bluewing @ bluewing @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

As an old toolmaker who might have dabbled in accuracy. I just shake my head when people complain about things like this because they think absolute accuracy --an impossibility-- is the important thing, (you can't afford anything close absolute accuracy), when it's repeatability that matters the most. Choose the one that repeats the best, toss the rest. Then learn what the "magic number" is that makes you happy to read and need to get the results you are looking for. Learn to apply some bloody "windage".

Remember: Rick Sanchez is a dumb-ass. And you only need to be 5% smarter than the tool you are using to be successful. So be smarter than the tool and understand the process.

You are looking for perfect here where you probably should be looking for "good enough". You will never build a chamber insulated well enough to hold temperature for hours or even perhaps a 24hours+ without cooling. Plus, you are never going to build a perfect vacuum chamber to prevent fresh air leakage or venting air the hot air into the room and that will also add to the cooling effect. If you have ANY opening or seam, there will be leakage.

Now consider just how big and bulky such an enclosure would need to be with the materials that a commonly available to you that you can afford. Is it really worth it for the small gain in finished product? Even manufacturers of high end printers accept the they will only get 'good enough' and that they need to have the heater cycle on and off to keep a steady temperature.

As a "boomer" myself, I do know the secret of the 'right click: Save as'. Who do you think thought up the idea-- that's right, a Boomer. And we taught Gen X about it. Not my fault they didn't pass on the ancient and now arcane knowledge to future generations. But I suppose you need to know how to use a mouse before you can right click anything. Having attempted to teach 3D CAD to high school students, my first job was to show them how to use a mouse and why fingers and CAD don't mix. And do it before we could actually move on to the subject matter they were supposed to be learning.

Still I do use an app for rotate my backgrounds and quotes. The app Variety works well with KDE Plasma with a large selection of repositories to choose from with beautiful backgrounds without taking up extra space on my drives. But what do I know, I'm just a boomer.

I do enjoy all the NASA photos and National Geographic backgrounds served up to me on a rotating basis without needing to take up local storage space to do so. But I ain't running Windows either.

Simple parts for 3D printing can be done with TinkerCAD. A free and basic CAD program that can do what you want. It runs in your browser window so it's platform agnostic also. Though I will tell you phones and tablets are very poor tools to do CAD work in. Larger screens and a mouse are virtually a necessity if you intend to not get frustrated.

After that, Fusion 360, (Windows only and a bastard install of local and cloud requirements), is popular with 3D printer enthusiasts. It's a stripped down version of AutoDesk's professional tool. There is also OnShape, another full CAD program that has a free license that runs in a browser window like Tinker CAD. The UI is a bit harder for newbies to navigate than Fusion. But there are limitations to hobby users.

FreeCAD is open source and a local install with support for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Newbies tend to find the CAD concepts difficult, (mostly because they are based on more proper workflows and design knowledge. FreeCAD will often punish sloppy workflows of beginners). And newbies tend to find the UI confusing. But they are working on it. The latest 1.0 release features a lot of improvements that user have complained about for years. But the learning curve is still steep and it takes some effort for those without real CAD experience and an unwillingness to practice the craft.

I'm all for it as long as it can make a conventional cut and a Humboldt cut. I'm assuming it can make plunge cuts.

Depending on where you live, there is already enough naturally occurring fluoride in the well water that adding more doesn't mean much. How else do you think they discovered fluoride helps your teeth?

Since I live in a rural area and need to have my own well, I know my water contains enough fluoride that it would be silly to add more. But some areas do not have enough naturally present. So it would be interesting to see the water test results for Florida cities to check the amount of naturally occurring fluoride present. YMMV

I did mention that plastic water bottles and other such consumer level disposable plastics aren't really required. Though the alternatives are much heavier and often bulkier than their plastic counterparts. Making them more difficult and costly to ship. And yeas, that includes basic food stuffs.

I'm just glad Tesla costs more than I can afford. Makes it very easy for the vast majority of us poor plebes to continue to not own one.

I so wanted a Chevy Bolt though.

It's actually not. Tesla just won't care until the feds sue them in court for it.

The data on that is all there. Records like car fatalities are collected mainly through law enforcement reports and states have registration numbers. But the question is, how centralized is the data? City, county, state, or federal? There is a lot of data that simply isn't required to be collected to a central agency to keep track of.

Tesla's do cost more to insure than 'average' cars. But, that extra cost reflects more the cost to repair minor/moderate damage than cost of fatalities. Since fatalities are just a smaller subset accidents. Tesla's are extremely costly to repair and often get totaled vs repaired. Premiums reflect that cost of loss.

3% of 250 million could very well be the approximate number of cars on the roads that are involved in a fatal collision. And that is the only consideration of the article in this study.

So it's a matter of personal choices rather than one of necessity. To be honest I do the same with some of the software that Fedora installs, (I don't need a suite like OpenOffice-- Abbiword and gnumeric are all I really need anymore), and some very specialized programs I use that most people have no need of. But none that has little to do with not having productive and usable software populating your first time boot.

So nothing to really make Windows actually useful on reboot. In nearly the same amount of time with a Linux distro, you get a system that may well not need anything extra to be productive with on 1rst reboot.

(And yes, I have installed both OS systems from scratch dating back to dos).

Did you also get most of the extra software installed at the same time or did you need to spend extra time getting all your non-OS software installed to make your computer actually useful?

I never have an issue with people preferring a different CAD package over another. For example: I detest Fusion 360 for various reasons even after spending a year with it. We all have preferences, work requirements, and even "vibe" better with one package over the rest. You need to choose the tool that works best for you.

What I do have an issue with is new users that try and have problems and immediately start whinging that "FreeCAD isn't like what I know. And it needs to be like my favorite" Those are the lazy people that can't be bothered to learn something new. And they should either expend the effort to learn or go back to whatever they were using or volunteer to code, (it's open source after all). FreeCAD ain't for you.

But if you have given FreeCAD, (or ANYTHING new in life), an honest try and you can't get the hang of it or simply don't like it. Well, that's a valid and very fair reason to not use it.

Been there done that. Got the tee shirt.

While good support to customers is very valuable, trying to support a product that is decades old and shares nothing in common with current products is a plain waste of time energy and money.

It would require someone to search out all the documentation needed to make that one part, then you need to figure out the correct process to make said part, determine if you have material on hand or need to special order something, then try to find that one old jig/fixture needed amongst a building full of 100's of such items for the right one. Then you need to be sure that the the complete fixture is there and nothing is worn out beyond use. Then you need to make time to insert this one-off semi-custom part into the manufacturing process.

By the time you do all this, that one 20 year old obsolete part will have perhaps cost you thousands of dollars and you still haven't made the first piece of swarf. Imagine the shock and surprise that customer would have when they get the bill that accurately reflects the true cost.

Then it's a habit not a fear. I also am comfortable with the cli since I started with Linux back at RedHat 5 and Mandrake 6. It was learn it or die in those days. But as time has passed, I find myself using it less and less because I don't really need it everyday. But while I might need to google a specific command because I forgot it, I still remember it's possible and handy.

No it's not. Unlearning old habits and thought processes is always the first step in learning new things. But to be fair, it's also the most difficult part.

While other CAD packages do have a better failure path to follow, they still can fail at the same points as FreeCAD. And you still really should be following best practices for ANY CAD package to avoid failures. But people are nothing if not lazy. And fillets and chamfers just suck in any CAD package. It's always been my practice to never add them until I was done with the modeling. And if major changes where needed, I would remove them if I suspected they could even remotely cause an issue during a change to a model.

You just want to be angry and complain about something don't you. Either get over it and learn to use FreeCAD or don't. But whinging is unproductive and useless.