I bought a 3D printer from my Denver Microcenter a few weeks ago. It's not available on Amazon, and only ships from China (it's a BambuLab H2D). It gives peace of mind that if something goes wrong I can just return it locally rather than deal with shipping a 50 pound printer back to China. Same goes for a MinisForum NAS I bought a few months ago. Plus, whenever I need a one-off USB cable, thumb drive, or printer filament, it's a 15 minute drive.
Also: they're always packed on the weekends. There is definitely demand for a brick and mortar store that focuses on tech/geek hobbies.
Here in Canada, the BambuLab stuff seems to ship from local-ish warehouses... but I get it. Tariffs might also be a factor in this.
Amazon is a reprehensible company that I absolutely order from 3-4 times a week. That 15 minute drive requires a 15 minute drive back, plus a car + insurance + gas. It's 8:59pm local as I type this. If I need a thumb drive, I can order one that will be here by noon tomorrow with free shipping.
TL;DR that hour of your time plus driving surely cancels out any potential savings.
I guess it's good to have options, and late stage capitalism is happy to give them to us.
H2D looks like an amazing printer. I have a P1P and it's great for my needs, but the Bambu stuff is just on a different level from the others I've tried.
I wish Alexander and the rest of the Multi team all the best at OpenAI. I'm saddened by the loss of what I consider the best remote pair programming app around (if Mac-only is acceptable). Other than Tuple.app, are there any strong competitors? I tried Datadog's CoScreen early on, and the amount of chrome it added to windows made things a little janky (perhaps it's better now).
It might be somewhat different in that it's only for programming, but Zed is a "multiplayer code editor" with channels, notes, video chat, screen sharing etc.
My team and I use https://pop.com/ daily! It's fully cross-platform and lightweight (no chrome added to windows), and it's absolutely viable to say "can I take control" and type in someone else's IDE halfway across the world in real-time. Once a co-worker had their laptop die while traveling, so they had a family member log into their home desktop, start up Pop, and remoted in from their spouse's laptop, doing all the dev work they needed from a continent away. There are some minor glitches, but all in all it's an amazing product!
Funnily enough I tried Tuple.app literally last week for the first time and the experience was incredible. I love their "privacy veil" feature. Good job if anyone's looking for a replacement that seems like the best alternative to Multi app.
I want to love it so badly, and it's fine if you're comparing it to e.g. google docs. But if you're comparing it to running the ide locally it's sadly still not quite there.
A lot of actions are still not supported remotely, syntax doesn't get reinterpreted properly unless you do manual workarounds like switching between files, etc. It's getting better and better, though.
I'm not the OP but I've had an XDR for about a month now, which replaced a 27" LG UltraFine 5K (same panel as the one used on 27" iMac for years). My issue with the XDR is the lack of built-in camera, mic, and speakers that are serviceable for zoom calls.
I don't need audiophile stuff, but it's remarkable how bad the built-in AV was on the LG UltraFine. Mic quality is bad enough that I won't inflict it on my co-workers. The camera is angled too low, resulting in the top of my head usually being cut off. And the speakers go from quiet to really loud, with no in-between.
I want to sort apps by highest reviewed followed by descending sort of number of reviews. E.g., I'm more interested in apps that have 200 5-star reviews than apps with 2 5-star reviews.
