WillAdams

There's a fictional take on this which is worth looking at:

https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm

It shipped, so mystified by the not yet printed statement on the web page.

Doesn't the _J_ in Jupyter stand for "Julia"?

Arguably, the effort of the reader manually transcribing the code into their own Jupyter notebook seems didactic.

OpenSCAD supports spheres, cylinders, cones, and stretching/scaling them --- granted, they get exported as a triangle mesh, but with small enough triangles and clever enough 3D CAM software things can look pretty smooth, and for projects of an inexpensive CNC there is inevitably some post-processing/sanding.

There are more low-cost 3D printers than inexpensive CNC machines, so that's a given.

That said, it's pretty easy to just output an STL from OpenSCAD, open it in a 3D CAM tool (Kiri:Moto is a free option, MeshCAM (ob. discl., I work for a distributor) paid) and get toolpaths.

Folks have worked up various other approaches --- I've been using PythonSCAD to output a DXF which can then be used for making toolpaths:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

LyX or some sort of Markdown editor with robust templates/stylesheets strikes me as more interesting.

A Word clone would have to offer something which Google Docs doesn't which is also what users want.

Thanks! My pleasure!

_Tolkien's Modern Reading_ has the following on Trollope which seems pertinent:

"His (JRRT's) appreciation of (realistic fiction) is underscored by his knowledge of that keen-eyed observer of contemporaneous political and ecclesiastical culture, Anthony Trollope."

I am currently trying to patch up my rather spotty education by listening to books on Librivox, trying for chronological order, so as to build a solid foundation and understanding thereby.

Yeah, that's why I was willing to pay for a book.

That's an interesting approach, and I'll definitely keep it in mind --- maybe 26.3 will finally be the version where I learn FreeCAD.

I will note that I was moderately successful w/ Dune 3D on the basis of its quite nice textual documentation:

https://docs.dune3d.org/en/latest/simple-part.html

>The FreeCAD wiki is very good.

In the past when I've looked there were a _lot_ of pages tagged as needing to be updated to 1.1 --- a quick search seems to indicate that enough pages have been updated that I couldn't quickly find any tagged as needing that for 26.3 which is a marked improvement.

I'm not patient enough for videos (though I have watched a fair number, they're just not clicking) --- I do far better with traditional documentation where I can walk through things at my own pace --- but I need for said docs to correspond with the UI of the application I'm trying to learn (hence my disappointment in the afore-mentioned text).

Reminiscent of

https://tug.org/tug2003/abstracts/pdf/yiu/yiu.pdf

have you considered extending this to include support for Chinese characters?

Is there an ergonomic UI for FreeCAD suited to use by the blind and visually impaired?

https://old.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1hrpusu/i_am_fu...

How do you feel about Python?

Soft-fork which bolts on Python:

https://pythonscad.org/

That was discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49960138

there have been a lot of free CAD tools being developed (many of them posted about here), but no one seems to have tried the traditional interactive interface approach w/o at least a text-based layer. My suspicions on this would be:

- adding the text-based description allows using an LLM to create models

- Fusion 360 and OnShape have taken up most of the oxygen in the room for '"free" traditionally interactive CAD'

- the UI is _hard_ --- poster child for this see the marketing for Plasticity XYZ (which seems to be a derivation of Moment of Inspiration 3D)

There was a post here which stated this quite elegantly a while back:

Parametric CAD, in my view, is a perfect example of ``visual programming'', you have variables, iteration/patterning reducing repetition, composability of objects/sketches again reducing repetition, modularity of design though a hierarchy of assemblies. The alignment between programming principles and CAD modelling principles, while not immediately obvious, are very much there. An elegantly designed CAD model is just as beautiful (in its construction) as elegantly written code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31471109

Will there be an update of all documentation?

I tried to follow along w/ a book which was purportedly for 1.1, but it turned out to actually cover 1.0

It's hard to approach learning FreeCAD seriously when one spends real money on a book which is billed as covering v1.1 on the cover and advertised thus, but once one gets to the actual text on the application, it says "1.0 or later" and all the screengrabs and terminology are for 1.0.

That approach makes it hard for folks to collaborate, and makes every sharing into a security evaluation and is a _lot_ more difficult than just scanning the cheat sheet and typing in some code and iterating.

I've been using PythonSCAD for a third approach:

- treat the CSG as merely a 3D preview, output a DXF, use a traditional CAM tool to create toolpaths from that file --- I did work up support for arcs, and am looking into more general curve support

It kills me that the typos in ebooks at least don't get fixed....

It's interesting how different folks approach his oeuvre --- I have a fairly extensive collection:

https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienbooks/comments/1oa01zr/four_...

and as implied in that link, have been reading his work since I was quite young, and dipped into the scholarship and linguistic angle when I picked up the paperback edition of _A Tolkien Compass_ in the early 80s.

I'm still a bit miffed that TUG2020 was cancelled, and am still waiting for it to come back to the East Coast of the U.S.

It was a search for "average cost of 500 billion ai tokens" which may or may not have been the correct phrasing, but seemed straight-forward enough that at first blush, accepting the AI-generated answer seemed reasonable.

To save folks looking this up:

>At current 2026 API rates, 500 billion AI tokens would cost roughly $100,000–$750,000 depending on the model, with most flagship models in the $150–$400 per million input tokens range

The thing is, the first editions were a _long_ while ago --- not sure how many are in good condition and for sale even unsigned.

Apparently some folks actually paid in advance for the full set leatherbound --- it'll be interesting to see the posts about Vol. 4 being delivered....

Thanks!

I went ahead and placed an order.

Hopefully it will arrive in a reasonable timeframe.

When I was making my presentation at TUG 2019 he suggested _dart_ as a term for a shape of "two straight edges, one concave arc" which then freed up _arrowhead_ for "two convex, one concave arc".

He is incredibly generous with his signings --- even doing one on the spur of the moment in his home when one of the presenters mentioned that he'd been unable to source a copy of _Mathematical Fun and Games_ (I had a copy I'd planned on getting signed, but instead passed it to his wife and insisted that she get a photo of DEK signing it for her husband and that they keep it).

Few other authors works have the legs to be reprinted sufficiently.

Make that all books.

It kills me that I was rebuffed when I asked for copyright permission to reprint the Tolkien text _The Old English Exodus_ on the grounds that I was a "Tolkien Nut" and not an academic, then, then I bought a boxed set (which contained 4 other books which I already owned), reading the book revealed 20 typos in the 22 pages comprised of the Select Bibliography and poem (they really should've just used a scan of those twain as was done in other similar texts).

Similarly, it's hard to take current discussion of _Dune_ seriously when the word "pogrom" is set as "program" in the e-book (and yes, I have reported this as a typo, and no, it hasn't been fixed, even though the publisher did "update" the book to change the cover).

The pre-order has June 2026, but apparently it's running behind?!?

A similar tool which directly makes OpenSCAD code is:

https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor

(though you'd want to import BOSL2 to do fillets and so forth)