Abstract: I burned a pair of audio CDs three days ago for listening to in my cars. Two (nearly) identical discs, one for each car. I have largely moved away from optical discs but am making an effort to re-embrace them.

Full text: So when I went to build my PC, I wanted a Fractal Meshify 2 Mini case. I built my cousin’s PC in one, I wanted one too, but they had apparently been discontinued. I wound up with a Pop Air Mini case instead, which in many ways isn’t as nice, but it does feature a pair of 5 1/4" bays hidden behind a magnetic panel at the front of the PSU basement.

One of my little projects was to install one of those multi-format card readers and an old optical drive there, and I got it done a few days ago. I have a USB optical drive, in fact a couple of them, but an internal one is just a nicer thing to deal with. It is my understanding that no one is actually manufacturing those external optical drives anymore; that the ones you see on Amazon with god knows what branding are old laptop drives of whatever spec stuffed into a new case with a USB controller. They’re flaky, janky, and flimsy. Plus there’s never anywhere to put them; they come with short little cables so they’re invariably hard to plug in. So instead I ganked a blu-ray reader/DVD writer drive out of an old Dell I have lying around and installed that, and man is it nicer.

My inaugural project was to make a couple of audio CDs for the car. This project involved little to no piracy; all of the audio came from legitimately purchased CDs that I bought as directly from the band as I could. I want to fund the artists, not the sniveling IP hoarders. So I’ve got discs now that have my favorite 25 out of ~120 tracks I bought from them in my cars. I ripped the discs to FLACs the second I had them and have been listening to them on my phone, my precious originals safely stored in a CD rack.

I also bought a new spindle of CD-Rs, which is also getting harder to do. The ones I bought have inkjet printable labels. And it just so happens my old inkjet printer has a disc printing feature that I’ve yet to use. So I tried it out. Getting this particular printer going in Linux for more than basic features is a no-go; CUPS+Gutenprint is available for at least a thousand makes and models of Epson printers including the models above and below mine in the range, but specifically not mine. I chose to take that personally, but in the meantime I have discs to print. Funnily enough the printer can do this without a PC at all; it has a feature specifically for printing JPGs onto discs, and another feature that I have to assume is designed specifically for piracy:

My Epson XP-830 Expression Premium “Small In One” printer has a built-in feature to copy a CD from the scanner bed to the disc tray. That is, put a CD label side down on the scanner glass, put a printable CD-R on the disc tray, and it will figure it out and copy it. I can think of no purpose for that other than to hand out copies of Now That’s What I Call Music 7 or Windows Vista Home Premium to all your high school friends. It’s useless for things like “File Archives 2011” or “Iron Butterfly Beach Party Mix” but it’s a very user friendly counterfeiting workflow.

So mostly I installed this optical drive for reading rather than writing. I can see a future where I replace this drive with an M-disc burner; I keep threatening to start a Youtube channel, and that might be how I archive video footage, but…I don’t know.

LED bulbs do get warm, not as hot as incandescent bulbs but they do emit heat. You might have to run them longer than a minute to warm it up enough to be immediate about it.

The official answer to this riddle is turn switch 1 on for a minute or so, switch it off then switch 2 on. if the bulb is hot but dark, its 1, if it’s lit it’s 2 and if it’s out and cold its 3.

the adult answer is why do I have only one chance to walk in the room?

They do that with dum-dums, I know. I…couldn’t tell you if they’re actually different flavors, honestly, they all taste “fake fruit” to me, but they’re definitely different colors, and instead of cleaning the machine between batches of flavors they just start making the next batch and some of the candy comes out mixed. Perfectly edible just kinda weird so they put a “mystery” flavor wrapper on it. Honestly I respect the frugality of it all.

that’s men’s room egg salad.

KFC was good. it’s now slop.

The British came up with that one.

Hey, that’s a personal question.

Okay but why is it inherently funny though?

So we’re just doing food items with no other context as memes? What’s it gonna be next month? Pasta?

My thing is, a dumb phone has the features I would like to do without on my smart phone. Telephone and SMS ARE THE GODDAMN PROBLEM. If people who were not explicitly whitelisted by me out of band had no method of contacting me, that’d be great.

Hey OP: forget it. throw your laptop in a lake and take up acoustic guitar.

Every slicer I’m aware of runs on Linux. I’ve got PrusaSlicer and slic3r installed right now. Cura is on Flathub. Hell, Simplify3D does or did offer a Linux version, though it was one of those janky .run installers where they translate the Windows install process as literally as possible to Linux.

As for modeling software, depends on what kind of modeling. I tend to use FreeCAD, but it’s mostly suitable for engineering and not art.

Ages ago when I still bothered with Octoprint, Cura Engine could be installed as a module, and you could slice an STL on a Raspberry Pi through Octoprint. I quickly gave up on that as a stupid gimmick because you pretty much always need to do adjustments in the plater, but once upon a time Cura could do it.

OP asked for software that runs well on a 10 year old laptop with 16GB of DDR3 and Linux. Saying that I found that Godot runs well on my laptop of similar configuration and vintage absolutely is relevant, you disingenuous troll.

I understand how Python modules work just fine, you install a module with Pip, and it’ll run on your computer and only your computer until your computer gets some update in the future because Python’s module versioning and dependency management are the worst in the business. Python also has a well-deserved reputation as a fast and performant language even running on old and limited systems…oh wait no it’s a sow in treacle. The more you implement in Python the slower it’s going to run. Can you name a commercial game that is implemented in Python, using modules like Pygame? I can’t.

If you’ve got the talent to open up a general purpose programming language and create a video game, use something like C# or Java, something designed for creating performant cross-platform graphical applications. Or, if you’re going to start gluing applications like Tiled and such together, you might as well go with something like Godot because that’s basically what you’re janking together.

I did call Godot lighter than Unity or Unreal, which I believe to be factually accurate. I have run Godot on a 2014 era laptop, it runs well on a system of that vintage.

It is a full featured 2D/3D game engine and development environment, which can be a lot to take in. A lot of what I learned about game development I learned from a Youtube channel called Clear Code, who made the same snake game in both Pygame and Godot.

Python and Pygame does away with the cluttered IDE, and you can build a functioning game in one file, then you translate those concepts to a more full-on game engine which is going to be a bit more practicable for making larger games with things like tilesets and more complicated physics and collisions and whatnot. I’d hate to try making a Zelda-like game in something like Pygame. Fear the men who made A Link to the Past in 6502 assembly.

I’ll join the chorus recommending Godot. A lot lighter than Unity or Unreal, it’s open source, well documented and quite capable. It’s got a lot of features, in a lot of ways it isn’t “dead simple.”

I might recommend starting off using Python’s Pygame library. Do something like create Flappy Bird in it, that will give you a pretty good idea of how a video game works under the hood, and it’ll run on a potato.

For pixel art you might go with LibreSprite or Pixelorama. These will allow you to create tile sets for backgrounds as well as character sprites.

If you’re looking to get into 3D art, you’ve basically got to go with Blender.

Three. Wordpad also existed.

See that seems like the kind of thing Matt Parker would make a video about, “Someone noticed a weird pattern in some numbers.” Like how 2 pi or the fibonacci sequence keep turning up in nature, and I just can’t muster up much more than a “…huh” about it. I mean I understand margesimpsonpotato.jpg but if you want me to do calculus you’re gonna have to bring me more than “I just think they’re neat.”

They’re on a mission from Gad.