“The brickings will continue until the printer sales improve!” This whole printer-bricking thing seems to be getting out of hand with the news this week that a firmware update caused certain HP printers to go into permanent paper-saver mode. The update was sent to LaserJet MFP M232-M237 models (opens printer menu; checks print queue name; “Phew!) on March 4, and was listed as covering a few “general improvements and bug fixes,” none of which seem very critical. Still, some users reported not being able to print at all after the update, with an error message suggesting printing was being blocked thanks to non-OEM toner. This sounds somewhat similar to the bricked Brother printers we reported on last week (third paragraph).

The trouble is, some users are reporting the problem even if they had genuine HP toner installed. Disturbingly, HP support seems to be fine with this, saying that older HP toner “may no longer be recognized due to new security measures.” Well, there’s your problem, lady! The fix, of course, is to buy yet more genuine HP toner, even if your current cartridge still has plenty of life left in it. That’s a pretty deplorable attitude on HP’s part, and more than enough reason to disable automatic firmware updates, or better yet, just disconnect your printer from the Internet altogether.

Here’s a pro-tip for all you frustrated coders out there: no matter how hard the job gets, planting a logic bomb in your code is probably not the right way to go. That’s the lesson that one Davis Lu learned after being convicted of “causing intentional damage to protected computers” thanks to malicious code he planted in his employer’s system. Apparently not optimistic about his future prospects with Eaton Corp. back in 2018, Lu started adding code designed to run a series of infinite loops to delete user profiles. He also went for the nuclear option, adding code to shut the whole system down should it fail to find an Active Directory entry for him. That code was apparently triggered on the day he was fired in 2019, causing global problems for his former employer. Look, we’ve all been there; coding is often lonely work, and it’s easy to fantasize about coding up something like this and watching them squirm once they fire you. But if it gets that bad, you should probably put that effort into finding a new gig.

Then again, maybe the reason you’re dissatisfied with your coding job is that you know some smart-ass LLM is out there waiting to tell you that you don’t know how to code. That’s what happened to one newbie Cursor user who tried to get help writing some video game code from the AI code editor. The LLM spat back about 750 lines of code but refused to reveal the rest, and when he asked to explain why, it suggested that he should develop the logic himself so that he’d be able to understand and maintain the code, and that “Generating code for others can lead to dependency and reduced learning opportunities.” True enough, but do we really need our AI tools to cop an attitude?

And finally, if you’re anything like us, you’re really going to love this walking tour of a container ship’s mechanical spaces. The ship isn’t named, but a little sleuthing suggests it’s one of the Gülsün-class ships built for MSC in 2019, possibly the MSC Mina, but that’s just a guess. This 400-meter monster can carry 23,656 twenty-foot equivalent units, and everything about it is big. Mercifully, the tour isn’t narrated, not that it would have been possible, thanks to the screaming equipment in the engine room. There are captions, though, so you’ll at least have some idea of what you’re looking at in the immaculately clean and cavernously huge spaces. Seriously, the main engine room has to have at least a dozen floors; being on the engineering crew must mean getting your steps in every day. The most striking thing about the tour was that not a single other human being was visible during the entire hour. We suppose that’s just a testament to how automated modern vessels have become, but it still had a wonderfully creepy liminal feeling to it. Enjoy!

It’s been a busy week in space news, and very little of it was good. We’ll start with the one winner of the week, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, which landed successfully on the Moon’s surface on March 2. The lander is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and carries ten scientific payloads, including a GPS/GNSS receiver that successfully tracked signals from Earth-orbiting satellites. All of the scientific payloads have completed their missions, which is good because the lander isn’t designed to withstand the long, cold lunar night only a few days away. The landing makes Firefly the first commercial outfit to successfully soft-land something on the Moon, and being the first at anything is always a big deal.

Slightly less impressive was Intuitive Machines’ attempt at a landing a day later. Their NOVA-C robotic lander Athena managed a somewhat controlled landing, but the spacecraft is lying on its side rather than upright, a surprisingly common failure mode for recent lunar landings. Also in the failure category is the loss of the world’s first private asteroid mining mission, as well as SpaceX Starship test flight 8, which ended in spectacular fashion this week as Starship exploded soon after booster separation. As usual, Scott Manley has the best analysis of the incident, which seemed to involve a fire in the engine bay that led to a rapid loss of thrust from four of its six engines, and sent the spacecraft tumbling before tearing itself apart. The only good news from the flight was the third successful catch of the returning booster by the chopsticks, which just never gets old.

What does get old is stories about printer manufacturers and their anti-consumer hijinks, especially when it involves one of the only manufacturers who wasn’t playing the “buy our consumables or we brick it” game. In addition to just about every other printer maker, Brother now stands accused of sending firmware up to printers that turns off functionality if non-OEM cartridges are used. The accusations come from Louis Rossman, well-known for his right-to-repair advocacy and, ironically, long-time proponent of Brother printers as least likely to be bricked. His accusation that “Brother is now among the rest of them” is based on a pretty small sample of affected users, and a self-selected one at that, so take that with the requisite amount of salt. For their part, Brother denies the claim, stating simply that “Brother firmware updates do not block the use of third-party ink in our machines.” They don’t go much beyond that by way of an explanation of what’s happening to the users reporting problems other than to say that the users may be confused by the fact that “we like to troubleshoot with Brother Genuine supplies.” What the real story is is anyone’s guess at this point, and the best advice we can offer is either to avoid printers altogether, or just buy the cheapest one you can get and harvest it for parts once the starter cartridges are empty.

If like us you’ve accumulated a large collection of physical media films and TV shows to while away the long dark days of a post-apocalyptic nightmare where Netflix and Hulu are but a distant memory, you might want to rethink your strategy. Some DVD aficionados have found a troubling trend with “DVD rot,” especially with discs manufactured by Warner Brothers Discovery between 2006 and 2008. It’s not clear what’s going on, but it looks like the polycarbonate cover is delaminating from the inner Mylar layer, resulting in cloudy areas that obscure the data. Warner is aware of the problem and will replace defective discs with the same title if possible, or exchange it for a title of like value if the original is no longer available. We’re dismayed that this defect probably includes our beloved Looney Tunes collection, but on the upside, now we have an excuse to sit through forty straight hours of cartoons.

And finally, if you were a NASA rocket engineer in the 1960s, skipping leg day wasn’t an option. That’s because the Saturn V full-stack shake test on the Apollo program was a very hands-on feet-on process. The shake test was performed to make sure nothing was loose on the stack, and that it would be able to withstand not only the shaking induced by those five massive F-1 engines, but also the occasional hurricane that Florida is famous for. To get the rocket shaking, engineers sat on the deck of the gantry with their legs bridging the gap and their feet up against the side of the service module and gave it all they had. Other engineers literally backed them up, to provide something to push against, while another team on the uppermost platform used a rope to play tug-of-war with the command module. They were able to get the stack moving pretty good, with a meter or so of deflection at the escape tower. It does raise the question, though: what would they have done if the test failed?

Just about any 3D printer can be satisfying to watch as it works, but delta-style printers are especially hypnotic. There’s just something about the way that three linear motions add up to all kinds of complex shapes; it’s mesmerizing. Deltas aren’t without their problems, though, which led [Bruno Schwander] to undertake a trio of interesting mods on his Anycubic Kossel.

First up was an effort to reduce the mass of the business end of the printer, which can help positional accuracy and repeatability. This started with replacing the stock hot-end with a smaller, lighter MQ Mozzie, but that led to cooling problems that [Bruno] addressed with a ridiculously overpowered brushless hairdryer fan. The fan expects a 0 to 5-VDC signal for the BLDC controller, which meant he had to build an adapter to allow Marlin’s 12-volt PWM signal to control the fan.

Once the beast of a fan was tamed, [Bruno] came up with a clever remote mount for it. A 3D-printed shroud allowed him to mount the fan and adapter to the frame of the printer, with a flexible duct connecting it to the hot-end. The duct is made from lightweight nylon fabric with elastic material sewn into it to keep it from taut as the printhead moves around, looking a bit like an elephant’s trunk.

Finally, to solve his pet peeve of setting up and using the stock Z-probe, [Bruno] turned the entire print bed into a strain-gauge sensor. This took some doing, which the blog post details nicely, but it required building a composite spacer ring for the glass print bed to mount twelve strain gauges that are read by the venerable HX711 amplifier and an Arduino, which sends a signal to Marlin when the head touches the bed. The video below shows it and the remote fan in action.

Not that it’s the kind of thing that pops into your head often, but if you ever do think of a cyanotype print, it probably doesn’t conjure up thoughts of modern technology. For good reason — the monochromatic technique was introduced in the 1840s, and was always something of a niche technology compared to more traditional photographic methods.

The original method is simple enough: put an object or negative between the sun and a UV-sensitive medium, and the exposed areas will turn blue and produce a print. This modernized concept created by [Gabe] works the same way, except both the sun and the negative have been replaced by a lightly modified resin 3D printer.

A good chunk of the effort here is in the software, as [Gabe] had to write some code that would take an image and turn it into something the printer would understand. His proof of concept was a clever bit of Python code that produced an OpenSCAD script, which ultimately converted each grayscale picture to a rectangular “pixel” of variable height. The resulting STL files could be run through the slicer to produce the necessary files to load into the printer. This was eventually replaced with a new Python script capable of converting images to native printer files through UVtools.

On the hardware side, all [Gabe] had to do was remove the vat that would usually hold the resin, and replace that with a wooden lid to both hold the UV-sensitized paper in place and protect the user’s eyes. [Gabe] says there’s still some room for improvement, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at some of the gorgeous prints he’s produced already.

No word yet on whether or not future versions of the project will support direct-to-potato imaging.

When building one-off projects, it’s common to draw up a plan on a sheet of paper or in CAD, or even wing it and hope for the best outcome without any formal plans. Each of these design philosophies has its ups and downs but both tend to be rigid, offering little flexibility as the project progresses. To solve this, designers often turn to parametric design where changes to any part of the design are automatically reflected throughout the rest, offering far greater flexibility while still maintaining an overall plan. [Cal Bryant] used this parametric method to devise a new set of speakers for an office, with excellent results.

The bulk of the speakers were designed with OpenSCAD, with the parametric design allowing for easy adjustments to accommodate different drivers and enclosure volumes. A number of the panels of the speakers are curved as well, which is more difficult with traditional speaker materials like MDF but much easier with this 3D printed design. There were a few hiccups along the way though; while the plastic used here is much denser than MDF, the amount of infill needed to be experimented with to achieve a good finish. The parametric design paid off here as well as the original didn’t fit exactly within the print bed, so without having to split up the print the speakers’ shape was slightly tweaked instead. In the end he has a finished set of speakers that look and sound like a high-end product.

There are a few other perks to a parametric design like this as well. [Cal] can take his design for smaller desk-based speakers and tweak a few dimensions and get a model designed to stand up on the floor instead. It’s a design process that adds a lot of options and although it takes a bit more up-front effort it can be worth it while prototyping or even for producing different products quickly. If you want to make something much larger than the print bed and slightly changing the design won’t cut it, [Cal] recently showed us how to easily print huge objects like arcade cabinets with fairly standard sized 3D printers.