wjrii @ wjrii @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

There is a roadmap and the adults in the room are getting the Devs to eat their broccoli and fix long standing issues - looking at you topological naming issue.

To be fair, you can't really call out part-time devs working for free too harshly, but I do think there was a focus on what they wanted to be able to pull off, versus what they wanted to empower random idiots with an Ender 3 to do, much less small-to-medium businesses. I think it led to the infamous "FreeCAD way" attitude amongst devs and power users. Topological naming, for instance. That arises out of the software implementation of 3D kernels, making it an issue of proper use of inherently limited design software, not of design itself. Software that accommodates it well is is not "cheating," and it's not lazy design to rely on well-coded apps, but I've run across that sentiment before, if not the words.

The push from Ondsel (for as long a it lasts... as the CTO mentioned, they have a very narrow path to support the underlying project while finding sufficient monetization), and the structure provided by the nonprofit should help. Autodesk too seems to be doing their part by making all but the most rank beginners (and some of them too) second guess the choice to lock themselves into Fusion 360.

Ted Lasso was on point in this matter.

I’m in the “cyst” camp. We had a Sheltie who got kinda gross little sebum-filled protrusions a little like that.

Go to the vet. If its just aging skin, you need to know so you can manage and maybe get some proper ointment, and if it’s something weird like a botfly, that shit needs to be removed ASAP.

Just used it to do a clean install to move my ThinkPad from Ubuntu 22.04 to Kubuntu 23.10. Good tool, and much nicer than constantly "burning" ISOs to the flash drive.

My WFH officemate is a 25 year old Cockatiel named Spike. He no longer really wants to come out of his cage, and on the rare occasion he does he doesn't so much fly as fall with style. That said, he's still spunky and loud and interactive and climbs all over his cage and has attracted interest from a local hawk on multiple occasions. He is my little buddy, even though my wife got him before we met. When he was younger, he would hang out on my shoulder (and poop on it) and could even be coaxed to fly over to me.

Definitely got the air cleaner running 24x7, though. SO MUCH dander.

Yeah, that is sort of what I've been noticing, and also with my experience initially wrapping my head around constraint-based drafting. I think the thing I'm still seeing though is that FreeCAD fails less gracefully than some of the commercial packages if you do things that are difficult to constrain, and in brief experimenting it seemed to be less willing to autoconstrain while drafting, particularly with easily changed dimensional constraints. I still feel comfortable saying it's a bit "persnickety," but agree that it's not the hell I used to think it was.

Does the OpenSCAD workbench count?! 🤣

For straight up ease of use, maybe try the current Direct Modeling version of Shapr3D (i,e, not the Beta). The free tier is useless for printing anything, but it's a great way to see if the workflow fits you. DS Mechanical, limited as it is, is also free and pretty usable if you have literally no import/export needs from other software, and its STLs are fine to print. Both are a little more intuitive for non-CAD people. Oddly enough, the big thing missing in the FOSS space is a decent direct modeler. It's kind of a shame, too, since so much hobbyist use has minimal need for strict constraints, collaboration tools, or parametric history.

Now, because high quality direct modelers are a bit niche, and often use sketches anyway, it makes sense to get a basic grasp on sketch-based CAD, whether fully parametric or not. The paradigm that was so different for me to get used to is that idea of "sketch and extrude". You don't just plop down a cube or sphere.

Instead, you go into 2D mode, select a "workplane" which (you often start with the generic XY plane), and you draw the cross section of your solid. Then you use extrude or pull or pad or whatever the app calls it; this adds the third dimension to make it a solid. If you wanted a cube, draw a square of n mm, then extrude to the same height. Oh crap! That needed to be a rectangle? In a parametric modeler, go back to the sketch and change it, then (if needed) do the same for the extrusion's height. For various flavors of direct modelers, you can pull that face, or click the sides to change the size, just do it over, or add the extra volume and boolean them together. The next big concept is placing workplanes. There's typically some button that pulls up a tool that lets you do your sketch directly on a face of the solids you already have (or on an "arbitrary" plane placed exactly in line with a face... NO TOPOLOGICAL ISSUE HERE!) Once you do THAT, you can extrude down into the old solid to cut stuff out of it (sometimes this will need to be done with booleans, but often the apps have a "remove shit" set of buttons or are smart enough to guess what you meant), or extrude out from the old solid to glom stuff onto it. Fillets and chamfers, when supported, usually work by selecting one or more edges and telling the app to calculate them away at a certain radius/distance.

In the end I feel you on wanting to like freecad, I’d really rather use a Foss solution for my personal work.

I just downloaded The Ondsel "flavor" of FreeCAD. It's based on the upcoming 0.22 release, and it includes an addon that integrates to their tiered PDM, but everything else is still completely free. I don't see anything mind-blowing, but it's a very nice update. UI improvements, mostly on the Part Design workbench, nice and legible dark theme, floating tree, better launch page, and floating user-enterable dimensions when sketching (pretty cool, and long overdue). I question the viability of their business model in the timeframe their VC's likely want, but for now they're plowing some amount of money into FreeCAD development.

the mouse controls are a bit whacky to me

Is it true that SW ties everything to the Middle button with various modifier keys? And doesn't let you change anything? I've used a LOT of different 3D software over the last 45 days or so, and honestly that would be (if true) among the wackiest I've run across. FreeCAD has 10 preset styles now, and one or more of them might work for you.

Solidworks Maker

Here is the cheapest deal I've found on it (it's well known, I didn't have to do any detective work or anything). $38 for a year is probably worth it just for the shits and giggles, but as I mentioned, there's just no reasonable path for the home-business that manages to pull in $3-5k of profit. Lock-in is the bread and butter for all the companies, big and small, and a big part of this exercise has been to see just what I'd be locking myself into.

My little part is sort of a low grade torture test for fillets, but I am not very scientific with controlling it or looking for alternatives. It usually seems to be the ellipse sticking out the side like the Florida peninsula that gives the kernels/apps issues. It doesn't take a super huge fillet to get to a point where the face gets too closed off and the calculation refuses to complete. Some might do better with blending one edge at a time. In the real world, most of these apps could get most single parts modeled acceptably, one way or another. To a certain extent I'm splitting hairs, but I do like to see what they can handle. I've only had reason to loft parts a couple of times, but I can see that being an entirely new can of worms to explore.

That’s a crazy number of tools to try.

Some in more depth than others, LOL. YMMV.

I mean, the license is right, the functionality for single parts is there, and the workarounds are known. The issues are large assemblies, slower workflow, possibly stability, and weird UI, but I think if you've broken through the wall with it, there's little reason to change until you can no longer do what you want, whether that's large assemblies, paid freelance drafting (with customer expectations as to file format), or something else.

Yup. PTC owns OnShape, so they have no need or incentive to make Creo Parametric accessible to the little guys, so they do not. :-)

Same deal with Siemens and NX (Solid Edge), and to a lesser extent Autodesk with Inventor (F360). It's really only Dassault that seems to be trying to appeal to small-time users with the main package, but it seems like they are not committed to that, just currently unopposed.

I tried it once, months ago, and it didn't click, really, but I could try it again. The main thing with Blender is the way it models. It doesn't do Boundary or Solid modeling, but instead models meshes that approximate solids. Some people will say that makes it "not CAD," and maybe they're right in a narrow sense, but specifically for 3d printing, every single solid you model will eventually be turned into a mesh before slicing, so if you are working with a mesh that's a higher resolution than you can print, you won't see the issues. I understand there are well-supported add-ons that add many of the tools necessary to make blender act like a direct-modeler for solids. I don't know if there are any that add the equivalent of a parametric tree or constraints, so I'll defer to others.

Knowing full well how much time I've spent on dead ends out of sheer morbid curiosity, I would say I don't think think it's a great idea to LEARN Blender to do mechanical style modeling, but if you also want to do 3D sculpting or you already know Blender, it could be a perfectly adequate tool for 3D printing. A rectangle, after all, is simply two triangles. :-)

They also play college football, mostly in the North. I understand the quality of play is about D3.

If you're not opposed to looking in on a Reddit thread, askhistorians hsa it pop up now and again. They have "flaired users," who, with few exceptions tend to be credentialed academics, typically younger Masters degree holders and/or PhD candidates (best I can tell), and with no love for the American right. Their general consensus is that the book is not "wrong," but it lacks context and is not very useful as history, and particularly not as someone's introduction to American history.

Much of it, yes, but the real reason Qui-Gon died at the end is because he was exhausted from carrying the entire film on his back.

Liam Neeson had the gravitas and experience to do his own thing, and almost everything good about that movie involves him. McDiarmid too. The younger actors, including Ewan, and the bit players were almost universally meh to dreadful, and frankly Portman was probably the worst; her line readings in or out of the makeup were stilted and straight up amateurish. While he was given garbage to work with and wasn't some sort of prodigy who could elevate it, Jake Lloyd at least brought energy and authenticity. Lucas should have at least gone the ROTJ route and shadow-directed, but with a no-name "official" director who was good with actors. The story for Ep 6 is very iffy, but the performances themselves are fine, even with Ford sort of mailing it in; Marquand was able to turn that apathy into a certain bemused ennui.

A few stores, in my area it’s particularly clothing discounters, seem to have moved to that model, and as long as you plan your checkout areas even sort of halfway well, it’s a million times better.

And god what a sad death Fry’s had. It went from the bona fide nerd store to a disaster. Eventually the ones in Dallas-Fort Worth were just zombie husks riding out the leases and selling leftovers on consignment from the few manufacturers who couldn’t be bothered to come repossess the inventory after the store failed to pay their invoices.

"Tolerable upper intake" is based on more than a single does. One gram would almost certainly be fine. There's some slightly sketchy 1940s "fuck them lab-rats" science going on, but some scientists at Cambridge guesstimated it would take making it into a significant side-dish or main course to REALLY fuck you up:

It is questionable what factor should be taken to convert doses used for rats to the corresponding doses for man, but the ratio of 75 taken from the relative food intakes of the 100 g. rat and 70 kg. man would seem reasonable. If we take 100,000 i.u. of vitamin A as sufficient to cause immediate illness in the rat, then about 7,500,000 units should cause illness in man. This amount would be present in 375 g. of bear liver containing 20,000 i.u. of vitamin A/g., not an excessive portion to be eaten at a single meal.

That was added in 1981 when it popped back into theatres after Empire. It was not original, but it was a very early addition, and since ESB came out in the interim as Episode 5 from the get-go, very much a retcon in the George style.

Heeler mix there? Adorable in any event.