With all the interest in 3D printer and large communities building their own printers, where are the amateur 2D printers? Did we just jump to 3D printing because it was cooler (which I also admit is amaizing)?

I just want a basic 2D inkjet or laser printer that doesn’t stop printing because magenta is low or doesn’t waste ink to “clean” the print head, nor make up weird errors because it doesn’t have access to the internet.

What about printers without ink? Would it be too hard/complicated to use a lower power laser (instead of a laser cutter) to burn/scorch a thin micrometric, if not nanometric, layer of normal everyday printing/copy white paper?

As a child, I remember scorching magazine/journal paper and all sorts of wood materials with my grandmother’s handheld magnifying lens under the summer sun in the yard. I was able to draw stuff without burning some of the material completely.

Every ~3 to ~5 years I change my free email addresses (gmail, hotmail/outlook, yahoo, etc.). Although, I don’t use yahoo anymore.

I have turned a few of my old gmail accounts into spam mail trawlers as I “Gotta catch ’em all! ” and every time I have to make a temporary or single use account for a service I want to check out/try or I just foresee making only a single purchase I always use a gmail account+alias if they don’t have a guest checkout option. The old gmail accounts are checked quarterly on a if-I-remember basis but at least once a year.

On first contact with any business, services or people I have never met in person I usually give a newer gmail address I check biweekly in case my forwarding filter missed something important.

Moreover, I use gmail incoming mail rules to forward copies of important keywords and specific email address to my 2 professional (redundant) emails for which I enabled notification on my phone, main desktop and workplace.

Gmail is so ubiquitous and well trusted that I can pretty much use it in any input forms for registration or verification. Their spam filter is also pretty good (not always) to skip/pre-filter obvious phishing and scam emails.

Even though I have already moved away or avoided Google, Microsoft, Meta/Facebook, LinkedIn, Apple, TikTok, Wechat, Temu, PayPal, Sony, etc. I occasionally still have to indirectly deals with them on a limited case-by-case but specific situations.

By excluding so many excellent email services they are inadvertently making sure that Gmail, Outlook and other allegedly “reputable” free emails services slowly become a junk/spam/marketing email dump that few would want to enable constant notification for and fewer would want to delve into and sift through daily.

Sorry, this became a long rambling rant about all the layer of protections I have to use nowadays to just avoid wasting energy and attention on the profusion of spam/useless emails.

Gosh, 🤣 … the image of having carbonized and/or partially vaporized humans quickly switched my awe in the technology into repugnance.

Darn, why does amaizing technology often end up with horrifying set backs and adverse effects?

Yup… and just after they are done setting up their manufacturing plant or tech hub, they will act all surprised (surprised-pikachu.jpg) when some made up excuse are fabricated to shake down their newly minted “investment” just like Several foreign businesses have been raided by the authorities. and cry how could this possibly have happened, all offended, while demanding for a bailout or a loss carryover of their future taxes.

Then there is the multitude of spying and theft: Allegations of intellectual property theft by China or through their Thousand Talents Program by offering high salaries, privileges and rewards to the chinese diaspora in various countries to bring back sensitive documents, blueprints, diagrams, formulas, and manufacturing-related proprietary data before leaving their previous workplace.

Unfortunately, China is at the crossroad of multiple extraordinary challenges it had been delaying, exacerbating or skipping for the last few decades :

• demographic collapse, whereas population over 65 will increase from 200 million today to 400 million by 2049, while the overall population will decline slightly caused by the one-child policy since 1979 but also the high cost of raising a child in China to be successful

• hundreds of entire cities of unproductive tofu dreg construction and litany of unfinished projects (roads, bridges and train lines to factories, airports and houses) causing huge insolvent debt among Chinese property developers, all amounting to a beleaguered US$55 trillion property sector, which accounts for between 22% and 29% of the Chinese economy

• numerous environmental challenges that have only accelerated, including air and water pollution, deforestation, and dealing with increasing local natural disasters (flashfloods, heatwaves, heat domes, droughts, soil erosion, desertification, typhoons, etc…) due to Climate Change

• feeding 22% of the world population with 7% (and decreasing) of their global arable land

• youth-unemployment crisis whereas millions of well-educated graduates (21,3% of jobseekers between the ages of 16 and 25) are struggling to find decent white-collar jobs in urban areas

• prevalence of corruption, nepotism, grift and extortion by every level of governance and institutions (local, city, regional, medical, education, police, etc…)

All of the above while an ongoing China-U.S. trade war.

Hence, my doubt on foreign investor’s (voluntary, well informed and rational) return into a unfriendly and drastically changed Chinese economy.

I hope I am wrong and I absolutely wish for the best for China and the everyday peoples of China currently struggling to eke out a living due a series of unfortunate natural and/or preventable human caused disasters, all amplified by a leadership prioritising ideology over effective governance, or control over pragmatism.

Excellent writeup! With constant updates to boot 🥳

I’m saving it for future reference.

Thank you for putting your time and effort on this.

Well, that took them long enough.

I don’t know about other governments and institutions but Windows went to shit long long ago.

I switched to Ubuntu (lubuntu or xubuntu back then) when I saw all the MetroUI shenanigans.

Since then, I have played with many kind of Linux distribution and currently settled with a mix of TrueNAS Scale, Linux Mint (cinnamon), Raspberry Pi, Ubuntu (core), NixOs and Android (mobile, tablet, nvidia shield pro).

After also switching family and relatives over to Mint or Ubuntu (the less tech savvy ones or those that did everything in the browser email/YouTube/online shopping), my life became so much easier whenever I gave them tech support. Nowadays, I almost exclusively give tech support for Linux systems for family and avoid Apple/Microsoft whenever wherever I can.

Really, windows will continue to go downhill (Microsoft account, advertising within OS, untimely updates, updates that breaks whatever whenever, the list is endless…). ChatGPT will give them a crutch but not forever.