So I've setup Manjaro and I freakin love it. It looks great, it feels great and Octopi is such a huge help. So hyped to... let it rot on my Laptop as I dont really use it much.

One loves what I do.
The other thinks I can do better.

So last week I got my second 3D printer. I have done a few prints with it and this weekend I wanted to connect it to an Octoprint instance on my Raspberry Pi. Yesterday everything went great, got some plugins installed, changed all settings within octopi, connected it to my network and this morning I thought let's connect it to my printer and try to print something with it. But everytime I executed my gcode it gave an error about the heated bed not being able to heat up. Even though I did see all communication between the printer and octopi, on both ends.
I've disassembled the build plate to see what could be causing the heating issue. Did not see anything. Strange...

I assembled the whole thing again and then turned on the printer and tried printing again. Hmm, now it does work, why? Me thinking a bit and then realizing that before I didn't hit the power switch on the printer and apparently the Pi gave enough power through USB to turn on the display and do basic logic like doing beeps on touches and changing variables on the screen. The worst thing is that octoprint gave me warnings about low voltage on the Pi even though I was using the official Raspberry Pi power adapter...

My own little version of moore's law:

In 1986 the connectome (the brain) of c. elegans, a small worm, was mapped. It would take decades before the research caught up to the point where we had the hardware to simulate it.

In 2024, we have successfully mapped, and fully simulated (to matching observed behavioral data) the brain of a fruit fly, a total of 139,255 neurons and corresponding connections.

Thats a 38 year period.

If the period is roughly 40 years, and the leap in successful neurons mapped *and simulated* is by an average of 461 times the prior number of neurons, then by 2062-2064 we will be simulating box jellyfish, fruit flys, zebrafish, bees, ants, honey bees, cockroachs, coconut crabs, geckos, guppys, sand lizards, snakes, skinks, toirtoises, frogs, iguanas, shrews, bats, and even moles.

By the dozens or hundreds in any given simulation.

By the year 2100-2104 we'll be fully simulating the brains of mice, quill, crocodiles, birds such as doves, rats, zebra finchs,

guinea pigs, lemurs, ducks, ferrets, cockatiels, squirrels, mongoose, prairie dogs, rabbits, octopi, house cats, buzzards, parakeets, grey parrots, snowy owls, racoons, and even domestic pigs.

And in the years between 2100 to 2140, starting immediately with domestic dogs, we will ramp up and end with the capacity to simulate human brains in full, probably by the dozens or hundreds.

This assumes we can break the quantum barrier of course.

!rant

So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.

To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).

I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/

I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.

I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.

But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).

I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.

What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!

Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.

I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.

Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.

What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/

Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.

To Summarize a bit.

It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.

So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.

I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..

Started with 3D-Printing last year, bought a cheap Creality Ender 2 and upgraded almost everything except the mecahnical parts.

Upgrades include a new Mainboard, stepper drivers, stepper dampers, custom firmware, new printed case, better extruder, OctoPI Server etc.

Oh yeah, and Animu ^^