Blender seems like a decent fit for this project, as the geometry is fairly simple and there shouldn’t need to be a ton of precision anywhere. Anything where geometry doesn’t need to match any already existing hardware particularly well, it is usually much faster to prototype in Blender in my experience. For certain things though, especially when you get curved surfaces involved, blender becomes the much harder option. Parametric obviously has many other advantages, but the stuff you can do with curved surfaces, booleans, and bevels in CAD tools is often extremely difficult to recreate in Blender.

Well yea, this one came out in 2014

Probably would look relatively similar to this camera when using a regular amount of zoom?

I’m sure there are a lot of earlier ones as well tho

well, i measured that on windows (since I still run windows on my main PC) but I assumed it would be similar on linux lol

will cost probably a lot more but if you find a good deal on a superzoom camera those are neat because at the max zoom range you can get some shots that not many other cameras can take (and certainly not phones)

I got a used sx60 hs for like $200 a couple years ago, compared to my phone (oneplus 12) it’s decent at macro, great at high zoom, but worse at basically anything else. of course if you want that look then it’s good for that too lol.

Also keep in mind that those all have pretty small sensor sizes (actually apparently the sx60 hs has exactly the same sensor size as this camera) so you need the area to be pretty bright for max zoom to be usable, and fast subjects are pretty hard.

curated photo dump:

TV

captive birds

wild birds (i really don’t know why that hawk let us get so close to it…)

full zoom

macro (it can actually focus on the lens, if you ever want to do that)

top of the london eye

random helicopter

can get some nice bokeh

full zoom range across the thames

steam is like 500 MB of ram by itself at least for me rn, so add any game or os stuff on top and it rounds up to a gigabyte

Windows file manager opens things in apps based on file extensions, and then it’s up to the apps to figure out what to do with it. I did a bit of testing, and it seems like Firefox is fine with opening JPEGs mislabeled as PNGs, but not PDFs mislabeled as PNGs. LibreOffice Draw is fine with that though, so if in windows I set that as my default for PNG files, it opens a PDF labelled as a PNG perfectly normally (and can also open actual PNGs normally).

If I just completely delete the extension from a PNG or PDF, Firefox will open either correctly.

obviously tests aren’t everything and don’t necessarily reflect user experience, and idk what that jump in safari at the end is from, but chrome clearly has some things going for it.

currently chrome passes 97.4% of applicable tests, firefox passes 95.8%, safari 94.8%, ladybird 92.9%, and servo 89.6% (a lot of the bulk is “easy” stuff like text encoding)

https://wpt.fyi/

Reminded of how, for some unfathomable reason, the way you access the task manager on ChromeOS is through the hamburger menu in the bar of the Chrome browser. Plus the popups “gmail actually works much better in chrome!! trust me!!”

I can see how people could get confused lol

It’s funny how that question can become serious again when you do actually know what you’re talking about

I remember this video addressing it at the end and basically giving up because it’s so meaningless lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmPIxfCggFw

There’s the people who know what source code is, then the subset of those who have heard of open source, then the subset of those who actually know what it means as opposed to like source available

I first got introduced to Blender in basically the same way back in elementary school

those computers probably weren’t actually very restricted, but none of us knew enough about computers for that to matter lol. as long as they blocked us from going on the download pages

other stupid thing someone figured out how to run was that Star Wars ASCII thing in the terminal (lol looked it up and found this article https://www.instructables.com/How-to-get-an-ASCII-Star-Wars-movie-on-Mac/)

Conflicted on filename extensions. For the average person it works just fine, and I suppose that’s what probably matters. It’s not very common for not knowing the details of how they work to matter. It’s just silly that the same information is also in the start of the file 99% of the time. It is nice though to have a readable, usually reliable label, and then have a signature anyways for when different names overlap. Wikipeda lists 4 completely unrelated types with a .mod extension, for example.

Pretty much any application will correctly open any file type it supports, regardless of the extension. So it is quite unintuitive that you could have a file named “.png” that seems to work completely fine yet is actually a jpeg or something. But that hopefully isn’t a case that people run into very often, so it probably doesn’t matter.

maybe orcaslicer for 3d printing people? seems like the most popular nowadays, although it’s getting so fragmented with every manufacturer’s own slicer branch…

yeah, this is hard

oh, people who do streaming or youtubing stuff probably know OBS

there’s also probably a certain demographic for audacity

you could have a camera host a local web server lol

… i guess i’ve kinda done that in first robotics (although that was a live feed)

2.8e-7 kWh per second!

I had an asus rtx 3060 for ~4 years and the only problem I am had with it was the RGB sometimes not working because of software issues.

If you can give ChatGPT the transcript and it can say “yes that’s about ____”, then that means it’s certainly possible for them to do the same. I would expect that anything trained specifically for that should only get better from there, although obviously they’re not going to throw ChatGPT-sized compute at it.

Well, no matter. Because I’m STILL holding all the cards, and guess what: they’re allll Full Houses!

Puppet master! You’re a puppet in a play, and I hold all the strings! And cards, still. Cards in one hand, strings in the other. And I’m making you dance like a puppet. Playing cards.

(From Portal 2)

With a super lightweight laptop, 5w is achievable during light usage. I have one that draws that. It’s usable for Google Docs sort of stuff indefinitely on a 5w charger. It can also go down to ~2.2w with low screen brightness and very low load. It is absolutely terrible though, celeron 3855u. I got Minecraft Java to run at 60 fps though… But it was probably using 7-12w then.

With a modern arm chip, you could get pretty great performance at that power draw. My phone (snapdragon 8 gen 3) in power saving mode can be like 5-10x faster at about 6 watts it seems like.

Glancing around my room and I’m pleasantly surprised at the amount of whimsy I have on display