knolan

For those of us who can’t afford a Vision Pro try the Reality Composer app for iOS. You can create a scene and place 3D models on walls or the floor and then navigate in AR.

It’s useful for placing furniture in your home. The IKEA app used to offer something similar.

Technically there’s no reason you couldn’t do something like a full house too.

We don’t have smart appliances but I’ve recently switched to an electricity plan with a really cheap night rate for charging my EV (1 cent per km!). We often fill and then schedule our Bosch washing machine and dryer to come on at 2am. No app required.

I’m not a libertarian. I’m not opposed to helmets and I and my family wear helmets while cycling. I fully support vaccines.

Mandatory helmet laws have the consequence of reducing the amount of people cycling. There’s no justification for them when compared to international practices.

Many of those who support mandatory helmet laws do not understand what the purpose of a helmet is and that it will not protect you from a collision with a vehicle.

On the contrary I fully support vaccines and I wear a helmet while cycling. The mandatory helmet law in Australia backfired pretty badly by reducing the numbers of people cycling. Those who promise mandatory laws for bicycle helmets tend to be anti-cycling and also tend to support notions that cyclists pay “road tax”.

Like enforcing mandatory bicycle helmets in Australia, this law is either massively misguided or serves another purpose. While politicians are often stupid, they can’t think we’re that stupid?

If you don’t want your kids accessing certain websites then the onus is on parents to control access. I do. If you want to do this structurally do it with ISPs and mobile carriers with router and SIM level filtering.

Put age limits on the ability to buy a device, SIM or internet package like we do for so many other things. It would be trivial to restrict access (and just as easy for smart kids to bypass as the current system).

Don’t use an iPad to babysit your child. Let them discover technology in an environment you’re confident and comfortable with. But it’s your job as a parent.

Or is all this really just about more mass surveillance under the guise of protecting the children?

We used PoE hats for a bunch of Raspberry Pis once. It’s definitely a great idea.

I love that Blender can be a powerful scientific tool. Unlike a lot of software build for research, Blender is fast and user friendly, even if it has a learning curve. The addition of geometry nodes adds so much more capability too.

I’ve used it to help students visualise topologies for meshing in command line CFD tools. It’s also great for motion tracking objects in video footage. I’ve even used it to simulate various camera systems.

Unfortunately the videos aren’t working on my iPhone. I’ll try on desktop later.

I found 4D Golf a great game to explore higher dimensional space.

It works really well with the AR viewer on mobile Safari.

There is the Journal of Open Source Software perhaps:

https://joss.theoj.org/

The Dutch model is frequently cited by campaigners here as how things should be done. Unfortunately, as you point out, our government doesn’t really care. Investment is a patchwork of half arsed attempts here and there depending on local pressure. There are only two tram lines in the country and people keep driving their cars into the trams. Bus lanes are clogged with taxis and the Gardai (police) are absent from our roads.

A recent local council attempt to remove a couple of parking spaces and install a shared space in the area I live was met with a wave of anger and vitriolic abuse. In a public consultation people were complaining about how it would prevent them bringing some elderly relative to the GP in the snow, while transporting a fridge. Meanwhile the area is permanently clogged with cars dodging a nearby toll making the place extremely unpleasant to use as an amenity.

It’s incredibly frustrating and saddening to contribute to the problems after trying so hard to do better.

I feel like a bit of a failure when it comes to transport. I tried for many years to cycle to work in Dublin covering 25km on an ebike, but gave up after several nasty incidents that almost resulted in serious injury (for example my head almost going under the wheel of a van). I've experienced so much hatred, verbal and physical violence from drivers — and I'm the kind of cyclist that is fully lit, clad in high-vis and stopping at all traffic lights.

About a year ago I started to take the bus. My commute went from an hour on the bike to over two hours. Spending four hours a day on a bus to travel such a short distance is not a fun experience. The bus meanders through a city choked with traffic. It's often faster if I get off and walk that part of the journey (I've checked). I enjoyed cycling for the most part. It was great for fitness and clearing my head. The parts of my commute away from cars were beautiful but there was a significant risk of death or serious injury every time I got on the bike. More and more drivers are buried in their phones. Cycle or bus and you'll see this.

The bus was slowly killing me. It was hard to work as the crowded bus wobbled around narrow Dublin streets along with various degrees of anti-social behaviour. I got off the bus angry and frustrated and groggy.

I've just bought a small little electric car and I can get to work in around 40 minutes. I don't have to listen to other people's loud voice calls or TikToks that are so loud they penetrate through ANC. I don't have to ask someone to make space on the seat they are occupying all by themselves and their bag and endure the dirty looks for it. I don't have to wait and wait for buses that never show up. I hate the bus. I hate that I hate the bus. I feel like a failure for having to buy a second car but I fucking tried!

I'm happy in my car. It's fun to drive and it makes me happy and guilty. I feel like I have so much more freedom. I'm not tied to the bus schedule which placed very tight limits on my time, and the bus frequently didn't show. Otherwise it would take much longer to get home. I can stop by somewhere on the way home and pick something up. Like the bike, I am by myself in the car and I can decompress. I can sing if I want.

It makes no sense for a 25km commute to take two hours. Its madness. By travelling from one suburb to another via the city centre the bus becomes wholly impractical. A public transport system has to work so that people leave their car at home. London worked for me, I got the tube everywhere. Valencia has an amazing public transport system. Dublin is completely broken.

Where I grew up in rural Ireland there was a haulage company based down a narrow single track road. You’d take your life in your hands going down that road at the best of times, never mind meeting a speeding articulated lorry. Eventually the county council made them build their own access to the main road.

The problem isn’t usually the narrow roads however, it’s the drivers everywhere who know there are no consequences for their behaviour.

Meanwhile here in Ireland the culture is going the opposite direction. There is a clear lack of roads policing here and a recent report has confirmed this[1] with many Gardai simply not interested in doing their job. Our police force is massively under resourced and moral is in the gutter.

Meanwhile we have endless PR events “pleading” and “urging” motorists to drive safely, many of which have photo ops with vehicles parked illegally on footpaths. All run by a Road Safety Authority government agency that is utterly incompetent and only seems interested in handing out high viz jackets to school kids and blaming them for being killed by motorists glued to their phones.

Which brings me to my pet hate, the utter contempt shown by Irish motorists for those around them, especially pedestrian and cyclist spaces. It’s extremely common for cars to be fully parked up on a footpath even if a parking space is in sight. I’ve had to dodge van drivers driving down the footpath on the Main Street of our capital city because they are too lazy to use the loading bay 50m down the street. This behaviour is accepted by almost everyone. Once a neighbour came around the corner with two wheels of her SUV on the footpath (presumably so she could mount the dipped kerb and park as close to her front door as possible). I had to jump back. I asked her, pleaded even, to not drive on the footpath. Apparently that was rude and she was highly offended.

Fuck cars.

[1] https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0731/1526401-garda-crow...

Just for reference I’m running 4.5 with the Vulcan backend and sculpting a 6.3 million vertex object completely smoothly and Blender is using 4 GB of RAM and 2.5 GB of video RAM. Granted my system has a 9800 x3D and a 5070ti.

How does it compare to blender 4.5 with Vulcan enabled?

Open a new blender file and select Sculpt and you start with a high poly sphere. The default cube is not suitable for sculpting unless you subdivide it several times.

You can create whatever start up file you want.

Other approaches include subsurface workflows, metaballs, signed distance functions, procedural (geometry nodes) and grease pencil.

Meanwhile in Europe we’re starting to get affordable retro styled hot (well warm) hatches like the Renault 5.

The Tree of Life was one of the only films I’ve ever considered walking out of, I hated every moment of it. I’m delighted to hear you were spellbound by it.

This reminded me. There was an episode of Modern Family made entirely on Apple devices.

It’s a really basic engineering problem that was studied extensively in many studies and we teach it at undergraduate.

When I made the point that there is no scientific novelty here they insisted that their PhD was a ‘generic’ one and that means they can continue to run basic simulations according the to the recipe.

Ugh you’re a tiresome culture war poster. I’ve no Interest in you or your hobby horse.

Yes indeed. I’ve seen similar there too.

You’re arguing about highly specific cases while the vast majority of institutions get on with the job of educating large numbers of students and doing what research they can.

Your anti intellectual bias is showing. There are problems in all domains. I’ve seen plenty of arrogant fools in industry too.

They’re using an industry tool to do well trodden industry problems that were solved by academics decades ago.

I’m not tolerating his behaviour and I’ve made my views clear to my colleagues. He’s going to burn every bridge possible with this behaviour.

This individual is pretty unique in this regard. I’ve never seen anything like it. Most students will acknowledge that I know the literature and will accept guidance. This person seems to think they know everything but their work is the equivalent of a tutorial case in the commercial software.

I’ve seen this with a PhD student publishing several rapid fire papers in MDPI journals. They are repeating well understood physics work done 50 years ago using off the shelf commercial simulation software. They don’t cite any papers older than a decade and claim without irony that the work is “significant” while none of their papers are cited. They will go to events where no one is an expert in the field and win prizes for showing lots of pretty pictures but nothing that isn’t already well understood.

When I, an expert in the field, tell them they need to produce something novel at their research panels I’m told I’m wrong. When I list all the work they are ripping off I’m told it’s somehow different without explanation. When I question the obvious sloppiness in their work (the simulation data showing major artefacts) they blow up at me screaming and shouting.

I’ve never experienced arrogance like this before. It’s shocking. Their supervisors tell me that they are close to firing them but then also celebrate all the publications they are getting.

The mind boggles.

Tap on it . Arrow keys to move and space to shoot. It’s annoying because you can’t strafe.

I was tempted to gut it and stick in a display driver board but that comes with a risk of destroying the thing. It’s still running fine and I could find use for it elsewhere.

But you’re right. It’s a damned fine display.

I went from a 2560x1600 27” 2012 iMac to a 5K 2015 iMac. The 2015 model was the first not to offer target display mode, so it’s even worse than you say. For a while I ran the 2012 as a second display for the 2015.

The 2012 iMac is long gone, passed to a friend, but I still daily drive the 2015 5K. I’m interested in the new iMac but the 24” screen feels like a downgrade. The 27” studio display seems like a nice option but for similar money I get an extra computer in a smaller screen.

Naturally I could buy a cheap monitor but I don’t want to.