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No need to go crazy with the first one. That first step from laptop keyboard or membrane pack-in is the biggest jump you’ll ever make in typing experience. a brown-switch gamer board with the RBG turned off and some cheap Amazon “CSA” style keycaps might be all you’d ever need. Of course, even that type of thinking can lead to certain… rabbit holes.

I never truly learned to type, though I had a few weeks instruction in school, and did a few levels of Mario Teaches Typing when I was a kid. None of it really stuck, and typing remains an exercise in hand-eye coordination for me. I topped out at around 70-80 WPM if I’m composing rather than copying, but that’s been good enough for a lifetime of office jobs, and certainly for writing school essays. There is definitely a lower ceiling if you don’t get proper instruction, but simple practice is still helpful.

Drawing an imaginary factory- and they wanted kids to do this before teaching them the parts of the cell- isn’t going to help you learn what mitochondria are.

That sounds like it’s an exercise meant to get the kids thinking about a multi-faceted system existing inside a single structure, with parts that are interconnected but distinct, and will lead into a common metaphor teachers use to teach about biological cells. Not being graded means they’re not judging the kids on what they know or don’t, but want to evaluate where they are with this sort of thinking and figure out what they will focus on. Also, your kid may be smart and already know where they’re going with this, but others in the class may not. If she does, she could probably knock that out in fifteen minutes. Even if you decide that she doesn’t need to do it, I don’t think it’s stupid busy work, at least not necessarily.

Some teachers are dumb; we need too many of them and pay them too little for each and every one to be a superstar. The ones coming up with curricula and lesson plans usually aren’t, though.

Abiword is okay for now, I guess, but it’s basically a zombie, waiting for dependencies to break:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=412196

The sense I get is that it is more lazy than anything. The verbiage feels like the fact that designs were public documents was tacked on last minute to satisfy some desire for market segmentation or to create a parts and design library to draw traffic. It would make sense that the company hosting the software would not want the headache of being unable to use your stuff commercially or even of parsing what they could use, since in some sense they always are using everything commercially. Refusing the to thread the needle with their verbiage, though, has left a situation where the Terms of Use say clearly that (1) a design is Content, (2) a free user’s Content is a public document, (3) a free user cannot use their own public documents for commercial use, and (3) a free user grants EVERY OTHER USER a license to sell their public documents.

1. “End Users’ files, designs, models… (collectively, “Content”).”
2. “All documents created by a Free Plan User, and all Content contained therein, is made public and therefore considered a Public Document.”
3. “If you intend to use the Service outside a trial context to create and/or edit intellectual property for commercial purposes (including but not limited to developing designs that are intended to be commercialized and/or used in support of a commercial business), then you agree to upgrade to a paid subscription to the Service.”
4. “For any Public Document owned by a Free Plan User… Customer grants a worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to any End User or third party accessing the Public Document to use the intellectual property contained in Customer’s Public Document without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Document, and to permit persons to whom the Document is made available to do the same.”

The only possible wrinkle is that the ToU distinguish between a “Customer” and an “End User,” so maybe you the customer can grant you the End User the same commercial rights that Joe the slightly shady CNC machinist in Peoria has when he downloads your widget to fabricate and sell. Something tells me that PTC’s license compliance folks don’t interpret things that way, though.

The issue with FreeCAD is that all the workarounds (so far) are manual. Other apps may well be doing similar things, but they’re doing them behind the scenes and the user doesn’t have to (for instance) specifically set up a datum plane offset at the exact same distance as the face you want to sketch on and either manage it by hand or use an integrated spreadsheet to set up and reference variables.

I like what I see coming out of FreeCAD these days, but stuff like that is… umm, a lot.

The dirty secret of FreeCAD is that most drawings that look okay will extrude even if unconstrained. You just lose the ability to leverage the history tree and the model will be as brittle as any direct modeler’s.

FreeCAD is on its way, it’s attracting a little more money and attention, and I’m using it more and more, but I often still feel like I’m fighting it.

If you are comfortable with all your models being available for download and some wonky Terms of Use that may let random internet people profit off your designs but not you, then OnShape in a full-screen browser feels about as good as F360 does. I guess you could also pay for it, but despite finding it pretty nice, I am iffy about paying Solid Edge prices for something browser based. I understand SolidWorks has slapped together a browser version as well, but nobody likes it.

Linux wise, there’s just not much outside FreeCAD and SolveSpace. BricsCAD is an okay evolution of AutoCAD, and VariCAD is a less good one.

I may have done a longer writeup than anybody needed the other day.

Yup. This is corollary to the other post talking about diameter. If you make a perfect circle with your perfect meter of perfect string, suddenly you can no longer perfectly express the diameter in SI units, but rather it’s estimated at 31.8309886… cm. Nothing is wrong with the string in either scenario.

I think it’s a nice enough idea, and I hope it sets a reasonable baseline for what enthusiast and workstation laptops will be as the entabletification of the mainstream computing device continues, but right now it’s sort of a solution waiting for its problem. Economically, it doesn’t make much sense for one person to buy one. In an actuarial sense, it’s almost certainly better to buy something you like that’s less modular, and replace it if it breaks or stops being useful for your intended tasks. Of course if no one who wishes them well buys their computers, they won’t last long enough to be relevant.

Strictly speaking, just standardizing and providing the physical specifications ends up making their dongles more like headers on a desktop motherboard, potentially a commodity piece that anyone could replicate. Their other modular components seem to have a similar idea. It all seems elegant enough, and ready to “backscale” into a distributed niche industry if the big companies stop making powerful proprietary machines at the scale that keeps them cheap. As it stands, they sort of ARE de facto proprietary, but I guess the idea is that there will be enough enthusiasts, hardware hackers, and evangelists paying a sizeable, but not crippling, premium to keep them afloat and gain the mindshare to become a new standard (and hopefully halo brand) when people need to build laptops like they build towers now.

Just used it to do a clean install to move my ThinkPad from Ubuntu 22.04 to Kubuntu 23.10. Good tool, and much nicer than constantly “burning” ISOs to the flash drive.

They also play college football, mostly in the North. I understand the quality of play is about D3.

A few stores, in my area it’s particularly clothing discounters, seem to have moved to that model, and as long as you plan your checkout areas even sort of halfway well, it’s a million times better.

And god what a sad death Fry’s had. It went from the bona fide nerd store to a disaster. Eventually the ones in Dallas-Fort Worth were just zombie husks riding out the leases and selling leftovers on consignment from the few manufacturers who couldn’t be bothered to come repossess the inventory after the store failed to pay their invoices.

That was added in 1981 when it popped back into theatres after Empire. It was not original, but it was a very early addition, and since ESB came out in the interim as Episode 5 from the get-go, very much a retcon in the George style.

I’ve had a fairly decent one with a Canon small-office B&W laser. It needs to be reset every so often, and it doesn’t seem to like my wife (though no printer ever does), but its apps and drivers are mostly business related, so while they are more than happy to help you buy supplies, they don’t force the issue, and the printer doesn’t care what brand of toner you shove in it. 99% of the time it’s just sitting there quietly on its LAN address, ready to print something successfully.

She just got an HP multi-function from work, and dear god that thing is annoying. It kept claiming that its own demo ink was counterfeit. Also fairly mediocre color prints.

I was assured by Ted Lasso that this will turn out okay.

The description of the Hogarth series is probably about as close as I’ve seen to what OP seems to be asking for, but obviously creatives in all media have been adapting Shakespeare for ages.

They may find a basic “nuts and bolts” adaptation to be a bit lacking though. Ol’ Willy Shakes tended to lift his plots from middle-brow history books and from earlier plays. The brilliance came in the specific use of language and from stretching the psychological intimacy and realism of the characters in ways that were unprecedented, but which has become the norm, and might feel stale at this point. Frankly, the plays would have been viewed as sloppy and vulgar by many in the upper class, even if they found them compelling in a “best of that lower sort of thing.” Shakespeare had to hustle and write “proper” poetry to build a reputation during his lifetime, and what was the net result of being the most brilliant literary innovator in English since Chaucer and possibly ever? He got to be like the second or third richest man in little Stratford-upon-Avon and told enough lies and paid enough bribes to get his dad a coat of arms.

That’s his preferred coffee taste and that’s what he demands the company makes.

I’m sure it’s also completely coincidental that burnt coffee tastes mostly same no matter where and when the beans came from. :-)

I normally use that same coffee in an Ikea French Press and while I won’t say it’s gourmet, it meets my needs for “not particularly bitter caffeine juice”. Honestly, I slowed it down the next time I did a single cup pourover and that took most of the battery acid notes out of it.

I don’t have a particularly sophisticated palate and still want some sugar and milk in there; I just don’t like Starbucks very much and hate paying a premium for a product that I like less than my homemade half-assery. :-)

If you need drinkable brewed coffee from SB, you have to order the blonde roast. They scorch the everliving fuck out of their regular stuff to ensure consistency regardless of source, so even if you normally don’t, if you want “black” coffee from SB, you’ll be better off with the blonde. If you’re brewing by volume of grounds, lighter roast will have more caffeine anyway (they’re the same if you brew by weight).