nyan

Gentoo, at least, is an unspecialized metadistribution that can be used for whatever purpose you can come up with. It can certainly be put on a server, but for someone lacking Gentoo experience the learning curve might be a little steep, and depending on exactly what software you want, compiling it may take a while on an older machine.

So speaking as a Gentoo user, Debian is a not-unreasonable choice for this use case. It's certainly stable enough.

I admit you'd be limiting your market to people who consider "helping the environment feels good" to be worth at least $5 if you price the spools at $20 USD. If you want to price it lower, you need more waste, though. So for now, the economics don't really work out unless we're talking about really large groups of hobbyist printers, or waste from a business. 🤷

Alternatively, what's impossible for an individual might be possible for a group. A makerspace with enough members who are into 3D printing might be able to break even on a macerator, extruder, and spooler in a reasonable amount of time by reselling the filament. Say maybe 30 people each producing a kg of waste PLA per year?

Hmm. Pinning some numbers on this . . . The Filabot EX2 is an extrusion and spooling setup for $6,560.70 USD . Plus the bill of parts for a DIY macerator . . . let's call it $7000, because round numbers are nice. $1000 a year would pay this off in a not-unreasonable amount of time. So you'd need to produce 100 spools at $10 or 50 spools at $20. If you're only clearing 30kg of waste per year, and selling 1kg spools at $20, that's $600/year and about 12 years to pay off the rig. Still not completely out of the question, I guess.

I think in most cases you have to pay the price of postage. Some of the companies will offer you an incentive like free or discounted spools of recycled filament to offset this, but the only one I've found that's in Canada with me ( filaments.ca ) does not. Printerior Designs in the US apparently does (never dealt with them myself), and there are a couple in the EU.

We've been able to manipulate photos since the early days of film cameras. While technology has made them easier to mess with, they've never been truly trustworthy.

My guess is that they're surfacing something from Bing rather than doing this themselves. Still Not Good, though.

When I looked into this a couple of years back, the prices for ready-made filament extrusion setups looked like the target market was small business rather than individuals. And the recommended DIY method for breaking down plastic if you didn't have a machine shop was to get a paper shredder with metal blades (one of the models capable of shredding optical disks).

Much simpler to recycle printer waste into slab material. Or send it to a manufacturer that does recycling. Unless you're generating at least tens of kilos of waste a year, you're unlikely to break even any time soon by re-extruding, assuming the resulting filament is usable at all (ensuring consistent diameter and near-perfectly round cross-section is probably a PITA).

I assume there's a data cable running from your optical drive to the motherboard. Check that it's undamaged and firmly seated at both ends, because this kind of sounds like a bad connection (which some players might be able to compensate for with filters). Even if you didn't replace the cable or the mobo, you might have unseated one end while you were messing around inside the case.

If you're looking for some way to restrict what a few specific programs can do without going to containers, consider firejail. It will likely do a better job than a home-rolled solution.

Looks like that laptop has a Kepler generation GPU (NVE0). Accourding to the Nouveau feature matrix, these cards are almost completely supported (you might have power management issues and need external firmware to access the built-in accelerated video decoders). Switching back and forth between onboard video and the nvidia card may have additional issues.

Well, if OP ever moves, the old slab could be broken up on site, the base moved, and a new slab cast at the destination. Or just hire the local high school football team at $20/jock/hour—four of them should be able to move it. 😅

The second episode only just dropped today—I haven't watched it yet. First one finished on a mild cliffhanger, which may have influenced the vote.