TLDR = what's a good next step after kid-friendly 3d creation tools?
Solved = Fusion360 is voted as winner, we even got a nice tutorial playlist.

Hi all - I'm still very much a new user. Highly skilled in IT but just getting my feet wet in 3D printing, since a month or so. I love the possibilities! I can physically create anything I can image, it's amazing.

So far, I've used mostly TinkerCad and done lots with it. The learning curve is practically non-existent, and it has sufficient features to do a lot.

But of course it's not perfect. Obvious example: can't do fillets, except in roundabout ways using negative blocks.

I've tried OnShape, OpenScad, Fusion 360, but found them quite a steep hill to climb.

Are these good choices, or is there something in-between that would make it easier for me to advance?

First, apologies if this isn't the best community; please direct me to a better venue if so.

TLDR: I need to buy 2× used gaming laptops that are powerful enough for 3D-heavy games -- I don't know what to look for?

Situation:
My kids have used Lenovo laptops for their rooms, and after some years, their gaming choices (BeamNG and other such 3D-heavy games) mean that old business laptops won't cut it. They need to be replaced (the laptops, not the kids!).

Problem:
Back when I was young, I understood CPU and GPU requirements - these days I don't. Help!

• An Intel i7 may be great but it may also be several years old. I don't understand the naming anymore.
• Most normal laptops have integrated graphics which don't satisfy even most basic GPU requirements.
• Real "gaming laptops" are expensive! And I need 2 of them! Gotta find something used, and I have no idea what search criteria to set.

My printer (well, PrusaSlicer) always starts with a line around the object I am printing. See (1) in the image. --Why? What does that do?

There is also this line (2) at the front of the bed. --Why? What does that do?

Here's a part of a cabinet in my wardrobe where my printer lives. It's a bit noisy with all those hard surfaces so I am just about to put up some foam padding on all 5 sides.

Is that stupidly dangerous?

You can see I have a smoke alarm there, but it won't stop a fire on its own.

Edit: the cabinet has no door, it's always open like in the photo, but the wardrobe door is generally closed. The room has some ventilation so smells do go away.

Background:

• At work we use MS Office, because who doesn't. We used to have a central file server with lots of well sorted directories.
• Then Corporate decided to ditch that, everything must move into OneDrive so there's always a Data Owner.
• The local boss had to move everything from the network share into his own OneDrive, and then share, with each of us, the folders that were relevant to each of us.
• This sounds like distributed storage, which is probably smart in some way.

In reality, it's shit. Everything is now a link to "corporateName.sharepoint.com" in the browser, and it's a hassle to find that in the file explorer. SOmeone just shared a folder with me. I see it in my browser. How do I get it from the browser into a normal folder view? Should I forget about on-disk storage; is everything today just a browser bookmark?

Worse, I have no idea what's where. Some people share some stuff and somehow it ends up in my OneDrive, but what's the context of it?

This seems so wrong to me. Am I just not "getting" it??

Hi all, I'm not sure what to do here. The controllers vibrate extremely loudly, it sounds like I am shaving my face! I don't remember it being so loud when the thing was new, just two months ago.

Is it defective?

What's the best way to get warranty replacement? I got it from Amazon but the only course of action there is to send in the whole thing for repair. Is that the best choice?

TLDR:

• Update: the server software has a bug about generating+saving certificates. Bug has been reported; as a workaround I added the local IP to my local 'hosts' file so I can continue (but that does not solve it of course).
• I suspect there's a problem with running two servers off the same IP address, each with their own DNS name?

Problem:

• When I enter https://my.domain.abc into Firefox, I get an error ERR_SSL_UNRECOGNIZED_NAME_ALERT instead of seeing the site.

Context:

• I have a static public IP address, and a Unifi gateway that directs the ports 80,443 to my server at 192.168.1.10 where Nginx Proxy Manager is running as a Docker container. This also gives me a _Let's Encrypt certificate.
• I use Cloudflare and have a domain foo.abc pointed to my static public IP address. This domain works, and also a number of subdomains with various Docker services.
• I have now set up a second server running yunohost. I can access this on my local LAN at https://192.168.1.14.
• This yunohost is set up with a DynDNS xyz.nohost.me. The current certificate is self-signed.
• Certain other ports that yunohost wants (22,25,587,993,5222,5269) are also routed directly to 192.168.1.14 by the gateway mentioned above.
• All of the above context is OK. Yunohost diagnostics says that DNS records are correctly configured for this domain. Everything is great (except reverse DNS lookup which is only relevant for outgoing email).

Before getting a proper certificate for the yunohost server and its domain, I need to make the yunohost reachable at all, and I don't see what I am missing.

What am I missing?

Neighborhood cats shit right in the middle of my lawn. It stinks and the robot lawn mover makes it even worse.

I do NOT like cats, and this is not helping.

What works to keep them from shitting on my lawn?

The votes have spoken. Some people are cat lovers; thanks for the great advice from the rest of you! I will not go out of my way to accommodate other people's pets that aren't welcome on my property. My first weapon of choice will be chili because it's simple and cheap. Other ideas have been noted.

The feed shows posts with - 35 votes. Why? Clearly the crowd says it's garbage, so can it be hidden?

On Windows, we've had the defrag tool and others, that happily works on a drive even while it is in use, even the OS disk.

On Linux, I know of the fsck command but that requires the drive in question to be unmounted. Not great when you want to check a running server. I do not want to stop my server and boot it from USB, just to run a disk check. I can't imagine that's what the data centers are doing, either!

Surely some Linux tool exists that can do some basic checks on a running system?

I mean, the simplest answer is to lay a new cable, and that is definitely what I am going to do - that's not my question.

But this is a long run, and it would be neat if I could salvage some of that cable. How can I discover where the cable is damaged?

One stupid solution would be to halve the cable and crimp each end, and then test each new cable. Repeat iteratively. I would end up with a few broken cables and a bunch of tested cables, but they might be short.

How do the pro's do this? (Short of throwing the whole thing away!)

edit: you are right, it's the I/O WAIT that it destroying my performance:
%Cpu(s): 0,3 us, 0,5 sy, 0,0 ni, 50,1 id, 49,0 wa, 0,0 hi, 0,1 si, 0,0 st
I could clearly see it using nmon > d > l > - such as was suggested by @SayCyberOnceMore. Not quite sure what to do about it, as it's simply my sdb1 drive which is a Samsung 1TB 2.5" HDD. I have now ordered a 2TB SSD and maybe I am going to reinstall from scratch on that new drive as sda1. I realize that's just treating the symptom and not the root cause, so I should probably also look for that root cause. But that's for another Lemmy thread!

I really don't understand what is causing this. I run a few very small containers, and everything is fine - but when I start something bigger like Photoprism, Immich, or even MariaDB or PostgreSQL, then something causes the CPU load to rise indefinitely.

Notably, the top command doesn't show anything special, nothing eats RAM, nothing uses 100% CPU. And yet, the load is rising fast. If I leave it be, my ssh session loses connection. Hopping onto the host itself shows a load of over 50,or even over 70. I don't grok how a system can even get that high at all.

My server is an older Intel i7 with 16GB RAM running Ubuntu22. 04 LTS.

How can I troubleshoot this, when 'top' doesn't show any culprit and it does not seem to be caused by any one specific container?

(this makes me wonder how people can run anything at all off of a Raspberry Pi. My machine isn't "beefy" but a Pi would be so much less.)