I have an Orbit Fusion for the couch. I looked at the Elecoms, but I just really like the scrollring. In my perfect world there'd be a god-damned three-button orbit with scrollring, but in the meantime remapping the Fusion's "Forward" button lets me use it with similar ergonomics. I notice the stiction, but it's a very minor little aspect of using the trackball, and it's not distracting enough for me to feel like I need to replace the bearings. I did do the "rub some nose oil on it" thing and that helped some.
There are a few DIY designs floating around that use BTUs, and some have certainly made their way into ergo keyboards, but I don't know of a commercial product that uses them.
The sense I get is that it is more lazy than anything. The verbiage feels like the fact that designs were public documents was tacked on last minute to satisfy some desire for market segmentation or to create a parts and design library to draw traffic. It would make sense that the company hosting the software would not want the headache of being unable to use your stuff commercially or even of parsing what they could use, since in some sense they always are using everything commercially. Refusing the to thread the needle with their verbiage, though, has left a situation where the Terms of Use say clearly that (1) a design is Content, (2) a free user's Content is a public document, (3) a free user cannot use their own public documents for commercial use, and (3) a free user grants EVERY OTHER USER a license to sell their public documents.
"All documents created by a Free Plan User, and all Content contained therein, is made public and therefore considered a Public Document."
"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."
"For any Public Document owned by a Free Plan User... Customer grants a worldwide, royalty-free 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."
The only possible wrinkle is that the ToU distinguish between a "Customer" and an "End User," so maybe you the customer can grant you the End User the same commercial rights that Joe the slightly shady CNC machinist in Peoria has when he downloads your widget to fabricate and sell. Something tells me that PTC's license compliance folks don't interpret things that way, though.
That's not how people work. You think Americans are stubborn about our customary units? Try damn-near everyone (including many Americans) with SI.
Time in particular is unlikely to be significantly reworked because you can only push the inconsistencies out so far. So you divide the day into a thousand beats. Great. A year is still not an integer number of days, and weeks and months are only loosely based on physical (lunar) phenomena at all.
The issue with FreeCAD is that all the workarounds (so far) are manual. Other apps may well be doing similar things, but they're doing them behind the scenes and the user doesn't have to (for instance) specifically set up a datum plane offset at the exact same distance as the face you want to sketch on and either manage it by hand or use an integrated spreadsheet to set up and reference variables.
I like what I see coming out of FreeCAD these days, but stuff like that is... umm, a lot.
The dirty secret of FreeCAD is that most drawings that look okay will extrude even if unconstrained. You just lose the ability to leverage the history tree and the model will be as brittle as any direct modeler's.
FreeCAD is on its way, it's attracting a little more money and attention, and I'm using it more and more, but I often still feel like I'm fighting it.
Too much gaming and The Expanse and arguing about Star Wars online to say I'm only doing productive nerdy things, but even back to high school and college, long before I ever heard the term, sometimes the urge to "just make somethin'" would become overwhelming.
Fair. I did spend a LOT more time thinking about Terms of Use and arguing with OnShape's legal department when investigating CAD apps than a normal human would have. I checked out of actual practicing well over a decade ago, though.
If you are comfortable with all your models being available for download and some wonky Terms of Use that may let random internet people profit off your designs but not you, then OnShape in a full-screen browser feels about as good as F360 does. I guess you could also pay for it, but despite finding it pretty nice, I am iffy about paying Solid Edge prices for something browser based. I understand SolidWorks has slapped together a browser version as well, but nobody likes it.
Linux wise, there's just not much outside FreeCAD and SolveSpace. BricsCAD is an okay evolution of AutoCAD, and VariCAD is a less good one.
This is the answer. It's only remarkable if you can't quickly get tacos anywhere else. It's kind of its own thing, though and it sort of hits the spot sometimes.
If I actually want Tex-Mex fast food, living in Texas I'd usually take any of the following before Taco Bell:
Diablo sauce is gross, though. It's really no hotter than Fire (and neither is very hot) but it tries to do something smoky and citrusy or some shit, and being Taco Bell, they can't pull it off. Better to just go with the tomato and vinegar and powdered jalapeno in whichever concentration level they can handle.
Yup. This is corollary to the other post talking about diameter. If you make a perfect circle with your perfect meter of perfect string, suddenly you can no longer perfectly express the diameter in SI units, but rather it's estimated at 31.8309886... cm. Nothing is wrong with the string in either scenario.
I recall rumors that when it came to version 10 of Mac OS, Apple knew they needed outside help, and the choice came down to BeOS on the one hand, or NeXT (including ol' Stevie J) on the other.
I'm amazed that we could design something that flew at all, given Mars's atmosphere is something like 1/150th of Earth's, but the gravity is closer to 1/3. I'm sure many people know this, but one of the bigger bits of scientific fudging in Andy Weir's The Martian is that a windstorm would fuck up their base like that.
I mean, depending on one's definition, either it is or it isn't, and with CAD extensions I imagine it's perfectly fine for 3D printing where everything ends up a mesh anyway, but pretty much everything I've ever made was better suited to a solid modeler. I downloaded it once, but there was a lot going on there, and since it wasn't my priority to learn to sculpt, I set it aside.
When is the last time you tried? 0.21 is better, and the new Ondsel build based on 0.22 is even a little bit better still. The skills (and mine are, frankly, below average) from Fusion360 should translate; under the shiny pull arrows, they're obviously very similar. It's all the same concepts, and constraints are less critical than they first appear for making one-off parts.
Then, if you don't share my concerns with OnShape, it should work very well in Linux and after hitting F11 you might just forget it's browser-based.
My B450 motherboard is pretty long in the tooth, but still firmly a "modern" component. I just added a Serial port via its built in header to use an old "Spaceball" for CAD. It only works in a few Windows apps, which is a shame because it's completely a software issue and it works PERFECTLY in the apps that still support it. Linux as well, though I've only tried that via a USB-Serial adapter on my laptop.
I think it's a nice enough idea, and I hope it sets a reasonable baseline for what enthusiast and workstation laptops will be as the entabletification of the mainstream computing device continues, but right now it's sort of a solution waiting for its problem. Economically, it doesn't make much sense for one person to buy one. In an actuarial sense, it's almost certainly better to buy something you like that's less modular, and replace it if it breaks or stops being useful for your intended tasks. Of course if no one who wishes them well buys their computers, they won't last long enough to be relevant.
Strictly speaking, just standardizing and providing the physical specifications ends up making their dongles more like headers on a desktop motherboard, potentially a commodity piece that anyone could replicate. Their other modular components seem to have a similar idea. It all seems elegant enough, and ready to "backscale" into a distributed niche industry if the big companies stop making powerful proprietary machines at the scale that keeps them cheap. As it stands, they sort of ARE de facto proprietary, but I guess the idea is that there will be enough enthusiasts, hardware hackers, and evangelists paying a sizeable, but not crippling, premium to keep them afloat and gain the mindshare to become a new standard (and hopefully halo brand) when people need to build laptops like they build towers now.
wjrii @ wjrii @kbin.social Posts 22Comments 514Joined 2 yr. ago
I have an Orbit Fusion for the couch. I looked at the Elecoms, but I just really like the scrollring. In my perfect world there'd be a god-damned three-button orbit with scrollring, but in the meantime remapping the Fusion's "Forward" button lets me use it with similar ergonomics. I notice the stiction, but it's a very minor little aspect of using the trackball, and it's not distracting enough for me to feel like I need to replace the bearings. I did do the "rub some nose oil on it" thing and that helped some.
There are a few DIY designs floating around that use BTUs, and some have certainly made their way into ergo keyboards, but I don't know of a commercial product that uses them.