WillAdams

Do any opensource CAD programs support AutoLisp?

Discussion of FreeCAD adding it here: https://forum.freecad.org/viewtopic.php?t=49989

Except I believe only CadQuery among those listed outputs useful STEP files.

In the context of CAD applications as being discussed

Notably, PythonSCAD is a soft fork, so stays in synch w/ OpenSCAD

Is there a contemporary implementation of these concepts which is readily accessible and well-documented and easy-to-use?

Notably, libfive is (was?) integrated into PythonSCAD.

The great thing about OpenSCAD is that it makes it easy to model objects which may be represented by positioning/stretching/adding/subtracting cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones using mathematics.

The awful thing about OpenSCAD is what one can model in it is directly limited to ones fluency and facility with using math to position, stretch, add, and subtract cubes, spheres, cylineders, and cones.

There is an entire book series on using it didactically:

- Geometry: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58059196-make

- Trigonometry: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123127774-make

- Calculus: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61739368-make

and there is a new book on Physics: https://www.makershed.com/products/make-physics

Interesting. I'll have to try to look into what the integration of flet.dev/Python w/ that code looks like.

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.