WillAdams

Yeah, really, Barnes & Noble marketing is missing a beat by not printing that as a bookmark to include with new book sales after asking the question at the register, "Has the person you are buying this hardcover for ever opened a new book correctly?"

Oblig. XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/1053/

(which I kind of wish was comic #1,000 so it was easy to remember/link)

Is making parts which actually fit in scope?

Because that was what was being criticized, and that seems to be where your project is failing.

Well, one can damage a hardcover by not opening it properly the first time:

https://www.reddit.com/r/lifehacks/comments/7sry7v/open_a_ha...

(which was a lesson in 2nd grade, when we got our first-ever hardcover textbooks)

C.J. Cherryh has a memorable quote on this in her _Downbelow Station_.

>They were armed, the swift exploration ships, as they had always been, venturing as they did into the unknown; but now they were used in a new way, to visit stations and pull them into line. That was bitterest of all, that the crews of the probe ships, who had been the heroes of the Beyond, became the Company enforcers.

From uncertain organic memory royalty was a set percentage (7%? came out to a $1,000 check plus a fee $500?).

Print $3,500 as two checks.

Books sold for $70 ea. and if sold on Amazon had $12.83 for their fees.

Sold a few in person, handed out too many for marketing, and did okay on shipping 'cause I re-used packaging. In the end, came out ahead, and would be willing to revisit this sort of thing in the future.

Well, we should use Mercator for its intended purpose (only), which is to accurately show/determine angles for navigation....

Yeah, I currently have a Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, Book 3 Pro 360, and a Kindle Scribe Colorsoft as well as a Wacom One attached to a MacBook and more styluses scattered around my house and bags than I could easily count, but this makes me at least a little curious about switching away from Wacom EMR.

That's a divide which I've been curious about for a while --- what texts are suited for an app/interactive version?

One which I usually bring up is:

https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...

but contrast that with:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1579128149

That was not the impression I got from the Tolkien Estate and Oxford University Press when I asked.

Most of the typos were linguistic, a couple of German words in the bibliography, Old English in the poem.

There wasn't much to it --- I contacted the Univ. of Missouri Press, they set a price in terms of initial fee and on-going royalty payments, I returned a signed copy of the contract and they sent a DVD w/ the files.

The only wrinkle was I failed to communicate clearly that I wanted to do a hardcover reprint and they assumed I was doing a softcover (apparently rights are different?) but they decided that the modest quantity I wanted (100) was okay for hardcover (within the variance of unprinted copies from first run?) and allowed it.

I contacted a (sort of) local printer with a digital press to send the files, proofed them, then once approved and printed, I drove in my truck and picked them up (should have parked closer, a couple of boxes took a tumble), stored them in my entry closet and sold them over the course of a couple of years, sending a statement and check each year until the last copy I was selling was sold and I closed the books.

The notable afterthought was that I should have bought used copies at the price that they were then set at by my re-issue and re-sold them after, but I couldn't bring myself to be quite that mercenary.

This hits close to home.

When Grayson's _Traditional Archery from Six Continents_ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1662236.Traditional_Arch... went out of print, I actually found it more palatable to buy the rights and re-print it.

Since then, I attempted that with Tolkien's _Old English Exodus_ but was rebuffed on the grounds that I was a "Tolkien Nut" and not an academic --- that text has since been reprinted by Harper Collins in a #2 box set, which I anxiously pre-ordered and waited for, only to find that from the Select Bibliography to then end of the re-set poem (22 pages) there were almost as many typos (20) on a quick first reading:

https://old.reddit.com/r/OldEnglish/comments/1vyly9o/could_s...

really wish all authors did as DEK and offered a bounty on typos... I could use a check for $51.20 even if it wouldn't fully offset the cost of the boxed set (though arguably, I should sell the other 4 books as dupes of texts I already own).

That is an interesting argument --- maybe there could be a tax credit for publishing specifications/keys when a product is end-of-lifed and support is cut off? Or, maybe a company could be required to pay for disposal if that is not done?

I'm actually rather fond of OpenSCAD --- it has the advantage of being completely safe in terms of security/execution, so no worries about downloading a random .scad file and wondering what it might do.

If one wants a full-fledge programming language for this, I found Python a lot more comfortable:

https://pythonscad.org/

For more on this in spades see boxes.py

https://boxes.hackerspace-bamberg.de/

For my part, I've been working the CNC router angle, so have a much larger kerf to cope with (and the added advantage of controllable partial depth and no char):

https://community.carbide3d.com/t/full-blind-box-joints-in-c...

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

The best programming course I had in college was one on comparative programming languages (and not just 'cause I was the only student who was able to do all of the Lisp exercises solo) --- it was quite striking getting an overview of the history of computer science and to see the myriad approaches which had been used.

Trying to outbright the sun on a battery-powered device is an approach I've always found questionable.

E-ink, instead just lets the sun reflect off of it, does want some sort of light in the dark, but, perfectly visible in full-bright/direct sunlight.

Sure!

Until the stack got too large, or one forgot the ID of the card one wanted to link to or the search text which would allow one to make it a target, &c.

HyperCard was _amazing_ (and I still have my copy of _The Manhole: Where Alice would have gone if Alice had HyperCard_ which was the predecessor for _Myst_) and it kills me that we lost MacBasic:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

and that HyperCard was such a mess of licensing that one had to use the "magic" word, or a command to enable Developer Mode and that it took so long to be developed/released:

https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html

(though one wonders what would have happen if it had instead been a NeXT product)

and then of course that the various alternatives had such tortured histories and of course the infamous "rug pull" when Live Code went closed source --- is there a viable free/opensource implementation which is nicer and more usable than Decker?

There was a commercial networking product which addressed principle 13 as well --- Kerbango? I remember a couple of ads for it, the idea was that adding a computer to a network and installing this would increase available storage space and back up all the other computers running the software on that network, basically a RAID of compleat machines....

The other books on hardware from this timeframe such as Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New Machine_ or Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ or Andy Hertzfeld's _Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made_ (available as: https://folklore.org/0-index.html) are quite striking and forthright in their discussion of hardware limitations and the ingenuity needed to get things done.

The book _CAD History_, available on-line at: https://www.shapr3d.com/history-of-cad/introduction has a bit on Xanadu from the Autodesk end of things.

Or, contrast the far more prosaic _Weaving the Web_ by Tim Berners-Lee and esp. take note of compromises such as URL changing from Universal Resource Locator to Uniform Resource Locator.

Visit any older cemetery and look for the tiny headstones and the matching very brief lifespans, or read an older obituary for someone from your great-grandparent's generation or further back, or watch a couple of seasons of _Call the Midwife_.

Or, just buy the source for a dollar and bury it:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

Not a PDF, the ePub --- each Amazon Kindle has associated with it an e-mail address, which when a file is e-mailed to it, will be automatically converted and loaded (once the sender is white-listed) --- that way, each new issue would just automagically appear.

I just noticed that too.

Do they offer a facility for automatically mailing the epub file to a specified e-mail address (I'm thinking the Amazon Kindle conversion e-mail) --- that might push me over into a subscription.

There are two sorts of folks working in the trades: the ones who claim to have multiple years of experience, but in truth have the same year of experience repeated, and those who for each year they have worked, have applied the past towards learning and improving their mastery of the craft.

See: https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni...

Yeah, my great aunt's bridge partner's husband had a cabinet shop which I used to hang out in after school when I missed the bus --- learned a lot by osmosis just hanging out and helping and doing odd chores.

When he passed away, his wife rented the shop out, to a drug addict who pawned off all the tools he could sneak out in his car.... when there was eventually an auction, not much was left, but I did at least get to buy an (empty) toolbox he had had me assemble from scrap lumber (which I still have on my workbench as a remembrance).

That said, for a flip side look at this sort of thing, consider the case of Charles Babbage trying to get his Analytical Engine made and the dispute over who owned the tooling, him or Joseph Clement, with the latter winning because at the time, a workman owned his tools, even if they were specifically constructed for a customer's project.

I dunno about fulfilling career, but I have to admit that I often use BlockSCAD:

https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/

to rough out designs as well as simple algorithms for OpenSCAD and ultimately, PythonSCAD for my current project:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

Obviously I need to start with a far simpler and more basic text.

A notable context where the the on-curve node placement rules do matter is font design where the node placements interact with hints and are useful for ensuring consistency and consistent rounding when filling in pixels.

Further, these rules facilitate using the shift key to constrain off-curve node placement to in-line w/ the matching on-curve node horizontally or vertically.

A more interesting question might be, "What would homesteading independence look like in the 21st century in terms of sustainability and so forth?"

An interesting extension on this is that the pencil manufacture which made his family wealthy is now workable on a small scale (allowing for the input of materials):

https://bridgecitytools.com/products/pp-1-pencil-precision