Regarding the uplifted chimps, since chimps are arboreal they may have a better conception of 3D space compared to humans, though perhaps not as much as the dolphins.

Yinrih are very arboreal but very not bipedal, so they don’t use artificial gravity in their spacecraft. I often describe their orbital colonies as being like a large shopping mall if it were a level in the game Descent.

Do the dolphins need to be underwater? How do they manipulate controls with no prehensile extremities? Nonhumanoid ergonomics are very much my thing.

Already do that via a custom domain and SimpleLogin/Proton.

Reject TV. Return to monitor. Yeah monitors don’t come in the same sizes as TVs, but if you just want something that shows you whatever you feed its video ports without any bloat than a monitor works great.

Nothing pops a vein quite like companies acting like a one-time expense should be a monthly fee. Paying monthly for heated seats in certain cars is where I first heard of this. They already put the hardware in the car. I guarantee they already charged you for the parts and labor to put in those heated seats when you bought the vehicle. No way they’re losing money on it in the hopes you start paying them.

But I’ll get off my owner’s rights soapbox now.

I’ll have to try that smart plug idea. I have some heavy duty Z-wave plugs I used for Christmas decorations last year and that would work great for the fridge.

For those who are saying I shouldn’t have bought these half-baked smart appliances, I agree. But I wasn’t always this aware of the privacy issues involved. The washer and dryer were purchased before I grasped how problematic cloud-connected always online IoT devices are, and as mentioned in the OP the ability to tell me when my laundry was done seemed like a genuinely useful feature. In the case of the fridge it was an emergency replacement and we took what fit the preexisting niche in our kitchen, and the complete lack of output on the fridge itself necessitated the app.

Washer dryer and fridge are TCP only

Oi! ya got a loicense for that walkin’ war machine?!

At Focus, Commonthroat is the most widely spoken language. It is the descendent of the administrative language used by the clergy of the Bright Way during the Age of Decadence, when the clergy ruled the entire system as a cyberpunk-esque megacorp. When the secular governments of the inner planets that would become the Allied Worlds (AW) re-asserted themselves after the War of Dissolution, they chose the already prestigious Commonthroat as a standard language.

As the AW grew from a mere treaty of mutual defense to an ever more economically integrated union, other languages were displaced by Commonthroat. At the time of First Contact there are only three “dialects with an army and navy” as it were. The holy world of Hearthside never joined the AW despite being the innermost planet, so they retain a unique Hearthsider language. The Partisans living in Focus’s Kuiper belt, who are the principle reason the inner planets formed the AW in the first place, speak a language called Outlander. The planet Moonlitter (really its many moons) also speak a different dialect of Outlander. Partisan Territory (PT) and Moonlitter are in a relationship analogous to Taiwan and the PRC or North and South Korea.

Outlander is the most vigorous language that isn’t Commonthroat, ironically thanks to the hyper-nationalist policies of the Partisan government which prevent the encroachment of AW popular media. Pups on both Hearthside and Moonlitter grow up consuming said AW media, and thus have a decent grasp of Commonthroat. Commonthroat is universally taught as a second language everywhere that isn’t PT.

Predating all of these by a hundred millennia is Primordial, the yinrih’s written-only language that evolved directly out of a scent-marking behavior. It fills the role of a sacred language in the Bright Way, and is taught in seminaries to aspiring hearthkeepers. Because yinrih evolved writing directly rather than inventing it, they have a written history that extends back to the dawn of sapience.

Meanwhile, the sociolinguistic situation on Earth at the time of First Contact reflects the conditions of today. English reigns as the de facto standard, with other languages like Spanish and Mandarin being regionally important.

Yinrih and humans cannot directly produce one-another’s speech sounds. That doesn’t stop Terraboos obsessed with human culture from trying though. Ideally, both parties in a conversation speak their own mother tongue (or native throat in the yinrih’s case) while the listener passively translates. If one party is monolingual, the bilingual party must use a speech synthesizer to reproduce the other species’ language.

Background: I just got my first printer (Bambu Lab A1 mini) last year. I am also not an engineer and, like you, don’t want the printer itself to be the hobby.

Based on my experience, and what I’ve seen others say online, Bambu Lab is still the king of “it just works”. If you’re not as ideologically motivated by right to own as I am, I’d say go with Bambu.

While I have zero experience with the company, Prusa seems to be the most consumer friendly, though they have their own issues. If I buy a second printer, it’s likely going to be the Prusa Core One.

That was very helpful thank you.

Thanks. Not sure if this is what you meant. The shape is distinct but the colors are similar. My avatar is from a worldbuilding project I work on as a hobby.

I forgot about dev mode. How does that compare to pre-enshittified firmware?

I’m definitely an “it just works” guy, and I am by no means an engineer. For me the printing is the hobby, not the printer.

Multimaterial would be good, but only if it doesn’t have to purge between colors. I bought the AMS lite along with the mini, and while it’s convenient when I want to print something in a different color, only having one nozzle means a truly multi-color print takes orders of magnitude longer to finish unless the print itself is completely designed around the limitations of the single-nozzle setup. Having said that, if the MMS can also act as dry storage that would be a plus even if I primarily use one filament per print.

It’s less about specific build volume and more what I can fit into the existing space while providing more build volume than the Mini’s 7x7x7 inches. I’d say the overall footprint of the printer has to be less than 60 cm on a side, since the table my current printer is on is 60 cm deep.

Enclosure is also a must-have.

I was going to say about 10x10x10 inches, but after recalculating the dimensions of the latest thing I’m making (a pill bottle organizer) I may be able to squeeze it onto the mini, so the thing that prompted this post may be a non issue, at least for now. Continued suggestions are welcome though.

What exactly does the mini do that makes it worth keeping if I get a larger printer? I’m not sure I can justify owning more than one.

• giant sea otters. They could also be trained as war beasts or treated as beloved pets by the crew.
• horshoe crabs. They’ve survived 500 million years, I’m sure they can survive this.

Dictator ship:

I have only one specific seafaring vessel defined, the Minnow. It is a mass-produced submarine chassis used for any number of purposes by the wealthy plutocratic underwater cities on the planet Sweetwater. Some of these cities are so scandalously prodigal that they’ll think nothing of abandoning these vessels to the surface at the slightest inconvenience, much like the fleets of abandoned luxury cars in Dubai. After breaching the surface and drifting with the currents, many of these derelicts are picked up by the poverty-stricken surface-dwellers of Sweetwater, both peaceful and piratical, who repurpose them for their needs. Minnows are infamous system-wide as technicals used by anti Allied Worlds insurgents.

Given yinrih are quadrupeds who stand around 30 inches at the shoulders, their subs are positively claustrophobic even for seasoned human submariners.

Dictatorship:

Partisan Territory is (ostensibly) ruled by Firefly the Apostate, who has cheated death for 33 millennia, making him unthinkably ancient even for the yinrih, who regularly live over seven centuries. He lives in a state of litchdom, suspended between life and death inside a modified metabolic suspension capsule called the Eternal Womb, his body dead but his brain alive.

However, even he has forgotten the location of his physical body, the Eternal Womb being squirreled away in some musty corner of the Capital Complex, which takes up the entire surface and interior of a dwarf planet. He fades in and out of madness born of his sheer age, as the vulpithecine brain is not built to store memories for such a long time. During moments of lucidity his mind prowls the capital’s network, drinking in the data flowing in from all corners of the Outlands. The acting government still uses his name liberally when enacting policies, saying such and such was ‘decreed by the Great Leader’ or ‘done according to his will’.

I’m guessing the Prosperity Church is a corporatized megachurch.