WillAdams

Note that Matt Keeter has been at this for quite a while now, very generously sharing his efforts and research:

https://www.mattkeeter.com/research/

In particular, his thesis is well-worth reading: https://www.mattkeeter.com/research/thesis.pdf

It was nice/workable for its time, and one wishes that there was some modern alternative, but "RAD" seems to have dropped off the radar.

Some things I've tried/looked into (beyond TCL/TK):

- Gambas --- Linux only, not sure if there's a nice visual UI builder

- LiveCode --- still salty about the license rug pull, wish the openxtalk folks could get some traction

- MoonBasic --- looks promising, but currently trying....

- flet.dev --- the AI-integration in this makes it quite compelling, though I wish that there was an integrated UI drawing tool, https://github.com/raffieeey/Flet-Visual-Builder is self-described as buggy and hasn't seen an update in 7 months

- Lazarus --- still bummed I never got anywhere with Delphi --- if flet.dev doesn't work out, may try it

Re-reading C.J. Cherryh's Chanur books and various other Alliance-Union novels from her Humble Bundle.

I'd be re-reading Tolkien's _Old English Exodus_, but proofreading the typos got to be too much.

Now if we could just bring back Navi/AOLPress....

Yeah, I am quite sad that I am packing up and shipping off my nifty little Intel MacBook Pro and for the first time ever, I'm wondering if I can do without a Mac, not even really wanting one.... the one form factor which sort of appeals is a Wacom Movink 13 w/ a Mac Mini (but I hate that the screen is so low resolution and none of the Cintiq Pros use the same stylus as my other stylus devices (Kindle Coloursoft, Samsung Galaxy Note and Book)

There are specialty chainsaws used for cutting mortises and so forth when timber framing, and some folks will rough up beams using just a chainsaw, to say nothing of the expedient lumber/board cutting jigs/fixtures.

There are myriad ways to do woodworking joinery, and entire books on it:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4942341-woodwork-joints

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17572619-the-complete-gu...

Note that modern adhesives (esp. if coupled with the judicious use of a bit of hardware) are quite strong/lasting so long as they are appropriate to the purpose.

Just making a couple as a test/prototype will go a long way towards building skill and confidence.

For my part, I've found Literate Programming to be the best lever on this for my own work, and there has been some discussion of other folks being successful applying it to LLM work:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300747

The really interesting thing to me is when Modula 2/3 and Oberon come up --- I'd _really_ love to see a bare-metal implementation of Oberon for the Raspberry Pi which was:

- actually ported (_not_ emulated) w/ native drivers

- easy to install

- performant

- had an attractive GUI

- had a web browser which could handle the basics of the modern web

I mean, the documentation is sixteen pages --- seems like a perfect fit --- still waiting on a tablet shell for an rPi 5 (and still need to get an rPi 5 Compute Module for it), so will be looking into it then....

Seems to me that requiring the homework and having it paired with the quiz works well in terms of cause-effect for the students.

I bought Delphi ages ago, but never got very far with it, which I regret.

I'd love to be able to take it up again, and this document looks very promising for that, esp. paired with:

https://wiki.freepascal.org/pas2js

which I now see is supported in Lazarus.

If someone has an example graphical project which compiles to an HTML page w/ JavaScript using the above, I'd love to see it and a detailed set of build instructions and notes on installing the needed toolchain and deployment. (as a note, I'm currently working in flet.dev using Python which allowed me to get a small prototype up-and-running, but I'm still looking into self-hosting and doing something more complex)

Pretty sure those folks are just using a digital press and sending things out w/ a bar-coded envelope w/ printed indicia --- as noted in the article, it was the letterpress aspect which set this apart.

I worked on a similar project for a non-profit at a previous job. No letterpress though, which I'm kind of bummed about.

The software in this space is execrable (I wrote a TeX tool to do it based on a CSV and it would've been okay if they'd allowed it to run on the server as each order came in, but they insisted instead on ganging things up which added complexity and made the files large enough that csvtool in TeX had a hard time working through them), and dealing with the USPS can be quite thorny, but as noted, customer relations is a potential minefield and managing customer expectations could get really expensive (once we had to pay $800 to have a single card delivered same-day because it was that or lose the contract).

I also argued that we should integrate the preview, generating a pixel image of the actual addresses from the typesetting system so as to push the responsibility for address verification onto the customer, but even though we were doing that for custom order books in a separate project by a different department it was shot down as an unnecessary complexity.

I just dodged being stuck on the Outer Banks or evacuating for a hurricane which has now closed Hwy 12 based on which week the family agreed on for the annual beach vacation:

https://www.outerbanksnews.org/post/n-c-highway-12-damaged-c...

(and they have an on-going beach replenishment effort as well)

>Cocaine is God's way of telling you you are making too much money. ---Robin Williams

>It made me feel like a new man. The problem was, the first thing the new man wanted was more cocaine. ---George Carlin

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/us/cannabis-marijuana-ris...

Is it wrong that I miss the days when GNUstep was put forward as the GUI option by the GNU project?

Managed to analyze what the LLM had made at my direction and re-work it to a very simply proof-of-concept which allows one to fill in some parameters, and then have it write out a G-code file to one's Downloads folder:

https://studio.flet.dev/run/46tp8GPq9g/

Note that the G-code has not yet been tested (though it seemed to plot okay in NCnetic), so please verify and test and proceed with due caution.

I've long thought that this would be an interesting way to apply syntax highlighting in PDFs typeset by (La)TeX.

Blew through all of my credits, but didn't get to a reasonable appearance in the UI, and still haven't adjusted and then tested the geometry for the toolpaths. Will have to see if I can grok the code and edit by hand.

Is there a good book (or web page) documenting the history of such small lathes/machines and their designers?

There seems to be a lot of misinformation (folks claiming Gingery was melting down working machines to make his, when they were iron or steel and he was casting aluminum)....

"Most households", no, but a statistically significant number? Yes.

Two of my co-workers have one each, and another is planning on buying one for her kids for Christmas --- DJI revenge-investing in Elegoo to spite the folks who left their company to start Bambu Labs pretty much knocked the bottom out of the market and halved (again) the price with the Centauri Carbon, resulting in a glut of ~$300 CoreXY printers, many of which are enclosed and hence have a higher perceived value.

Most estimates are that 2024 had ~4.5 million shipped, and 2025 looked to be even more, and no signs of the upward trajectory decreasing for 2026. For one small snapshot see the recent Snapmaker campaign for the U1, >$20M raised from >20K backers. With most sales to the U.S., for ~135M households, while not at 10%, it is almost certainly past 5%, so approximately 1-in-20 households.

Blondihacks is a favourite along w/ Clickspring and Pask Makes. Haven't found occasion to watch Artisan Makes yet, but it is queued up for the future.

Tried the AI studio as noted elsethread and it got much further along than any other tool I've tried thus far.

Working on a different project and ran out of free credits, so got out my credit card ($20 for 10,000 tokens) and a few prompts and 2,447 tokens later arrived at:

https://studio.flet.dev/run/bicQWc3Aul/

which I'm hopeful of finishing up tomorrow.

Yes, but there are some variants such as the Voron, which last I checked was still focused on DIY kits/self-building.

EDIT: I don't really have room for a manual mill which would be large enough for this sort of thing to make the parts I want(the Grizzly would be really pushing its limits).

It's more idle speculation at this point in time --- I did save the electric motor from replacing the garbage disposal recently (cracked housing) and I also have a key duplicator I fished out of a dumpster (working!) and really, it should be workable to fabricate something given the tools I have.

If you did a writeup on making a lathe w/ 8020 profiles and a cartridge spindle (source?) I'd be interested --- what would the total landed cost be?

Given that the Gingery books folks are shutting down as well: https://gingerybookstore.com/

one wonders what the other alternatives are.

I mentioned Taig elsethread, and the Unimat is still available at https://thecooltool.com/en/ --- for opensource there are a couple of options:

- https://www.lathes.co.uk/multimachine/

- https://www.printables.com/model/89657-3d-printed-wood-lathe...

and I've been debating on getting a small Grizzly G0745: https://www.grizzly.com/products/grizzly-4-x-6-variable-spee...

Are there other notable approaches/options?

There's a lot to be said for a manual approach for certain tasks.

For an extreme example of partisanship on this, see the Youtube channel "Inheritance Machining"

Taig maybe?

https://taigtools.com/

(ob. discl., I work for a hobbyist CNC company, but we don't offer a 4th axis or lathe)

My Elegoo Centauri Carbon and Flashforge AD5X have been pretty much plug in, load filament, calibrate/configure for that filament, print.

It or a similar printer (CoreXY, enclosed if you're going to print filaments which warrant that) from a brand w/ a good reputation should work as well.

Feels a bit like an extension of having an LLM make a JSON file for text/numbers/dimensions in an image, allowing one to edit it, then use it as a reference when a prompt re-works it --- just one has to find the right node to update/edit.