If you’re really keen on getting a possibly non-running used bike as your first, I would definitely recommend sticking with something that’s a single cylinder for simplicity, and probably something that has a carburetor rather than fuel injection, because mystery carb issues are easier to solve than mystery electrical issues, especially given peoples’ pathological predilection to getting mystified and intimidated by wires. That’s not casting any admonition on your personally or your skills, but rather a prediction that you won’t get much decent advice from punters online as soon as your problems are found to be electrical and everyone either immediately tunes out, begins spouting absolute bullshit, or both. Conversely, there is always the nuclear option for a carb which is yeet the entire thing into the fuck-it bucket and just replace it.

The Honda Super Cub and its myriad derivatives (which, surprisingly, encompass both the Grom and the Monkey) is a popular option. The new ones are fuel injected and computerized, but the classic Cubs have carbs. You can get Chinese clones of these for not very much money, also. If you really want to wrench, a Chinese bike will offer you no choice…

Also consider a Suzuki TU250 which is sort of the quintessential standard beginner’s bike, or possibly an old Honda CB250.

If you’re confident in dealing with a twin cylinder bike, the other obvious suggestion everyone will offer is the Ninja 250 (the older ones are carbed, but have two carbs rather than one) or Honda CB350, which is also a parallel twin. The Yamaha V Star 250 is also a small V twin, with a fairly light weight.

The height of various motorcycles is a perpetually contentious topic, especially when offering advice to beginner riders. Some people will insist that shortness can be overcome with skill and that one should just practice and git gud. Other people will say that you should eliminate a variable and a lot of anxiety by getting a little bike that you can easily flat-foot as your first.

I have no input in this. Get what makes you comfortable.

However, I will recount what we did, vis-a-vis myself and my wife, and trying to find a motorcycle (not a scooter, which she already has one of) that she could actually sit on. We found that the obvious answer, the Honda Grom, was actually too tall for her. We settled on a Suzuki Vanvan RV200, which she can sit on and get both feet on the ground. (It’s third from the right in the banner image at the top of this community.) This was available in both 125 and 200cc guises, but I don’t think the 125 was ever sold in America. It was sold in Europe where they have tiered licenses with a 125cc restriction, though.

Edit to add: I would really advise against getting a non-running bike as your first motorcycle. I get the appeal of wanting to tinker with it, but it’s all too easy to wind up with something that’ll be both a basket case and a money pit, and learning to ride on something like that will probably be more frustrating than it’s worth. If you want a project, get one as your second bike. Also remember the Ironclad Law Of The List of Craig (and also Facebook marketplace): Any time some asshole says “all it needs is x, y, z,” that’s never actually all it needs. If it were that easy, the loser selling it would have fixed himself it and he’d be selling it in running condition.

Just yesterday I created !printmything@lemmy.world for this very purpose, so I’ll plug it again. Well, not miniatures specifically, but rather a place for people who haven’t got printers to ask for help from people who do.

I’m not in Oz so I figure shipping to you would be quite prohibitive. But you might be able to connect with someone in your country, who can ship printed stuff to you more cheaply and – importantly – without having to fuck around with customs.

The go-to wisdom is that detailed miniatures are best printed with a resin printer. You can do it with a traditional FDM (filament) printer but it’s harder to get the small details reproduced, and FDM printers can’t print in midair so you either have to be very careful to take that into account with your design or do a lot of work with removing and doing the finish work around printed supports. So you probably want to find somebody with a resin machine.

That may be a good idea.

I’m sure we’ll figure out what so the other good ideas are as we go along…

Not that I can find.

I was about to say something monumentally stupid, along the lines of, “somebody ought to make it.”

The hell with it. I just made it.

!printmything@lemmy.world

Yes, that part specifically is a bit braindead.

It’s probably because they can’t be arsed to figure out who has the rights and who doesn’t, so they just loaded up the ban shotgun.

There are oodles of commercial 3D printing services that will run off whatever you send them for a price. Craftcloud, Shapeways, Xometry, etc.

Or printathing.com, if you’d like to get hooked up with a private(ish) person to do it for you.

Or just ask at any of the innumerable online spaces where people talk about 3D printing (like right here) and someone can probably do it for you, too.

My exception is not to people printing things for others for a specific purpose if asked to. It’s against stealing other people’s work and cynically trying to turn it around for a profit, without putting any effort into it and probably implicitly passing it off as if it were your own work in the process. Likewise, I don’t object to someone designing their own thing and selling their own thing on Etsy. But just to put it into perspective I imagine most people would also rank it as Not Cool to go on Etsy and start trying to sell, say, just printouts random stuff you downloaded from DeviantArt.

Send me the file or a link and I’ll print it for you. I’m sure plenty of other nerds would do the same.

There are also commercial print services, but local nerds are always a great first resort.

Pretty much all of those are characters from franchises that quickly jumped to consoles, or had the intention of multiplatform releases from the very start. I’m not sure any of them are very fitting.

So on that note, the least nonsensical mascot for PC gaming in particular I can think of is that dwarf, whoever he is, from the box art of World of Warcraft. Or possibly the orc from the alternate version. WoW is earth-shatteringly popular and has basically defined the entire private lives of a depressing number of people, not to mention it’s the sole and singular thing even non-gamers think of when you mention MMORPGs. And it has only appeared on home computers. Never consoles. Other Warcraft properties have, but not WoW.

Define “long.” I disagree with the Doomguy proposal explicitly, because Doom appeared on the Sega 32x in November of 1994 which was barely a year after the initial PC release. One of the defining aspects of gaming in the mid '90s was the monumentally cynical gold rush of trying to cram Doom onto any damn fool console as fast as possible, in a vain attempt to capture part of the lightning and make those sales. And until the Playstation and arguably the N64, every attempt failed spectacularly in various ways.

The definitive Doom experience remaining locked to the PC for those few years was absolutely not for a lack of trying. Every greedy video game exec on the planet wanted Doom on their system. id themselves assisted with several of these ports in various ways and they had absolutely no intention of leaving Doom only on PC, either, if they could help it.

Awesome. I fully approve of this. If you want to sell 3D printed stuff, sell it on an appropriate platform and for fuck’s sake, sell things that you actually have the rights to print and sell.

Next, let’s crack down on the hordes of losers on Etsy who just drop-ship crap from Alibaba for a 6000% markup while boldfadedly claiming it’s “hand made” in the hopes that everyone is too stupid to notice. (But people must be, because apparently that’s still working.)

Also not true for HP’s “Instant Ink” subscription service, which I can tell you from experience will brick the perfectly full cartridges already in your printer as soon as you cancel, even if you have not yet reached the next billing date.

It can indeed, but Notepad++ is explicitly Windows only.

There are some clones for Unixlike platforms, and I guess you could run the genuine article in Wine if you really felt like it. But don’t go looking for an official Linux build, because there isn’t one.

It’s a 2nd gen Kawasaki KLR650.

That’s definitely aftermarket from the previous owner. The little rear luggage rack appears to be as well.

Or get hooked on your handlebars on the way by and wrapped around your neck, which is a thought I am always cognizant of when riding with my UTG messenger bag or a laptop bag.

Heard. Allow me to introduce you to…

…The badonka-donk.

In these I can fit my entire camping loadout with room to spare, or:

In the left box,

• My welder
• Welding Helmet
• Apron and Gloves
• Hammer, Tongs, Brushes
• 3-4 spools of wire

In the right box,

• My entire drill kit
• A master tap and die set
• Angle grinder plus a selection of wheels and disks
• a 100’ extension cord

All I need to do is figure out how to power the welder from the bike and I can strike anywhere, without warning.

This may in fact not be completely outside of the realm of possibility for someone who has no idea how to actually operate his computer, which is most people. The notion that things can be deleted, not to mention when they should be deleted or when they should not be deleted, and the fact that on most modern systems they aren’t actually deleted when you hit “delete” and instead go to some manner of purgatory elsewhere on your drive where they’re still accessible in full (recycle bin/trash) regularly eludes the majority of computer users.

The problem is, the defendant’s excuse could be explained by him being a moron from multiple avenues, so we’ll never know if he’s inept (as in can’t delete files) or inept (as in so stupid he things everyone else is as stupid as he is in order to believe his dumb excuse).

I’ve done it.

I have this UTG messenger bag thing. In general wearing it on any of my bikes isn’t much of a problem, except for on my Shadow where the seating position is low and you’re leaned so far back that it dangles a little too low for comfort. It still works, it’s just sketchy. It’s one of those things where I’ll do it if I have to because the computer I want to bring is already in it, but certainly not because I want it for bike specific transportation.

Surprisingly it does not flap in the wind if you are sub 100 MPH. It will slide around on its strap, though, and it swings out like a pendulum whenever you take a left turn. My commute is quite short, at least compared to the types of people who are constantly bitching about “car brain” (news flash: It’s bike brain around here), at maximum about 10 minutes if I take the direct route and often rather less. As for access, well. You could, but you probably won’t, and I’ve never needed to. You’re wearing gloves for a start, and I don’t know about you but I don’t generally find myself needing to retrieve tools and turn bolts while I’m riding my motorcycle. Getting my laptop out while in motion is likewise a non-starter. Any of that kind of stuff you’re going to do on the side of the road, at which point you will probably take your bag and at least some of your gear off, at which point it’s moot.

Unless by “access” you mean getting at your gun. On that note I advise you to learn to shoot left handed first before making any decisions.

I’m not entirely sold on the idea of a messenger bag for the dedicated on-bike things. I can see how having the weight off kilter to one side like that would get old after a prolonged period, and there’s really no non-annoying way to keep it secured such that it doesn’t swing around. Yes, the UTG bag has a Velcro thingy on the back designed to be a belt loop for this purpose, but if you’re wearing modern textile riding gear the only way to use that would be to undo it and loop it around one of the cinch straps on your pants (from behind!) every time you put it on or took it off.

I’d much rather use a backpack for that sort of thing, which explains the myriad of backpacks I own both motorcycle specific and not. Or if I’m on one of the bikes with luggage, I just jam whatever it is I have in there, and then it can be whatever bag I want.

Yeah, print out that fuckin’ telephone because we called it. Sometimes it sucks to be right.

Prime is already a protection racket. Sure, we could deliver your package on time but we won’t unless you pay us extra to not artificially slow it down.

It’s amazing how so many people still haven’t realized this and dutifully pay for Prime because, “It’s just so convenient!”