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My dream device is the "Solar A5 e-ink computer" - It's A5-sized laptop, so it fits in a leather zipped case for journals. If you're familiar with HP Journadas / Sony Vaios from early 2000s, that's roughly the form factor. There's a solar panel on the back of the screen / outside of the enclosure. The screen is e-ink, and the operating system is Linux Mint Debian Edition. For console mode, a good "writing station" applications are "mc" (Midnight Commander) and "ranger" - simple GUI for editing text in folders, like a blog/knowledge base.

Some challenges I've experienced: (1) Can't find A5-sized e-ink screens that accept HDMI as an input, (2) It would be cool to use a common Android phone, since there are many around. RaspberryPI is an option. Honestly, would love the simplest portable device that runs Debian Stable on a battery, (3) I have NOT been able to find small, A5-sized keyboards. Most small keyboards are cheap plastic bluetooth junk.

If anyone would like to seriously rally around this, let's talk'bout it. My vision for this laptop has always been "10:00 AM Austin Texas, sitting at a patio bar in direct sun, journalling/coding/writing". I have not been able to find any computer device that satisfies that situation, so there is obviously a market niche.

Can you share more about your journal specifics, and Anki deck + spreadsheet? Thanks!

Worth mentioning - for a long time, I found my handwriting messy AND my hand would tire out. When I was about a teen-ager, I decided to write in call-caps, very clearly. I've been doing that for a long time now, and worth giving a try.

What labs actually care about people, from your perspective?

Curious if we included package managers from operating system distros (example: Debian apt), in your experience, what do you suggest JavaScript/Python/Rust package managers learn / borrow from?

I read a book about this called Life After Life, written in the 1970s. A doctor spoke with hundreds of people who experienced Near Death Experiences, and wrote commonalities / patterns that most experienced. Found this absolutely fascinating. Coming from a non-religious background, I found this book somewhat of a brain breaker.

As others mentioned (including @BoardsOfCanada) - search for "NDE" on a video platform, and watch a few. I make no claims to be a professional assessor of truth/lies, but when you watch many of those videos, ask yourself honestly, is this person lying (or rehearsing a staged story)? Additionally, some mention "impossible" information (like an out-of-body experience, where they are able see something outside of the room, which would be impossible for their body to do; or receive/hear information).

What I appreciate about that book is that the doctor (Raymond Moody) doesn't offer judgements or much of his own opinions, but he tries to faithfully retell what the patient experienced.

What's interesting is some of the discussions the patients have with the "luminous being(s)" and souls/spirits/entities on the other side...

They seem to frequently ask questions like, "What did you learn (while on Earth)?" - and there is the implication that our souls are sent to Earth with a specific mission.

The people who experience these NDEs also often say that this other world (spirit/soul world?) feels MORE REAL than the Earth world, and that they report feeling finally "at home".

Other interesting observations - (1) they rarely smell anything in the other world, (2) many report perfect sight / knowledge (for example, can clearly see infinite detail of a mountain range on the horizon), (3) Often hear musical "chimes", (4) the "luminous beings" have a sense of humor, and are not judgemental during the life-review, (5) During the life review, they often get to see the experience from another perspective - for example, during a fight with a sibling, you can see the fight/feelings from the other siblings' perspective, (6) the people often come back with some sort of "gift" / power - for example, the ability to sense other peoples' emotions at a distance (like extreme empathy), or to heal people with touch. (7) Apparently suicide is a big no-no - the people who attempted to kill themselves were essentially "scolded", told that it was a huge mistake - "We" are not supposed to decide who dies, including ourselves - and that we have a mission to carry out, even if the circumstances are difficult. That was a bit shocking to read...

Pretty fascinating stuff.

I personally have not experienced an NDE, but I have spoken to several trusted friends - including a man who drowned as a child, and was brought back to life. He experienced the common "symptoms" of the NDE described in those videos... just the level of detail he can recall from the conversation he had with the "luminous being", and the extreme feeling of "home" and intense love he experienced - he said that since that point, he's not afraid of death at all, and after that experience, he felt strongly driven to become a teacher and help others....

https://www.amazon.com/Life-After-Bestselling-Investigation-...

Worth checking out, even if just for curiosity / open the mind's sake...

One option to check out is VSCodium + FOAM plugin. When editing a folder of Markdown files, you can cross-link to them using Obsidian-style links.

Later, if you want to publish the files as HTML, you can use MkDocs.

I can answer this with confidence, honed on 20+ years of notes / journalling:

// NOTEBOOKS

- Pocket x 2 books, dotted, soft cover. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015NG44ES

- A5 x 4 (2 x personal journal, 2 x work journal) (OPTIONS: Moleskin: A5 dotted, hard cover; fun colors; Lechtturm191: A5 dotted, hard cover, fun colors: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDYQKJLC?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_...)

// NOTEBOOK CASE

Galen Zipper A5 folio x 2 colors

Personal book: https://www.galenleather.com/products/leather-zippered-a5-le... , -

Work book: https://www.galenleather.com/products/leather-zippered-a5-no...

// PENS

- Uniball Micro 0.5mm x 2 boxes. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CRDU8QY?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_...

// BAG

- Think Tank Retrospective v2 shoulder bag: https://www.amazon.com/Think-Tank-Retrospective-Shoulder-Mes...

SUGGESTIONS

- I cut off the bookmark strings that the books come with - always gets snagged

- Be honest

- Use your imagination

- Have fun!

FreeCAD would benefit from effective

(1) agile Product Management,

(2) Product Design & continuous user-research,

(3) Improvements to test-driven development (TDD),

(4) transparent & open outcome-based roadmap,

(5) a vision to make the application easy to use for newbies in a maker-space, and (this is specific to my use-case),

(6) Improvements to the CAM module to make it easy to use this for CNC routers, and designing objects with sloped/curved surfaces.

- FreeCAD site: https://www.freecad.org/

- FreeCAD code: https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD

- FreeCAD forum: https://forum.freecad.org/

To echo others' comments: FreeCAD has improved significantly since v1.0, so I'm hoping this attracts quality & stability-minded develeopers, and a frequent release cadence.

I am thankful to the Meta / Facebook team for contributing time, energy & improvements to `ffmpeg` and `ffprobe`. I hope they consider funding the project, so that `ffmpeg` can invest in code quality, documentation & ease of use, community events / hackathons, and more.

Just an anecdote - I never used Twitter/X, and never used BlueSky. Recently (about a year ago), joined Mastodon. I enjoy it, find a lot of value there, and have interesting conversations (recently about Mint Debian Linux & sound-systems, and also maker-space CNC design tools). There seems to be active investment in good features & quality on the platform, including making it easier to host your own organization server.

I believe, due to the format of engagement, its easy to spend a lot of time there scrolling - so consider

(1) only using the platform on your desktop computer, instead of phone,

(2) limiting time - 25 minutes a day is enough!

(3) Mute spammers, complainers, people with negative attiudes - you can't catch them all, but you can intentionally shape your experience over time.

(4) Subscribe to tags of your passions (example: #piano, #makerspace, #drawing, #cats, #jujitsu, #cncrouter, #3dprinting), and try to lean into that instead of getting caught up in endless political reactions - which never ends. You can be intentional, and subscribe to people who have a positive vision for the version of the future you prefer.

Can you share details about Blender CAD/CAM capabilities? I have a CNC router (carves 3D shapes into wood), and exploring what tools can help with that. I keep hearing about Blender's CAD abilities - I don't know Blender well, so I haven't jumped in there...

Recommendations for local text-to-speech synth? Last year, played with Piper-TTS, Chatterbox, and some others. Ideally supporting English, Spanish, Chinese.

(1) PROJECT "AFFIRMATOR" - Start each day out right with chill jazz wake-up music, then life-success wisdom (Earl Nightingale, Tony Robbins, etc). In the evening, fun latin cooking music plays, and then lo-fi chill tunes. At night, your personalized vocalized affirmations & goals plays, and then drift to sleep with meditation music.

Tech details: I found that used, small form-factor Dell Optiplexes are great for product protoytyping. I'm in Medellin Colombia, and found that you can buy these for about $200 USD - they are often former Point of Sale (POS) or office computers, from about 10 years ago. They have SSDs, run quiet, and are very reliable.

For project Affirmator, I installed Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). Using Cron and Mpv to shuffle-play activity-specific folders of MP3s at the same time each day. For example, for the chill jazz music - I've got a folder of 40+ song MP3s. Cron plays those at 06:30. So it's like a calm, upbeat alarm clock. I'm not a morning person, so this is a "friendly" way for me to wake myself up!

For the vocal affirmation part - I built a Python tool that reads 200+ text affirmations from a markdown/text file. It then uses AWS Polly text-to-speech API to vocalize the affirmations into MP3s. Next, I use `ffmpeg` to add a variable silent spacer gap to the ends of all the MP3s. This allows your to hear a voice affirmation ("I am fit, athletic, and strong!", "I am a confident piano player."), and then there is silent space for you to say it out loud, or repeat in your head.

This project incorporates ideas & routines from: The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale, Tony Robbins Personal Power II, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and Atomic Habits by James Clear

https://codeberg.org/jro/Affirmator-app

(2) PROJECT "LINGOFREQ" - Language learning tool. Uses language-specific high-frequency word lists. Generates example sentences according to a theme/topic. Translates the word & example phrases to English / Spanish / Chinese. Uses Text-to-speech to vocalize the phrases into each language. These phrases are ordered by frequency. When you want to improve your language skills, you set a "window" range of frequency you want to practice, and Lingofreq will play audio files in this range. You can learn Chinese & Spanish while doing the dishes, at the gym, or before going to bed!

Code: https://codeberg.org/jro/LingoFreq-app/src/branch/main/apps

(3) Medellin COMMUNITY MAKER-SPACE / CREATIVE ENTREPRENEUR LAB I'm at Medellin Colombia - my mission is to create the best maker-space. I was a member of ASMBLY Maker-space in Austin Texas (great space!) and worked at Pivotal Labs (agile product prototyping / software lab) - so I'm aiming to combine the best ideas from those.

BACK-BURNER projects:

Documenting my Knowledge as "Public Knowledge Base" - https://codeberg.org/jro/Knowledge - Here are my notes on Python, Git - I'm bouncing between Obsidian Sync / Publish / Markdown (currently easiest way), and some sort of open-source knowledge base website (VSCodium + Markdown + FOAM + MkDocs + RClone). I haven't found a solution I'm happy with yet...

Open-source CNC router tech stack: - I have a CNC router (robotic drill which can carve 3D shapes into wood). Last year I challenged myself to operate it completely through an open-source tech stack. This took me on a journey of learning Inkscape (2d vector design tool, SVG), FreeCAD (3D product design / CAD / CAM tool), G-code (format of text instructions which tell CNC tools where to move and what to do), Universal G-Code Sender (a tool which imports CAM - computer aided manufacturing - designs, connects to the CNC router tool, and actually operates machine. It's quite exciting to play with! Used Kiri-moto (web-based CAD / CAM tool) to convert 2D/SVG designs into 3D shapes). Used OBS (screen recording/streaming tool) and a bunch of web-cams to live-stream tool usage to PeerTube Live (similar to YouTube).

Being "principled" about using open-source tools can be so challenging, but its quite rewarding on the long run.

LEARNING SPANISH - What's working for me... trying to read spanish books before bed. Handwriting a few paragraphs from a book into journal. Highlighting words I don't know. Looking them up later. Reading a book while listening to its audio book at the same time.

If anyone's interesting in contributing to these projects, I would warmly welcome that. Design, product, sales, project management, engineering/coding, marketing - need tons of help in all these areas.

Gracias! // JRO

Such a great and underappreciated movie.

Sales & Marketing guide / playbook for Technical People would be great. I am a solution/sales engineer and would find a ton of value in that.

Check out Kiri:Moto (open source tool which can convert SVG into 3D shapes, and export to G-code appropriate for 3D printers, CNC routers)

https://grid.space/kiri/

This may be helpful to you - a high-quality maker-space / tools forum: https://forum.makerforums.info/

I've seen a few HackerNews commenters frequenting both forums...

I'm in Medellin Colombia, and frequently see BYD cars on the road. I recently had an Uber which drove a BYD car - I was seriously impressed. For those who don't know, Medellin is extremely hilly, and somewhat of a mountainous bowl. I live pretty high up, and can feel the gasoline-powered taxis seriously strain & struggle. Meanwhile, in the BYD electric vehicle, it ascended the hill so easily. Truly felt effortless.

Recently saw a Tesla setup in the mall - so it does seem like they are kicking off a marketing campaign.

Every time I consider learning Rust, I am thrown back by how... "janky" the syntax is. It seems to me that we ought to have a system-level language which builds upon the learnings of the past 20+ years. Can someone help me understand this? Why are we pushing forward with a language that has a Perl-esque unreadability...?

Comparison: I often program in Python (and teach it) - and while it has its own syntax warts & frustrations - overall the language has a "pseudocode which compiles" approach, which I appreciate. Similarly, I appreciate what Kotlin has done with Java. Is there a "Kotlin for Rust"? or another high quality system language we ought to be investing in? I genuinely believe that languages ought to start with "newbie friendliness", and would love to hear challenges to that idea.

Meant to mention in my requirements: No Bluetooth! :)

I saw a friend's 2-year old e-ink Boox reader - it changed my thoughts about eInk. The refresh rate was quick, and he could draw using a stylus. Definitely seemed responsive enough for writing/programming...

Curious your experience with Mint Debian Edition. I currently use Debian Stable as my workstation & local server - I considered Mint, but since it was Ubuntu, I held off...

I am hoping that someone (maybe me!) will make a "write/program in the sun"-friendly e-ink Linux computer, A5 sized.

Use cases: Patio bars in Austin Texas, sunny Medellin Colombia, outside plaza cafes in Barcelona.

Thank you!

What would it take to have "vim-wiki" for nano (see also: FOAM, Obsidian)? I have always admired nano for how simple and easy to use it is, and would love to use it for wiki/obsidian-style note taking & linking...

I haven't tried it yet - async processing (and even using SQLite) is new to me, so I'm trying to figure out solution patterns which work for the now, and also I can continue to invest my knowledge in to solve future problems.

I will look into WAL mode. I am enjoying using SQLite (and aware that its not the solution for everything), and have several upcoming tasks which I'm planning to use async stuff - and yes, trying to find the balance between how to handle those async tasks (Networky HTTP calls being different than running `ffmpeg` locally).

I will check into `asyncio` and Python threads. I used multiprocessing as my first project into asynchronous programming. The previous use-case was using Python + multiprocessing to run MacOS `say` (using Python subprocess) - so I could invoke it 10-20 times simultaneously on my computer, rather than waiting for each to complete. I experimented a bit with how many concurrent processes to run (using `time` to clock how long the runs were).

Thank you - this is helpful. I didn't realize how important I was going to value consistency over quality voice, but then when you've got to go back and listen to everything for quality control ... I guess that is the drawback of this phase of "generative" voice synth.

Curious if anyone has strategies on how to perform parallel writes to an SQLite database using Python's `multiprocessing` Pool.

I am using it to loop through a database of 11,000 words, hit an HTTP API for each (ChatGPT) and generate example sentences for the word. I would love to be able to asynchronously launch these API calls and have them come back and update the database row when ready, but not sure how to handle the database getting hit by all these writes from (as I understand it) multiple instances of the same Python program/function.

I experienced that recently - just curious, since you're digging into voice synth, what are open-source voice synth (specifically text-to-speech) which have been working for you. Recently, I have tried PiperTTS (I found the voices very flat, and accented), Coqui (in the past - it wasn't great, and doesn't seem to be supported). I spent a ton of time trying to get Chatterbox to work (on Debian Linux 13) - and ultimately couldn't get the right mix of Python versions, libraries etc. At this moment, I'm using AWS Polly and ElevenLabs (and occasionally MacOS `say`), but would love to have an open-source TTS which feels quality, and I can psychologically invest in. Thanks for any perspective you can share.