wjrii @ wjrii @kbin.social

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Joined

2 yr. ago

So is there an open source direct modeler? I've been working in Designspark, but while it is not currently as onerous as F360 or OnShape (god forbid I stumble into something that other people decide might be worth a few bucks), it's still a (free for now) subscription and has had feature erosion, specifically importing darn near anything pre-existing. I'm not making anything complex enough that it suffers from the Direct Modeling workflow, and I find that workflow much more intuitive. Shoot, I'd even settle for a fork of Solvespace with chamfers and fillets, LOL.

And well we should. Honestly, a “torch?” For the electric light that you could easily flash on and off if you wanted or wave around to flash in someone’s eyes?

WHERE IS THE FIRE, NIGEL?!?!? THERE’S NO FIRE!

I just did a quick YT search. It was literally half a second as they were coming back from break and she instantly puts on her BBC anchor face. I wouldn't even get (more) angry with a Fox News or RT presenter for doing what she did. No biggie at all.

Seems like what a lot of people want is a hybrid of Usenet and Reddit, but what we have is more like a bunch of reddits that are willing to talk to each other. Certainly better for governance and redundancy and as a kind of organic load balancing in a cash-poor ecosystem, but the "killer app" would be (optional?) persistence of communities outside of instances.

At a minimum, it’s an unhealthy degree of authoritarian control.

You're not wrong.

I like The Orville. I've watched the entire run of the show. Much like you with LD though, I don't quite get how people love The Orville. It strikes me as leftover TNG episodes with a Find and Replace, followed by a liberal coat of Seth MacFarlane's very particular set of Gen X influences. The morality is often pretty clumsy and I can almost imagine Seth and the writers being frustrated by the ambiguity that a good Trek episode can leave you with. Then, the way it had to start with a more Galaxy quest vibe to get a show order from Fox, followed by Seth wanting it to be more serious but also still be a Seth show, it's kind of all over the place. I also find some of the acting performances to be amateurish to the point of distraction.

And for all that, I still like it. It scratched an itch and has a lot of heart. On the whole, it's more than the sum of its parts, but for me it still has a ceiling. I like it about as much as I like Discovery, which I have also watched in its entirety though only once. The two shows' issues are very different though, with the exception of tonal whiplash.

I have come around on LD. I think it is a similar love letter to to Gen2 Star Trek but handles the balance of trek-to-humor better, and for all their cartoon antics, I've found the characters more compelling than The Orville's.

True, but there is an almost childlike literalism to the small amount that is unique about Mormon theology, plus it all arose in the era of the printing press and governmental archives, so there are fewer excuses. It's also culturally very top down and high pressure, as you are keenly aware. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call the mainline LDS church a cult, but it's definitely closer than, say, the Episcopalians.

Well hello fellow exmo. I gave it up in my late teens. Found myself playing "devil's advocate" too much in discussions with my friends. Tried to pray about it all Joseph Smith style, but just got absolutely nothing. Realized that I had never enjoyed Church, never felt at peace there, and just generally came to the conclusion that the essential problem of free will and comparative religion and the extremely specific truth claims that Mormonism requires weren't holding up. I was also completely eeshed out by the thought of a patriarchal blessing, and I felt no calling whatsoever to go on a mission. I wasn't as traumatized as some, growing up in the Mormon hinterlands of the American south (NE Florida) meant the LDS were a little less high and mighty and I had a circle outside of the church, but the pressure to conform and stay is very real.

I only resigned formally when my mom sicced the missionaries on my never-Mo wife and me after I moved to Texas.

Ultimately, even as religions go, its theology is very silly and its most ardent adherents are real jerks.

Before then, I imagine there was not a trace of doubt in your mind.

Calibre and a paperwhite works way better than I'd have thought a locked down device would.

On the flip side, the variety and market segments that are open to fountain pen people are as good as they've ever been (since ballpoints became a mature technology), both for ink and pens. Sure, the Sheaffer School pens and Waterman Phileases and Cross Whatevers aren't hiding in Office Depot anymore, but you can still find a Varsity or a wick-feed Zebra pretty easily, and the Internet is so much faster than it used to be. I guess I'll never pop into the cigar shop by the office to pick up a spare Lamy Safari though.

Sleep less. Drink coffee.

Open source is not the same as, "you are barred from commercial use," which is why I hesitate with OnShape. At minimum, these companies need to tighten up their licensing terms to be strict but fair.

to wit, Creators have this:

Trial or Free Versions. Trial and free versions of the Service are made available by Onshape. Trial versions of the Service are intended for evaluation purposes, and may be used for commercial or non-commercial purposes during the evaluation period. Free versions of the Service are intended to support (a) creating and editing intellectual property for non-commercial purposes, and (b) viewing, commenting and import/export for commercial or non-commercial purposes (to the extent the plan offers those features). If you intend to use the Service outside a trial context to create and/or edit intellectual property for commercial purposes (including but not limited to developing designs that are intended to be commercialized and/or used in support of a commercial business), then you agree to upgrade to a paid subscription to the Service. Trial and free versions of the Service are otherwise subject to the terms of this Agreement.

but consumers have this:

For any Public Document owned by a Free Plan User created on or after August 7, 2018, or any Public Document created prior to that date without a LICENSE tab, Customer grants a worldwide, royaltyfree and non-exclusive license to any End User or third party accessing the Public Document to use the intellectual property contained in Customer’s Public Document without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Document, and to permit persons to whom the Document is made available to do the same.

Maybe there's some nuance I'm missing, but on its face that's total bullshit. You can use the trial version for commercial purposes as long as you don't intend to KEEP doing so, but not the free version. Meanwhile, you are automagically granting a license to commercialize your files for literally everybody else. Sloppy at best, exploitative at worst.

Looks like the .45 cartridges that make up the engines were welded to the .50 cal rounds making up the rest of the fuselages, so no gunpowder was gonna survive that. Then even if it is just glue, the central one with the cockpit is the bullets only, so clearly OP's grandpa was comfortable deconstructing the ammo. I don't know what the base is, but it's probably the bottom of some big ass artillery round. the pedestal is not instantly familiar to me either, but given that this model is based on the P-38, I'd bet it's from a 20mm Hispano autocannon. I suppose it's possible there's still powder in there, but I'd say it's exceedingly unlikely.

While I'm speculating, I wonder if the wings and stabilizers were cut from the rest of the casing that supplied the base. The thickness makes it look plausible, but my words are creeping closer and closer to my ass the longer this goes on, LOL.

So most of the big packages have a cheap or free tier for hobbyist/maker use, and I think they all do for educational use. The rub with most of these is that they are either not for commercial use (OnShape, Solid Edge CE), or they have "gotcha" thresholds ($1000 revenue for F360, $2000 profit for Solidworks).

Now if you wanted to go completely free-as-in-beer and still retain full commercial rights, you really have to go open source. Then there's also DesignSpark Mechanical, which is Windows only and not truly parametric, but is much more advanced than something like TinkerCad. They've got their own issues with feature erosion in the free tier, but because the company's main business is selling components, they haven't removed commercial use from it yet.

That's a more reasonable threshold, and allows some wiggle room if you have an idea that blows up and makes you a few bucks (what is profit? Can you count your PC and printer as capital expenditures? etc etc).

Autodesk is gonna Autodesk, but they should, at a minimum, match that term.

I think SolveSpace and OpenSCAD have trouble with fillets, but FreeCAD should be fine, though as a person with a non-technical background, FreeCAD is still generally miserable to use.

OnShape is free but explicitly non-commercial if you don't pay, and it requires your models to be publicly available in a potentially weird way where someone else could make money from your stuff but you can't. It's a weird AF licensing setup.

Eleven. Kinda felt like that was too many though.

My last couple of parts I designed in Designspark Mechanical, which I gather is a nerfed Spaceclaim. Closedf source and Windows only, and I guess that they've been pissing off their users too, but by removing features rather than trying to directly extort money. The reason I went with it though, is because despite being full of its own issues, it still allows commercial use with the free subscription/download.

The most likely scenario is that I never make a single dollar from my hobbies, but it's nice that if I were to somehow stumble into something that a few people wanted to pay for, I wouldn't owe Autodesk any money. The direct modeling also makes sense for my TinkerCAD/woodworking brain. I have tried FreeCAD and found the learning curve daunting.