I will add that FreeCAD has come a long way in constraint based and parametric part design, and I'm able to use it exclusively running an Arch-based distro.
Deltahedra has extremely impressive tutorials on YouTube. No fluff -- no long intros or filler -- 30-60 minutes of dense content, clearly explained: https://www.youtube.com/@deltahedra3D
I think I understand this — I mean, OpenSCAD was my brief gateway to parametric CAD, and then I got to FreeCAD via brief stepping stones of CadQuery and other packages.
But OpenSCAD isn't really parametric CAD. It's a programming language; it's parametric for that reason. But it's not really CAD, at another level, in the sense that it does nothing to "aid" your design work. It has no interim abstraction for generated geometry; everything must be explicitly described.
FreeCAD, though, is profoundly parametric, through and through, and really always has been. Indeed the parametric aspects are the main thing that made it workable before the TNP mitigations were added. It is not a limited CAD package, by any means. It's just a somewhat unfriendly one with a CAD kernel that has some limitations. Really it's almost better understood as a 3D IDE with some workflow affordances.
If you are stuck trying to get your head into how FreeCAD works, there are now three really good ways on Youtube: the Mango Jelly Solutions videos are incredible, the Shawn Hymnel/Digikey FreeCAD and 3D Printing course is good, and there are great recent videos by Deltahedra.
But what you will be able to make with it, once you get your head into it, is night and day different to what is possible with OpenSCAD. Because your parametric work in FreeCAD (or other CAD packages) can operate on the geometry of the result of previous operations.
Give it a try in the New Year with FreeCAD 1.1 when it is released.
If you want another stepping stone from OpenSCAD to FreeCAD or any other package, I really recommend you look at CadQuery/Build123D. This will give you a similar coding approach but it will introduce you to operations on the true faces, edges and vertexes of the output of other operations.
(FWIW I would not say that Sketchup is not high end, either. It's not to my tastes but it is quite powerful)
I'm self-taught with CAD, and have repeatedly tried and discarded FreeCAD for several years. (Tangent: perceived absence of a decent CAD solution in Linux is one of very few things keeping me using Windows.)
I recently happened upon a video which mostly changed my mind [0], in which someone successfully passed a Solidworks professional certification using FreeCAD. And to my eyes, their workflow was only rarely any worse than e.g. Fusion360, Solidworks, etc.
I've since been trialling FreeCAd via the 'bleeding edge' weekly development builds [1]... and it's not perfect, and it's a touch clunky in certain areas, but it's now more than usable. (In some areas, it's actually better than the competition I've tried, IMO - for example making and cutting threads.)
Outside air isn’t a panacea. There is often plenty of pollution right outside your window unless you live on an idyllic beachfront property. The humidity level outside is also rarely what you want in your home, whether it is too high or too low.
Much better than cracking a window is the use of ERVs (energy recovery ventilators) and air filters on the incoming air.
An ERV is a fairly simple device that exchanges air with the outside while mitigating the loss of energy and humidity.
Any modern home build likely has an ERV as part of the design, but it’s not like they can’t be retrofitted, and I’ve even seen some DIY-friendly window unit ERVs (but I’ve never heard if those are any good).
It's not mentioned in this article, but Geoffrey West's book "Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies" give a fascinating and approachable overview of similar ideas.
One of the ideas presented is the "quantization" of the exponents observed in power laws relating various biometrics. E.g. it's known that the larger a species' average mass, the longer it lives, and that this relationship is expressed as a power law. What West found is that the exponents in many of these relationships are integer multiples of 1/4! This book, and West's research, uncover the origin of that phenomenon, relating it back to the efficient distribution of material throughout the organism (certain branching laws of cardiovascular networks, or phloem in plants, etc.)
It's not hard to see how that could apply to things like cities and companies as well.
I recently built something[1] similar, though with far less effort and sophistication than the author. The goal was to have a plug-and-play audiobook player for an elderly family member with impaired vision. In retrospect, it would have been better to adapt an old phone or tablet with a macropad rather than build this on top of an espmuse speaker[2].
I keep thinking that a cassette player would be the ideal interface for something like this. The controls are as obvious and as tactile as it gets and the whole analog-mechanical experience is familiar to folks from that generation. If only tapes could hold more than two hours of audio ...
So much for "but deepseek doesn't do multi-modal..." as a defence of the alleged moats of western AI companies.
How ever many modalities do end up being incorporated however, does not change the horizon of this technology which has progressed only by increasing data volume and variety -- widening the solution class (per problem), rather than the problem class itself.
There is still no mechanism in GenAI that enforces deductive constraints (and compositionality), ie., situations where when one output (, input) is obtained the search space for future outputs is necessarily constrained (and where such constraints compose). Yet all the sales pitches about the future of AI require not merely encoding reliable logical relationships of this kind, but causal and intentional ones: ones where hypothetical necessary relationships can be imposed and then suspended; ones where such hypotheticals are given a ordering based on preference/desires; ones where the actions available to the machine, in conjunction with the state of its environment, lead to such hypothetical evaluations.
An "AI Agent" replacing an employee requires intentional behaviour: the AI must act according to business goals, act reliably using causal knowledge of the environment, reason deductively over such knowledge, and formulate provisional beliefs probabilistically. However there has been no progress on these fronts.
I am still unclear on what the sales pitch is supposed to be for stochastic AI, as far as big business goes or the kinds of mass investment we see. I buy a 70s-style pitch for the word processor ("edit without scissors and glue"), but not a 60s-style pitch for the elimination of any particular job.
The spend on the field at the moment seems predicated on "better generated images" and "better generated text" somehow leading to "an agent which reasons from goals to actions, simulates hypothetical consequences, acts according to causal and environmental constraints.. " and so on. With relatively weak assumptions one can show the latter class of problem is not in the former, and no amount of data solving the former counts as a solution to the latter.
The vast majority of our work is already automated to the point where most non-manual workers are paid for the formulation of problems (with people), social alignment in their solutions, ownership of decision-making / risk, action under risk, and so on.
You might find this course helpful then. There is a huge amount of information you need to consume to make an IC so having it all organized for you is pretty valuable. It will save you many, many, hours. :)
I'm not in the field, but I highly recommend Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic. Not a textbook, but an excellent one (and I've had people in the field speak highly of it to me).
My go to reference when I want to reduce rust binary size is the excellent https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust, a set of guidelines on how to reduce size with explanations of the consequences
I am currently using a Fovitec Bicolor 650 LED panel - it was cheap and I am cheap. I replaced the power supply with a higher-wattage unit because it flickered at max power, that might be enough to make me not recommend it but it works for me.
I previously used some adhesive LED strip lights on a 24x24 plate of aluminum. If DIY electronics are your aesthetic, go for it!
Racing through his mega tutorial was a great refresher for me on the fundamentals, and it's easy to plug in computer vision & related libraries/extensions/packages.
You don't need a computer, or even electricity. Thermostatic shower valves are 100% mechanical, and work beautifully. There are models available that will automatically compensate for both temperature and pressure changes, keeping the output temperature constant.
>Regarding manufacturing and machines/machining, any book or resources that stood out? I'm most familiar with the Machinery's Handbook.
I went to a top tier school for MechE and Materials, and would recommend two intro books: Engineering Mechanics Statics by Meriam and Kriage and Shigley's Mechanical engineering Design in that order . If you fully understand the contents of these book, it probably puts you in the top 10% of mechanical engineering graduates.
For a broader education, you can read Fundamentals of Heat and Mass transfer by Incropera, DeWitt, Bergmann & Lavine as well as Fundamentals of Fluid Mechanics by Munson, Young & Okiishi.
Understanding these two books will probably as well will probably put you in the top 1% of grads.
If you have a strong background in mathematics, these mostly deal with applications of linear algebra and differentials, so the value is understanding the applications.
From there, you can branch out. If applicable, Ogata's Modern Control Engineering and Tongu's Principles of vibration
Most undergraduates dont really understand these due to the heavy application of Laplace and Fourier transforms, but are relevant if you want to build complex machines.
CO2 sensors for every room in my apartment. Before monitoring the CO2 levels I did not realize the relation of tiredness, mental fatigue and high CO2 levels.
Cost about 30€ instead of previously used 3€ cotton T-shirts.
Can wear one for about 3 weeks without washing, with no body odor. Much more pleasant to the skin, even for doing sports, driving, etc. Also, warm in winter, airy in summer. Plan to switch most clothing to merino wool.
We set up a motorized curtain in our bedroom. It's been really nice to black everything out at night while sleeping (some of our neighbors leave outdoor lights on) but in the morning, wake up with natural light
If you need something portable while walking around the house, I recently bought this rechargeable heated vest for my wife https://fieldsheer.com/products/summit-vest-women-s# who hates the cold. She LOVES this vest, wears it every evening. This was possibly my most successful gift in our 12 year marriage.
And I don't mean to keep promoting this brand but I've got their heated ski gloves too and they're amazing. I was night skiing and saw that one of the ski patrol ladies had a lit LED on her gloves. I asked her what that was and he told me it was this: https://fieldsheer.com/collections/womens/products/storm-glo... (wait, I wear women's gloves?) They're fantastic, I wore them skiing in 10ºF Vermont weather from 9am to 3pm on low heat. The batteries died around 3ish but I had hand warmers after that.
intro: freedman, Pisani, purves. Very clear and accessible.
Intermediate/advanced: casella and Berger
Advanced: Bickel and doksum
Overview of ML and modern stat methods: efron and hastie
You are spoiled for good choices frankly.
What’s the best textbook you have read about X? In general the answer is “the third one.” By that time things sink in and the third book seems super clear and understandable.
I wonder what the battery life. ESP32 tend to be very power hungry with WiFi, not sure about pure BLE operation. This is why simple long-lasting (eg Withings, misfit) watches use nrf52 chips.
Currently using Time4VPS with no issues so far: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (affiliate link, personally i find it to be an affordable VPS host that i've used for years and host most of my stuff on).
I think the actual question would be: "Which VPS hosts have the least blacklisted IP addresses for hosting mail servers?" But i'm afraid that i cannot answer that one, because after a brief search i could not find any articles, which would check the IP blocks owned by different hosts and what percentage of them are in blacklists, which would probably be a large undertaking.
Until then, most of the answers will probably be subjective, along the lines of: "I use $HOST without many problems." (like my answer above, though even then someone could get a blacklisted IP address and their answer would be the exact opposite to mine).
