Altitude would be fun to see reborn. Hit 4-5k players at its peak on Steam. Now pretty much dead apart from dedicated league play.

It’s a 2D flight/arena game with a variety of game modes, aircraft to fly, weapons, perks, powerups etc. Very arcade.

• ✅ Fun
• ✅ Accessible (Win/Mac/Linux/Steam)
• ✅ All ages
• ✅ Casual (games last minutes, not hours)
• ✅ Not AAA
• ✅ Free
• ✅ Runs on potato

Only drawback according to the assignment:

• ❌ Not FOSS

I wasn’t aware until you told me, so that holds true. Might pick one up, that’s cheap enough just for funsies.

I’ve not had a problem with the Chitu breed of kit - hardware or software. But I have seen some absolute horror stories from the later Mars machines. The 4 MAX (maybe the whole 4 series) has a fantastic bug where leaving the USB in while turning on will trigger the machine to start a firmware update.

A bit of a hitch when it doesn’t check for firmware files being present first before wiping itself. Making the mistake of leaving the USB in at power-on effectively soft-bricks it.

Elegoo are now leaning into moving vats, which is fancy and allows for autolevelling. I think it’s just a recipe for trouble and more parts to fail though.

I’ve stuck with iredmail for years. Spin up a VM, grab the installer, and see how it performs for you.

• oobe bypass.
• A post install script.

Alternatively, Tiny10

Can’t argue with that. I still use FDM as well for a lot of models - currently running an old Ultimaker 2 and a BCN3D Sigma D25 for the bigger batch jobs.

The latter is mostly stock but the UM2 is pretty much unrecognisable from when it was new now; a real Ship of Theseus. Bigger gantry, uprated board/head/feeder and tweaked Tinker firmware to suit. Shoved a Pi with Octoprint in there too.

While you can get flex & specialty resins, you are right that you’re certainly not printing them alongside the regular stuff in one run like you intend to, unless the model is redesigned in multiple parts. They are also priced to suit :|

Will be good to see what you come up with. Almost all of my prints are the work of others these days. I’m not much of a designer and the furthest I go with CAD is putting terribleness together in a 12 year old version of Sketchup 😂

You’re welcome - glad to see you have it really sussed out. Finding something that works for you and knowing it won’t just up and disappear off the market (as many fashion frames do) is excellent.

Can see the optician side as well - they have an established process and deviating from that is unwanted faff. However, they are perfectly capable of ordering a lens to a customer given spec. A short ‘if this doesn’t work then lol you suck’ disclaimer is all it would take to make the sale.

Resin is well within reach of the casual hobbyist now - we’re talking a couple hundred dollars to get an entry level machine, and a little extra coin for the materials/consumables. I have a (now old) Mars 3 that is ticking along beautifully.

Safety/PPE/ventilation is the main downside compared to FDM. It’s a stinky job but you can’t fault the results for presentable and functional parts. These things can print stuff like screw threads and other teensy features perfectly.

Offer always stands if you ever want something to demo and can’t get anyone more local to help :)

A part like this is begging to be done on a resin machine. You can’t beat them for the kind of shapes and tolerances you’re working with here.

I’d give it a go on my FDM machine, but I have .8 nozzles loaded right now - no hope haha.

I’d be happy to turn a few of these out in resin if you don’t have a machine, would only ask for the freight cost.

Teams can go fuck itself with a rock. We’ve taken licensing now that doesn’t include it.

Still holding on to classic outlook as long as possible. The new version/skin/glow-up can go share the aforementioned rock with teams. Where’s my VBA, where’s my ribbon customisations, and why must it be dumbed down to Fisher-Price levels of ‘user friendliness’?

A lot of my answers to user questions these days are ‘Because Microsoft ™️’.

If you shit out a ring, you’d best hope you haven’t been skipping your kegels.

https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/electric/Watt_to_Amp_Calculator.html

Instagib <3

Main topic aside, what are you doing putting bread and butter together with a fork?

All the small appliance suggestions so far are great - they remove a lot of the danger and give you an easy place to start. Same for the safety items. Even with no fear, it is sensible to have an extinguisher and fire blanket in the kitchen.

When you feel that you are ready to start picking up knives and working with flame, do it with a friend or family member that is suitably understanding & willing to teach. Simply watching it done is still familiarising yourself with the process and hopefully reducing your fears.

My sister is the same way - I am teaching her slowly. We started with baking, as all the prep work is done cold with only one heating process. Not exactly healthy, but it it gets the ball rolling on working with heat.

You’ll love Anthracite Grey then.

For another arm of the empire, try Frontier - which focuses on Hudson’s Bay Company.

Not that you should have to, but web results can be disabled in start search.

Winkey+R will open the no-frills run menu. As long as you know the exact exe or component name, you’re good:

• notepad
• calc
• cmd
• control
• control userpasswords2
• mstsc
• ncpa.cpl
• diskmgmt.msc
• devmgmt.msc
• shutdown (with /s, /r or /h switches)

A few decent ones there.

However, voters don’t listen to economists. If they’re not happy with the status quo, they vote for disrupting the status quo even if experts tell them that that’s a bad idea.

Also see: Brexit.

Sadly it does not stop them whining about the consequences of their poor decision-making.

Already is. See GeForce Now, which is already getting Grocery Shrink Ray’d come January…

They can keep it then.

The music really planted the game in its age and was half the bloody fun!

They did Vice City dirty this way too.

I will never tire of beating 7 shades out of Anna Navarre on that plane. Though the killswitch method is flat out hilarious.

The Revision mod made DE even better.

Worth a replay with it on if you haven’t already