WillAdams

I am currently trying to apply code-based CAD principles to my current project:

https://studio.flet.dev/run/bicQWc3Aul

do you know of a traditional CAD program which could be used to drive such designs/projects in a useful fashion? I'm currently contemplating a re-write to use a Domain Specific Language....

This probably merits noting that the whole Code CAD thing is getting pushed very hard lately with many new AI-driven projects.

I will note the following projects which have made recent advancements:

- OpenSCAD --- the hopefully final Release Candidate for the long-awaited update is now available: https://openscad.org/downloads.html#rc

- PythonSCAD --- for folks who want variables which change and so forth: https://www.pythonscad.org/

- CADquery --- https://cadquery.github.io/

- Build123D --- https://github.com/gumyr/build123d

Longer list/discussion at: https://github.com/Irev-Dev/curated-code-cad

Also, a more recent project by Matt Keeter, Halfspace was announced recently but didn't get much discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49881890

ThinkPads seem to still have physical buttons for clicking:

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...

The small rural high school I attended in the early 80s was unable to find a math teacher able to teach calculus for my junior/senior year, which significantly reduced my college options.

If nothing else, you could maybe get some sales leads (I'm assuming you run a building contractor/solar panel install business?) --- fall-back position buy the new car purchase information for the relevant zip codes? (this must be pretty inexpensive to purchase judging by the junk mail caused by my wife's new car purchase)

I am still baffled that no electric car dealership worked out selling a garage covered in solar panels as a financing add-one for a new vehicle purchase --- even as a publicity stunt it seems the sort of thing one could have gotten a good bit of coverage with.

A previous calculation was that an all-electric economy makes sense when oil costs ~400 per barrel --- since then increased efficiency in solar panels and so forth and presumably greatly reduced that figure --- anyone got the math and figures to work this out with contemporary technology?

It's an actual quote from the article, but yes, that is an evocative reference.

Typing the letters individually in "Zapfino" until at the end, one gets the nifty encircled ligature of it.

This is still an on-going thing for the LinuxCNC project (which mostly follows Mach3 in using a Parallel port interface to drive a CNC controller).

Best example of how far BeOs fell short was that for a very long while it lacked printer drivers of any kind --- by contrast, not only did NeXTstep essentially get printing "for free" since it used Display PostScript, the implementation of that was such that Adobe demanded a modification to the user agreement limiting the output resolution so that print shops would not be able to purchase NeXT computers and use them as RIPs for imagesetters.

Do you know if other of his works merit the sort of effort which has gone into re-translating and correcting _20,000 Leagues Under the Sea_?

I was very glad to re-read it when:

https://www.usni.org/press/books/20000-leagues-under-sea

was published.

The context is that it was suggested as a Hugo Award Winner for the year of its release --- my comment was an effort to reframe that suggestion.

It would have been more interesting if it had been published in 1991 so as to directly invite comparison to David Brin's _Earth_ in which that author did much the same (imagine life in the future), or not until 2012 so as to be contrasted with KSR's _2312_.

Interestingly, another David Brin novel was nominated for the Hugo in 1996 (_Brightness Reef_, one of his Uplift books).

It was rather more prosaic, but I did put a flipbook typographic animation into the printed version of my article on Zapfino in _TUGboat_

https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf

One of the things I have of my father is an envelope which has some brass bits in it (I believe for a scale) which was mailed to my great uncle, addressed by hand, with only the county and state for an address in 1957 from Washington, D.C. with a postmark "Pray for peace" and in a box on the left of the envelope is written:

-------------------------------------------

House of Representatives, U.S.

Part of Congressional Record --- Free

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND NAACP IN COLLUSION TO FORCE SCHOOL INTEGRATION IN VIRGINIA

Address by Honorable Harry Flood Byrd before the Richmond Kiwanis Club, Richmond, Va

Extension of remarks of HON. WATKINS M. ABBITT of Virginia IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Wednesday, April 3, 1957

-------------------------------------------

U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.

I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm.

and it's worth noting that that county was one of the last to integrate in Virginia, facilitated by student teachers from a college in a nearby town whose post office is named for Watkins M. Abbitt.

One technique which seems to work well for stuff with text/numbers is to ask that a JSON file be generated which contains the text, then edit that, then direct that the image be regeneratd with the updated JSON content.

I've been moderately curious if one could get such a description of the visual aspects of an image and make get consistency/repetition thus.

Does Moment of Inspiration have that same lack of suitability? (I've long meant to try it)

I use it (for choosing tools) with a drawing program and a stylus (for the actual drawing) and it makes things quick/interactive --- no Apple Pencil support, and no ability to lay the entire device down flat means it doesn't suit my needs.

A coworker of mine launched a Windows port (clone?) of emacs when he came in for the day, and never left it for the entire workday --- always envied him his facility with that, but never quite got comfortable with it (and even in a fit of pique gave away a printed copy of the LISP manual which I kind of regret now).

The ironic thing is I've been fascinated by similar graphical efforts such as the Glamorous Toolkit.

The thing is, there are already some notable projects:

- FreeCAD --- exactly what it says on the tin, and making huge improvements, so that I am quite hopeful of 26.3

- SolveSpace --- surprisingly capable/nimble/lightweight

- Dune 3D --- the new kid on the block, it is quite workable, and has quite good documentation: https://docs.dune3d.org/en/latest/simple-part.html

(and for the hardcore programmers there are OpenSCAD and derivatives such as PythonSCAD)

Wouldn't the compute from the tokens for these projects be better used improving existing projects? (there are more of these new 3D CAD tools than I can count: Cadivari, Layerling, OpenSketch, &c.)

The Release page has:

>Download the Source code ZIP below and extract it. It includes the application, its libraries and the OpenCASCADE WASM/data files.

Fundamentally, poverty is a lack of energy, so this is potentially absolutely transformative.

A further consideration is that roughly 50 percent of the cost of traditional energy sources is transmission, so balcony solar is far more efficient on that basis.

It also enabled nxhosting, which was magical --- allowed one to do remote control over dial-up (so long as one didn't manipulate too large a pixel image).

I really wish Display GhostScript had gotten traction w/ the GNUstep folks.

On comp.sys.next.advocacy Mike Paquette talked about how he might not have stayed at Apple after the NeXT acquisition if he'd realized that that first decade was going to be a re-tread of his first decade at NeXT (writing Quartz vice writing Display PostScript) which I think really understates how important that code is.

An Uncle of mine, who paid to have electric run up to his mountaintop home at the insistence of his wife would have loved that sort of self-sufficient install --- he always complained that after running that wire he suddenly had neighbors, when before, there weren't any.

Any possibility that these will also support the Apple Pencil?

It was simply a magical thing in the early days, and one wonders how things would have turned out if for instance we had had MacBasic instead of HyperCard:

https://folklore.org/MacBasic.html

https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html https://www.folklore.org/Evolution_of_a_classic.html

(and it kind of kills me that there isn't a book on the history of HyperCard --- a quick search did turn up:

https://www.taskade.com/blog/hypercard-history

which seems promising (if a bit self-serving and possibly AI-generated.... will have to find time to read)

Same, although these days, all-too-often one learns of this when one sees a garage sale notice that the shop is being sold (picked up some pretty nice tools thus).

Probably the most annoying bug I ever encountered was in Quark Xpress 7 when in a two-column layout, placing a discretionary hyphen in a paragraph on the right-hand column caused a preceding paragraph on the left-hand column to reflow to a different number of lines. I tried to get Quark to look into it (it was perfectly repeatable) --- when they wouldn't, I pulled a couple of all-nighters over a weekend and shifted the entire project to InDesign.

That said, as a counter-point, there were also applications such as WriteNow which was ~100,000 lines of hand-coded assembly, which was quick and performant even on an 8MHz 68000 Mac Plus --- it flew on a 25MHz NeXT Cube (it was originally developed as a possible advanced MacWrite/replacement for it if it didn't ship, then was contracted by NeXT to make a bundled word-processor)

https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model_The_Finder....

BeOS was also hampered by promising more than they delivered --- I was just about bodily ejected from a BeOS user's group meeting when I asked how the presenter's slides were printed (at that time, BeOS didn't have printer drivers, a marked contrast to NeXT's use of PostScript for both display and printing and even having a rasterizer which had them adding a clause in later OS versions limiting the DPI for output --- folks were buying NeXT computers and using them to drive imagesetters, bypassing the normal PS license expense).