback pockets is mainly to speed up turnaround after everyone's off the plane. (planes only make money when they're in the air)
After they made this change years ago, they said so explicitly in their marketing around continuous improvement.
They don't have to actually sell a single scratchcard for it to be worthwhile for them - the whole point is to cheapen the experience.
They have an entire theory of marketing based on people believing that "if it feels cheap, it is cheap", and so they deliberately build in a bunch of annoyances (scratchcards, arbitrary baggage restrictions, checkout hoop-jumping, endless PR about removing toilets or running standing-only flights) which serve to make their service seem as cheap and nasty as possible.
And it works: some people simply ignore the nasty aspects, others are willing to put up with them in order to get a bargain, and yet others actually take pride in wading through the crap - usually expressing it in "I beat the system" terms. And here we are talking about it on a barely-related thread - carrying their marketing message further!
Three years later, they have unreliable printers that are difficult to maintain.
I have a five year old Prusa, still working very nicely, and it's still a tool and not itself a hobby.
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