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mkosmulon Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

Designing origami tessellations: https://origami.kosmulski.org/albums/tessellation-examples

It's lots of fun, with folding allowing you to go offline for a while. The community is very friendly, both online and with IRL meetings such as yearly conventions in many countries.

Still a kind of niche within origami, so there's lots of room for novelty and explorations. And there are strong ties to mathematical and computational origami if you're into this kind of thing.

mkosmulon Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?

Allegro Tech Blog: https://blog.allegro.tech/

mkosmulon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://origami.kosmulski.org/

Origami: my designs and general musings

mkosmulon Five origami books by Shuzo Fujimoto are now public domain

Apparently a kind soul bet me to it and already uploaded the files to archive.org: https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Shuzo+Fuji...

mkosmulon Five origami books by Shuzo Fujimoto are now public domain

Apparently a kind soul bet me to it and already uploaded the files to archive.org: https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Shuzo+Fuji...

mkosmulon Five origami books by Shuzo Fujimoto are now public domain

Following the advice of another commenter, I'll upload the files to archive.org

mkosmulon Five origami books by Shuzo Fujimoto are now public domain

Great, then I'll give it a try

mkosmulon Five origami books by Shuzo Fujimoto are now public domain

This looks like an interesting option I did not think of. Can anyone upload there? If so, I'll upload them myself. I was mostly aware of the Internet Archive and did not think of archive.org when it comes to books.

mkosmulon Five origami books by Shuzo Fujimoto are now public domain

What exactly do you mean by "sharing site" and why is that more accessible to you than GDrive?

mkosmulon Five origami books by Shuzo Fujimoto are now public domain

Unfortunately, paper versions are currently very hard to obtain. The last reprint was in 2007 (Twist Origami 1-3, and Introduction to Creative Playing with Origami), and the volumes were too little to match growing interest. When starting this project a year ago, I already had most of the books, but getting those I didn't own was very difficult. The copy of Solid Origami I grabbed was - I believe - literally the last copy I could find on the English-speaking internet. I grabbed it from Kim's Crane (https://kimscrane.com/) and I think they had a copy or two of Fujimoto's other books at the time.

If there is an origami society in your country, they may have some of these books in their library (rules for lending may vary, of course).

These books being so difficult to find was one of the reasons I wanted to ask Fujimoto's heirs to release the books to the Public Domain.

mkosmulon Five origami books by Shuzo Fujimoto are now public domain

Not yet, unfortunately, since I don't speak Japanese myself. Google lens helps with some segments but produces garbage for others. These books are not the most approachable and many sections do require some background in geometric folding. Hopefully, with the books being PD now, we'll be able to get help and make them more accessible to everyone. Meanwhile, you can find links to instructions for a few Fujimoto's works scattered around the web (on youtube, on my web page at https://origami.kosmulski.org/ and other places).

mkosmulon Ask HN: Any emerging alternatives to Facebook and social media worth noting?

There's also MeWe (https://mewe.com/)

mkosmulon Paper Grain in Origami

The shake of the forming wire does help align the fibers in cross-direction, but the effectiveness of this is smaller than all the other effects combined, which align the fibers parallel to machine direction. So, overall, the process reduces the alignment to machine direction somewhat, but does not change it enough to make cross-direction dominant. So, everything makes sense: toilet paper is a long band, grain is aligned with machine direction (the long side of the band, perpendicular to perforation), and that's why it tends to tear "the wrong way". It was exactly the same with the paper towel whose picture is shown in the post.

mkosmulon Evolution of Web Performance Culture

Weird, I'm pasting the correct URL, https://blog.allegro.tech/2021/09/evolution-of-web-performan... but the domain is removed automatically when I view the link that actually gets posted.

mkosmulon Evolution of Web Performance Culture

Right, thanks for pointing this out. I don't know how this happened. I'll remove this one and make a new post.

mkosmulon Naming Origami Models

It's an interesting subject, thanks for pointing it out. Knots can be compared to 1D origami in a way :)

mkosmulon Naming Origami Models

Yes, it's available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDcAOTaCXHs&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...

It takes quite a lot of time to watch (it's a full semester course) but definitely worth your time if you're into origami and mathematics.

mkosmulon Naming Origami Models

A crease pattern [almost] defines an origami design so this is the closest to a formal description you can get. It's actually good enough for quite an advanced mathematical apparatus to have been developed which allows you to prove lots of things about origami in a strict, mathematical way. However, the crease pattern is still a 2D drawing, so while much simpler to describe than the final 3D shape, it's also too complex to be neatly described in words. You can, of course, spell out all the folds, their angles and lengths, but usually it will be too long to be called a name. For simplified cases with additional bounds, it is, however possible - in the post I list one such approach (by Goran Konjevod) which works for a certain type of tessellations.

mkosmulon Building a personal website in 2021

Thanks for the feedback regarding the clutter. Some parts have indeed grown beyond what I originally planned. I was able to remove the breadcrumbs and it didn't feel like a loss. I also shortened the social media links at top of the page since you were right to notice on some pages they took lots of space for no good reason.

mkosmulon Building a personal website in 2021

Thank you

mkosmulon Building a personal website in 2021

This blog's author wrote his own minimalistic static site generator: https://prog21.dadgum.com/

But, I think, doing things from scratch can be risky: ready-made solutions have a learning curve, but they also do lots of useful things which you might need, and writing all of that from scratch is really lots of work.

For me, it's always about find the right point on the spectrum between "write it myself to do exactly what I need" and "huge, bloated thing that claims to do everything anyone might ever need"

mkosmulon Building a personal website in 2021

Very true. Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder.

mkosmulon Building a personal website in 2021

Yes - with all contents stored in nice Markdown-formatted files, switching to an alternative site generator should be relatively easy.

mkosmulon Building a personal website in 2021

No, I didn't know it - thank you. It's probably too late to switch at this stage, but I'll have a look. It's always good to know some alternatives/replacements.

mkosmulon Building a personal website in 2021

Thank you for the tips. As for justification, I actually compared my "before" and "after" layouts and found the one with justification better for my taste. The link you posted has some very interesting thoughts, though, and certainly justified text on a web page is a completely different level of typography than text justified e.g. in LaTeX.

mkosmulon Building a personal website in 2021

This is a very good point - good you brought it up. I do care about not breaking links, though I did not mention that in the text. Actually, you can still reach my site by using the address it used even before the previous one, and there are still links on the web using that very old address, thanks to two levels of redirects.