it_depends_man

It would ruin the concept, so I get why they don’t tackle the topic, but:

The federation, particularly humanity inside of the federation, is run by essentially a military government. There are elections, probably, we never really get to see them, and the decision making process of the admirals is not shown to the viewer, for world building and story telling reasons. The admirals are the problem posers, the calls to adventure, the exposition. “Go there, do this, top secret, very important, blah blah”.

They don’t do misuse them in lore, that much, but even the lesser capable space ships are enormously dangerous. If I recall correctly, there are even some mentions of not being regularly allowed to warp inside solar system boundaries. The risk of misuse or accidents is unimaginable. I’m pretty sure humanity has resigned itself to being ruled by some admiralty board that could order to vaporize the planet. They’re not going to do that, but the implication is certainly… looming.

I also really don’t like how they changed styles after the 80s/90s series. The perceived need to reinvent themselves has yielded mostly bad results. Only “Strange New Worlds” is tolerable, because it’s well done, but it’s still “too much” in my opinion. The special effects are nice, but there was no need to design corridors like that.

Same for uniforms. Look at how much “the suit” has changed since the 1870s. Barely at all.

No.

Your suggestion: discuss it, have a plan, make sure this is the right gift by talking to her, otherwise, the machine is fine.

I got a kit that was not complicated to assemble but it took a fair bit of time so I would say the price for this machine is pretty fair.

No idea about how well that one works, but I guess it comes with guarantee?

Better make sure to have a list of projects first, because while cool to have, you can just order 3d prints, you don’t need the machine yourself. Or you can visit hack spaces and ask for a turn on their machine. And it’s like… an actual waste of living space if you’re not using it. It’s actually in the way. Same thing as useless kitchen devices that sit on the counter and collect dust.

Then again, if you want to be nice and give your sister a nice gift, go for it.

Also idk how relevant money is to you, 800€ can buy a nice dinner, nice clothes and a weekend trip to a nearby city. Or like… think about an actually high quality bag or purse that gets used daily. Definitely the price range to discuss it with her and not just show up at her door with a huge box. 😅

It’s difficult to police and enforce. It requires manual review of entire code bases. Not doable for them. Not the point of the project either, you use flathub when you don’t want the package system and get something directly from the dev that just works.

impractical for an airplane

Depending on how much effort you’re willing to put in, I would suggest switching material.

Use fiber reinforced plastic.

The process can be done at home, though you may need some practice. You can print the shape you want with a thicker wall thickness and then use that as a negative. You get the best results if you have a compressor and can use vaccum techniques to get the excess plastic out of the material. This will put you in the thickness space you want, and it will still work, and you don’t have warping problems.

I don’t know much about 3d printing, so disclaimer. The modern printers are very much built on open source so it shouldn’t matter too much which screen you use.

I have also not done a firmware flash myself yet, but doing that sounds plausible to me.

I can’t believe that was the only issue that made someone trash it.

As you can see (and as you will see), it’s a bit tinkering leaning hobby, if someone doesn’t have the energy, patience, skill or motivation to learn, a broken part can be a major problem. I don’t think there are repair shops you can go to…

How can I teach myself how to offer small improvements to the projects I use?

Programming in general?

Probably more that if you want to work on graphics software, you need to understand graphics programming?

That’s unfortunately very difficult. I know of no good way to do that. With specification based software, you can at least read the specification or related standard and then it flows from that how it should work. With programs that server a different, specific use case, there is a manual, and flow to things and then “things stick out”.

If there are issues, you just read a bunch of issues and read the code that they are about and get a feeling for why the issue is an issue and why the code is the way that it is.

I remember one thing I helped with for a short while, didn’t use the python “with” file writing dialogue, because the file they were writing was massive and opening it in one place, then doing a bunch of functions that wrote and appended to the file and then closing it somewhere else, was the best solution, even though it looked unclean at first.

Made me think == good post.

Idk what you read into my comment?

Wrote up a huge hypothetical of what I would do. Tough stuff. Made me think. Good post!