That would be Toronto’s Pearson Airport! Often ranked the worst or nearly the worst in North America, depending on the survey. It’s not great…

YYZ is a pretty great song though!

Oh, one other thing I wished I knew earlier: There’s all these drawing tools in the sketcher like line and multi line and arc and whatever. And coming from something like Inkscape I thought there was a similar sort of “path” concept, but there really isn’t. Every line is just a line on its own, just with constraints from its endpoint to the end of the next line. But you get those automatically when clicking with the line tool too! So early on, if I messed something up, I’d feel the need to delete the whole “path” and draw it right. Dumb. Just delete whatever line you need to delete, draw any other lines with any tool makes sense, and it’ll be equivalent. Just do whatever, the system doesn’t care and can’t tell them apart anyway.

Obviously if something downstream is depending on the position of that line that might mess up those constraints, but that was more likely to happen when deleting all the lines rather than just the one problematic one I forgot to make as a curve or whatever.

I watched a few of the digikey tutorials in YouTube for the basics, and that was good enough for me to get started. But also I think like a computer after years of software dev, and I’ve done constraint-based UIs before, so I think it was pretty native for me.

Here are some “once you know what the buttons do” tricks that I’ve learned:

Early on I tried to put all of the details into one sketch, because it looked like “what I was trying to make”, and then it was a pain to pad this and then pocket that, etc. Now I think of it as an interative process, more like sculpting, I guess. But also you don’t have to do things in manufacturing order either!

Maybe I want the outline of the case to be dependent on the screw holes, so it feels like I have to do them together. Wrong. In the Part Design workbench, in a single body, one sketch can just be the circles for the screw holes, because those have a fixed size and location. Done. Next sketch can be the the internal outline of where your board fits in, referencing the circles of the screw hole sketch using the “external geometry” button. Okay, now I have a sketch for the screws and a sketch for the internal bits, but I haven’t actually “made” anything yet. That’s fine! Now we can do another sketch for the outside perimeter that again uses the external geometry feature to be constrained based on the screw holes from one sketch and the internal space from the other, while maintaining a 4mn wall thickness around those features, or whatever. Great! Now we’re in a place where we can pad down the outline, pocket out the internal gap to one thickness, pocket down the screw holes to a different depth. The way we “built” the 3D features didn’t have to match the order we designed the sketches.

Now that we have that, it’s still mutable. We can at this point add another sketch for some risers you want, and pad those up. Great, what else? Maybe this edge is a bit sharp. Click it and apply a chamfer. Okay what’s next? You know? Just step through it getting closer every time. You don’t necessarily have to get all features defined up-front.

If things start at different heights, you can use datum planes! From your body, click the datum plane button, then it will be asking what you want to reference it off. From here you can expand your Origin in the tree view and click the XY Plane to have another one like that. Then you can set the offset in the task panel on your right to be basically 7mm above the XY plane or whatever. Great! Probably name it, and then hide it because it’s just visual clutter. But now when you’re making your next sketch you can attach it to this “screw height” plane, and be exactly where you need to be to either pad up from here or pocket down or whatever. And when padding or pocketing you can also use the “to face” mode instead of “dimension” mode, and pick the datum plane as your face, to have an easy “it’s as thick as it needs to be to get here” thing that will ensure your pockets down always line up with your pads up, for example.

You want a lid? Great! New body in the Part Design Workbench. But you want it to be based on your other bottom part so you don’t have to redo everything? You want a Shape Binder, which looks like a green blob for some reason. And if you have your lid as the active part (its name is bold in the tree), then you can select any sub-element of your main body before clicking the binder button and only grab that element. Like, for the lid you probably want the sketch of the screw holes rather than the whole thing. And maybe another of the sketch of the outside perimeter. And now you can use that as external reference geometry in your lid sketch and have the whole thing done in 10 minutes! And there’s even a chance that if you adjust a constrain on those screw holes later, the whole body and perimeter and lid will all adjust together because they’re all referencing each other. Of course, the downside is if you delete a line and redraw it in the screw hole sketch, everything downstream might break because all of their references are now missing. But having several simple sketches makes this better than one mega-sketch with all the detail.

The number one number one number one thing to not get tripped up on early is that an individual body, the 3D part, must always be connected at all times! Which kinda makes sense as a finished product, it has to be one thing, but it can be confusing when you’re in the middle of working on it. Your sketches can have shapes wherever, but the 3D part must stay contiguous. So let’s say you wanted some posts around each screw hole to act as stand-offs. Makes sense. So you make a sketch for the screw holes, which is just some circles in space and nothing else, and you make a sketch based on that for the posts and it’s also just some circles in space. And you think “I’ll just pad these down to give me the posts, then I’ll pocket the holes into them, and then I’ll get to work attaching them with a base”. Wrong. Sensible but wrong. When you do that you’ll only get one post, because the others aren’t connected to it! You can build up the sketches in any order, but when it comes time to realize it, it needs to stay contiguous. So sketch the holes, then the posts, then the outline for the base, but then pad the base up, then pad the posts down from the screw layer to the base layer. Or up from the base layer to the screw later. Whatever. Now that they’re connected to the base, you’ll get all the posts, because they’re one thing. Now you can pocket the screw holes from each post. Etc.

If at some point you’re missing something, or your whole body disappears, make sure you haven’t cut something off from the main body. Everything must be attached! If not, it’s a separate body and should use the shape binder, as mentioned, to reference cross-body external geometry.

Have fun, and don’t expect to be amazing right away! Oh and also, remember your goal is the print. Any amount of ugly in the CAD is something you have to contend with, but won’t affect the print. It’ll still be a case if you had to copy the constraints 5 times. It’ll still be a case if you used a circle instead of a bezier curve. You can’t see those sins in the print. And likely you won’t be starting a business of custom prints, so even you may never have to look at this CAD file again. So do whatever you need to to get the print. Make a new sketch that references the other sketch as external geometry and then traces all the relevant details in a particular order just to get the loft right. Ask me how I know. It’s stupid, but it works, and it gets the print.

You got this!

For sure, for sure. But if you don’t know it’s a time loop, then after 30 minutes or so you get thrown a hell of a curveball! And we love that!

Ugh, my bank does this. But they fucked up so bad, it’s on the client side and so slow that the page loads, and I go to click the login button, and then it moves out from under my cursor and I click the register button.

I don’t know who decided this was a thing people wanted, but they should have their UX license taken away…

I know we’re joking… but just in case people don’t know, π, despite what we call it in English, is the letter “p”, which ought to be said “pee”, and was chosen for “periphery”. Though “perimeter” could be used as as well. Because even though we have the special word “circumference” for the perimeter of a circle, pi is the ratio of a circle’s perimeter to its diameter. As in, take diameter, multiply by magic constant p, get perimeter.

Further addendum to the above, because I can’t stop.

If you’re a certain kind of abolishionist, there may still be something for you in Taler.

Taler can be used pretty trivially to make a “downtown dollars” or “store loyalty points” system, where the issuer is the store or local BIA or whoever and it’s just a drop-in open source system that already does all you need. And it doesn’t matter that you can’t move between exchanges, because they’re store loyalty points, and it doesn’t matter that you maybe can’t transfer them between people, because they’re store loyalty points, and it doesn’t matter that the vendor is fully auditable, because the vendor is the issuer, or at the very least the local neighbourhood association. And it doesn’t matter that the issuer can put pressure on the vendors, because they already can.

In this use-case, the consumer privacy component is also basically useless, but it doesn’t hurt and being able to deploy the system and use an open source wallet to “collect and spend points” is better that cooking something up in MySQL. So in that one weird way, Taler might be good for a local community because it’s a free software system that can just be deployed to do a simple thing.

More details on the above, Taler does allow to you send money to friends or family as a feature, but it’s in the same way PayPal or banking systems do. I send coins to the state, ask them to be sent to this other person, and the state consumes my coins, issues new ones for them, and there’s nothing private about it. The state knows each party and the value transfered. So useful, but not private. Or maybe the sender is still private, but the recipient definitely isn’t, they’re basically just an ad-hoc vendor, and vendors are not private.

Taler doesn’t have any of the “proof of work” environmental concerns of other crypto currencies, which is good for some people. But the reason it doesn’t is because it’s centralized and non-federated. If I get my money from Exchange A, I can only spend it at vendors who are associated with Exchange A. Period. There could be a scheme where Exchange A is a vendor with Exchange B, and Exchange B is a vendor with Exchange A, and this allows them to build a feature where money is allowed to “flow” between exchanges, but this is just the banking system again, and would be built on agreements and products on top of Taler rather than part of Taler.

Because of the above, the issuer (which I’ve called an exchange and “the state” above because I’m consistent) has the same ability as Visa and Mastercard to pressure vendors and shut them out. Because all spends must go through the exchange, and because there’s no safe way to transfer money without the exchange’s involvement, if they don’t like that you make trans comics, they can freeze you and all your money evaporates with no in-system recourse.

So for all intents and purposes, the benefit of Taler over current banking systems and credit card systems is that it’s an open standard rather than something bespoke, that I can participate in it with an open source wallet, and once I’m using it, as a consumer, they don’t know what I personally am paying for, but they do know what “people in general” are paying for.

That’s about it, because I still need to sign up to get money from an issuer, I still need a vendor account to be a vendor, I still am “locked-in” to whichever exchange my wallet was issued from, and that issuer has unilateral control over which vendors it likes.

But those benefits I mentioned above aren’t nothing, so it really comes down to how you feel about the rest of “the system” you’re in. If you’re an anarchist or abolishionist, there’s roughly nothing for you in Taler. It has hierarchy and control built in. But if you’re an open source person who feels like the legal system is the appropriate place to settle debates and that it’s more valuable to society to have something “simple” with no environmental impact and that doesn’t operate as a tax shelter or money laundering system, Taler can be that!

Since this is a privacy community, I’ll mention that Taler has some very deliberate, but interesting, stances in its design. It’s designed to be privacy preserving for the customer, but fully accountable for the vendors.

So the vendor doesn’t know who paid them (ID wise, obviously they can associate payments with orders or whatever), and the state can’t track who is sending money to which vendors, but the state does know how much each vendor got and who they are.

Because of that, Taler has no peer to peer transfers at all, if I’m not mistaken. It’s all “money is issued by the state, you keep it, and then spend it only at state-licensed vendors. End of options, that’s all you can do and that’s the only way you can do it”

Which again, they chose to do for reasons, like preserving the ability to audit companies for taxes and to prevent laundering and shady practices, but some in this community may not like that, even if it does preserve consumer privacy.

I’m not a Taler fan, but it’s my understanding there’s a pretty generous gap there. Like, if it expires in a year, your client will start trying to renew it at 6 months, so things would have to be pretty messed up for you to not be able to renew for a full half a year. That’s more like the system is just fully gone, at that point.

It’s not like the expiration is at 10:05 this morning and your client tried at 10:04, got an error and now you’re ruined.

EDIT: I looked it up rather than pulling numbers out of my bum, and the FAQ says the current wallet renews things a month early. So not as far ahead as I said, but still within the spirit of what I said. What I don’t currently know is if there’s a server-side limit, or if an individual client can be configured to request even more in advance.

Tom Sawyer by Rush

Agreed! 😛

I disagree! Empathy is about feeling what another person is feeling. And what I’m saying is I don’t think it’s that they’re not feeling what the person hurt by the system is feeling, I think it’s that they assume the system is working as is necessary, and the other person’s pain is justified or explained by something, even if they don’t know what. Their pain is a consequence, in the way that a person standing up under a shelf and bonking their head is a consequence of their actions.

So it’s not that they don’t understand that it’s bad until it happens to them, it’s that only when it happens to them do they feel like maybe this consequence isn’t justified by anything. And I think that’s why sometimes the leopard-face-eating doesn’t even shake them out of it. They’ll be like “look, I know you’re deporting people because they’re bad and they came here illegally and they’re criminals, and that’s great, but you deported my wife and kids. There must be some mistake”

And it’s not cognitive dissonance for them. They believe the bad people should go. They believe that all the people who have gone so far deserved it. But just now there was a terrible mix-up, because they know their wife isn’t a bad person. And once this mix-up is remedied, the system can continue in its useful purpose.

Everything local, I assume, means no upload? My dad does house inspections and so there’s like 4 or 5 pdf forms he fills out all the time. If he were using this, would he upload the template every time, or could he upload it once and then fill it out multiple times?

I assume also that it wouldn’t keep a history of each finished file, and it’s all ephemeral?

I don’t think it’s that they’re all psychopaths, or lack empathy. I think what it really is is faith, in a sense. They’ve been told bad things happen for a reason, that actions have consequences, and thus they have faith that the bad things happen to bad people who deserve it, because the world is a just place.

But when things happen to them, or people close to them, then they know that it’s not justified. They don’t know about all those other folks, but they know their mom didn’t do any bad stuff, and they know they don’t deserve this outcome. So only when it happens to them do they go “this is bullshit” and then get angry that the system and/or universe gave them the wrong result.

Okay, so obviously there’s the diagonal checkerboard behind him, separated by a parallel checkerboard to his left… but am I crazy or is the checkerboard further behind him diagonal but also has bigger squares?

I was going to make a joke about one of the world’s richest families not being able to get the pattern to line up across the wood barrier, but looking closer I don’t think it can line up because they’re different tiles…?

Get on the podium Shinji!!!

It’s good to know that literally every fire from now on will be “because they’re gay”, as though there have never been fires before 🙄

Maybe not a teen thing, but among children I think “because 789” could bring 789 into the discussion.

If instead of a giant omnibus torrent they put a folder structure on IPFS, it would be essentially a fully available streaming Spotify clone with the ability for people to “pin” tracks or albums or artists to have them stay locally on their device…

Just saying…