3D Printing Today

3D Printing Today is a numbered, conversational show about desktop 3D printing. Andy Cohen introduces each episode with Whitney Potter alongside him, and the opening line pitches the show as covering hobby, professional and industrial printing alike. The structure rarely varies. Each show reads out its number and a rundown of its segments, turns to a news story, and ends by previewing the next numbered show before a brief sign-off. The pair are open about how that works: the segments are recorded ahead of time while the news is current, so a lead story can overtake the material behind it. In one show they apologized up front that parts of the conversation were already out of date. The news comes from wherever the story is. When their usual site would not load, the story came from elsewhere. Another time it was an Irish newspaper reporting on an Edinburgh University development, said to be printed in a TPU-like material and able to walk off the printer under compressed air. That one drew a Murderbot joke and frank suspicion about the photos offered as proof. Other news slots have covered a Snapmaker tool changer opening to pre-orders and a lawsuit involving PopMart. The segments are where the practical detail lives. A nozzle crash on an XL gets traced to a tiny bit of material left behind with no real prime wipe, one of the lessons from a roots pot project in which some attempts failed a handful of layers in. A comparison of coasting and linear advance explains why PrusaSlicer's approach, built into firmware and driven by G-code commands, is harder for an ordinary user to adjust. A conversation about prints in ambient temperatures runs from PLA parts left in a car to annealing, with HTPLA singled out as a favorite because it prints easily and can then be made functional. Color printing is the subject the show keeps circling. Shows 605 through 609 list designing for printing in color, color exploration, textured color and controlling color depth among their segments. The assessments are plain: painting color onto a part in the slicer took about an hour per piece, produced smudgy rather than straight lines, and could not be moved to a different slicer. The rundowns also reach past the printer, with segments named 'Thingiverse posts getting unpublished', 'Copyright strike' and 'How to ruin an online object resource'. Between the technical passages the talk wanders. One detour covers the Korean custom of a pig head centerpiece at a company celebration and a 3D-printed version made for a new maker space in Seoul, followed by a cheerful admission that the story might have been told before. That mix of bench-level detail and easy back-and-forth is what the show delivers.