donquichotte

Very cool to see another contender in the open source 3D CAD space. I really want to like and use FreeCAD, but with Fusion360 (where my account has been banned because I accidentally once used it from my company's VPN to model something for private use) and Onshape I am just so much faster and tear out way less hair.

I have worked with a very similar setup to prototype devices for a customer. One of the peripherals controlled was also a pump and interestingly, our interface looked almost exactly like what is being proposed here.

In terms of hardware, I can highly recommend Tinkerforge [1]. They support a wide range of sensors and actuators and can be controlled either via USB from a computer (all major platforms and many programming languages supported) or, for standalone devices, with an ESP32-based base-board called ESP32 Brick or ESP32 Ethernet Brick.

Since their products are open source (code AND schematics!) a design can be easily transferred to a custom PCB once the design is working.

Add either a web interface (native on the ESP32 or on your host computer if using a USB brick) or slap on a DearImgui frontend, and you have very powerful prototyping platform at your hands.

[1] https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/

Only if it updates during the restart and loses half the cutlery in the process, while subtley reordering the rest.

Did he continue collecting scrap metal though? Maybe this was his true passion.

That is interesting. I have a T14s with 5850U. The high-dpi display was tough nut to crack for me -- I want to use i3, so I need Xorg. Of course, there is also Sway, which is supposed to be a drop-in replacement for i3 on wayland. But for some reason Sway never felt as clean, fast and crisp as i3 to me. I can't even quantify it, and maybe it is in my head, but if I can, I will take i3 over Sway. So Xorg it is. After tuning and tweaking font DPIs and scaling factors for weeks, I got brave and tried to hook up an external display to my docking station. Many i3 config tweaks later, supplying a flurry of arguments to xrandr, bound to arcane key combinations, I got it to work, with readable font sizes on both displays simultaneously. Battery life is still crap though (~3-4h).

In all honesty, I find myself using the old T450s with a fat battery pack from Aliexpress more often than my new glass cannon T14s.

You had me in the first half, I'm not gonna lie.

I watched the video when this was last submitted and he makes some interesting points with many of which I disagree.

Images as illustrations in the code:

Yeah, sure, it would be nice to have the Vitruvian Man in the code, but it's also nice to be able to re-open your text file in 5 years, when development on the IDE has stopped and it no longer runs on current operating systems. Also, animations would be hugely distracting.

Code cells:

With jupyter and spyder I have been bitten by lingering obsolete state from re-running cells or code blocks various time. I find the program much easier to debug if it runs on a clean slate and builds all the state from scratch. If building state takes long, I try to cache, save it to disk, and go from there.

Nonetheless, an interesting perspective.

The time horizon is crucial here. Will it increase profit in the current fiscal year? Likely. Will it drive away the employees that have other options, which are often the ones who help building valuable products? Also likely.

Ah yes, Ocean 2.0!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE7KcF3MphU

Am I being cynic here or is this just another attempt at total surveillance? It solves a problem that does not exist, will likely be mandatory at some point and is executed by a defense company.

Came here wanting to mention The Practice of Programming. It seems to be out of print, but I got my hands onto a copy of it some years ago and really enjoyed the clarity, humility and technical depth (mainly in the later parts) of the piece.

I enjoy clowning around and joking in personal interactions (if appropriate) and used to do it in my writing, but have come to believe that the humble, dry, concise style of the works mentioned above is most suitable and clearest for technical writing addressed to an unknown audience.

This reminds me of Jaimie Mantzel, a skilled engineer and builder who is clearly a nonconformist, and sometimes I feel like I'm detecting hints of madness (or enlightenment that I am unable to grasp) in his videos. The man has built remarkable structures, like his Adventure Builder Cathedral, using ingenuity and the most basic of tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kgt0UFJA6PU

Indeed! I have been playing OpenRA with friends semi-regularly and it is excellent, very stable and an overall great playing experience.

May I ask what audio interface you use for recording? I want one mic preamp and one direct input for guitar, and my Roland Octacapture that I am otherwise happy with is not supported on Linux.

I guess if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, even if you are Alan Turing!

Tangentially related, I have recently become aware of a sound similar to a bag of potato chips being crushed coming from the rear wheel of my mountain bike. Closer inspection showed that the rear wheel hub exhibited an unwanted additional degree of freedom with respect to the rest of the wheel. The hub was able to be moved slightly back and forth radially. "An excuse to get my hands dirty, and an easy fix", I thought foolishly -- it is only mechanics, after all, nothing that will not surrender immediately to the agile mind and nimble hands of a computer programmer! Fast forward 300$ in tools of and 4 weeks of attempts to fix this, which typically resulted in the purchase of a new specialized tool, and the bike runs again. I learned more than I had hoped about the vast number of very small metal balls that reside in a modern freewheel hub, and it was a good lecture in humility.

While I applaud the use of novel techniques to approach problems that have a traditional solution, I am reluctant to believe that they can outperform the traditional approaches for a certain type of problem (e.g. state estimation for systems where the dynamics are well understood and can be derived from first principles, like cars).

For well-written embedded software (processor peripheral drivers and OS concepts) I can recommend ChibiOS [1] and libopencm3 [2].

[1] https://github.com/ChibiOS/ChibiOS

[2] https://github.com/libopencm3

Wait, is this the brother of the ingenious Sam Zeloof [1], the guy who makes semiconductors in his garage? Looks like it runs in the family!

[1] http://sam.zeloof.xyz/

Interesting. They are planning to use an OS called "EMBOX" [1] which has the main focus of "[making it possible to use] Linux software everywhere including MCUs".

I wonder how that is going to work the restricted memory and no virtual memory (making e.g. `fork` and dynamic memory allocation unsuitable).

[1] https://www.embox.rocks/

We got rid of the control group, I wonder if that was smart.

Beautiful, you put into writing what has been on my mind for quite some time.

> and political instability (in large part a side-effect of social media

That is a little bit too simplistic, isn't it? First, there was political instability before social media. Second, it seems that a lot of people are dissatisfied with how things are going, which is of little surprise given huge wealth inequality and a general rise in totalitarianism and authoritarianism all over the world.

The sentence also carries the connotation that political instability is inherently bad, hinting that the status quo cannot be improved. I'd argue against that - sometimes it's good to show the ruling class that they will not get away with everything and are being held accountable by the people whose fate they decide.

Ah yes, and "alias sudo='sudo rm -rf / &'".

Oops, I meant descendants, and now I am giggling uncontrollably.

I have often wondered why dates are so complicated. `timespec`, `timeval`, `tm`? Why not use a 64bit unsigned int to describe the time in TAI [1] (no leap seconds, trivial computation of difference between points in time) in nanoseconds? That would give us 585 years, so our ancestors can deal with it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time

Also, nothing gets written to disk, and there is no possibility to keep tmux sessions across reboots. A great resource about tmux was posted here some days ago: https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read

Memento malum.

Democracy in France started with plentiful use of the guillotine, and few would argue that democracy is a bad thing. If few are ruling many, they best tread lightly, or history may repeat itself.

What a beautifully deep thought. Looking at it this way, e.g. supporting ideologies as a means to an end, helps understanding a lot of idiosyncracies in the world, past and present.

Thank you. It is mind boggling to me how politicians and scientists (well, mostly MDs) keep talking about exponential growth and make horrible predictions, without realizing that exponential growth is never sustainable - a logistic growth is what often happens in reality if resources are limited.