The last two Apple products I purchased for myself were:
- OPENSTEP 4.2 --- for use on a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ tablet
- Newton MessagePad
I've been waiting for Apple to make a product which I want to use since the Newton was shut down, making do w/ a succession of Windows tablets and a Wacom One display attached to my MacBook, and a Kindle Scribe (recently upgraded to a Coloursoft), and a Galaxy Note 10+ --- being able to use the same stylus on all of my devices is quite nice.
I really wish that there was an agreed-upon/universally-accepted Literate Programming system (or that for a given system, sufficiently varied tools for availing oneself of them as to foster acceptance), but pretty much every programmer's approach is unique, incompatible, and a hurdle for anyone else to use their code....
It's also quite nice w/ a stylus, and Win2K was absolutely my favourite OS despite lacking explicit stylus support (as Windows XP Tablet PC Edition had) --- just need a 3rd party note-taking tool w/ stylus support and HWR.
I never got into HWR. I already type faster than I write with a pen. Waiting for it to convert my scribbles to text, even if it gets it right first time, is just a painfully slow process even on an ipad pro. I'd rather just use a touchscreen keyboard to write
It's nice for when one wants to slow down and think, or if one needs to take notes --- back when I was in college, while professors would often object to laptops, no one complained of my using a tablet and stylus --- also allowed for sketches/diagrams which I found helpful/useful.
I had a ThinkPad X61T for a while, and assembled a full set of accessories for it, but it ran hot, and I never managed to get Wacom EMR stylus support in Mac OS working (bought it to be a Hackintosh).
I really wish that there was an updated ThinkPad which supported the current generation of styluses (was looking at an x230T until I got my Samsung Galaxy Book 12 and Staedtler Noris Digital Stylus).
The Mercator projection is perfectly suited to its intended use --- maintaining angles for navigation.
That it was pushed into other usages was a function of cold war politics (makes Russia seem larger/more intimidating) and needs to be considered in that context.
Arguably, every classroom (and home with children) should have a globe.
> Arguably, every classroom (and home with children) should have a globe
Or even better is to build one. It is a lot of fun.
It is very instructive to understand why you need to shape the gores that you cut out of flat paper to stick them to the sphere. The boundaries of the gores need to curve so that there are no creases or no bits and pieces sticking out. Even then it is not going to be an exact fit on the globe, unless the flat material has some give.
The Mercator hate is a remnant of the turn of the decade. The unprivileged "global south" is smaller than Greenland!!
Except that Google Maps (yes maps, not Google Earth) has shown a globe for a decade now.
And, of course, pupils do have access to a globe. But somehow, people always frame it as an unfulfilled necessity that perpetuates "global power imbalances" or stuff like that.
> That it was pushed into other usages was a function of cold war politics (makes Russia seem larger/more intimidating) and needs to be considered in that context.
Is this actually true, or was it just done "on autopilot" because before universal public education most people using maps of the entire world were navigators for whom Mercator made the most sense?
I don't know, I just hear a lot of conspiracy theories about the dominance of Mercator. If it's not Cold War politics then it's "white supremacists trying to make North America/Europe larger and Africa smaller", and I think laziness and just going with what worked in the past is a more likely explanation.
And weirdly, neither does Klipper, despite having all the resources in the world to do so. Just not a priority since slicers don't produce code like that, and 99.999% of Klipper's job is to eat whatever a slicer sends it.
So suppose I attached an extruder to a Haas mill or something...
Yes. Another technique was to use alcohol rather than water since it has lower surface tension, but that was only workable for smaller models (which were usually enclosed).
Even if it wasn't a large size, it likely wouldn't be great. During my PhD on sprays, I did some (unpublished) experiments using isopropyl alcohol to reduce the surface tension. The nozzles I used were around 1 mm in diameter as I recall. I did not anticipate that the room would fill up with isopropyl alcohol vapor and (probably) tiny droplets. I wore a mask and maybe left the room while each trial was running. Breathing that likely wasn't great for my lungs.
It's a shame that there isn't a series of articles on such models --- saw the Chesapeake Bay model (mentioned in a footnote) on a field trip when I was much younger (and it was still in active use for research I believe, yes, as my kids constantly tell me, I'm old).
Simulation used to be essentially impossible, something one dreamed of, or had to pay for time on a Cray or similar supercomputer/cluster.
Apparently, the Chesapeake Bay model was built just as that was becoming feasible:
- OPENSTEP 4.2 --- for use on a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ tablet
- Newton MessagePad
I've been waiting for Apple to make a product which I want to use since the Newton was shut down, making do w/ a succession of Windows tablets and a Wacom One display attached to my MacBook, and a Kindle Scribe (recently upgraded to a Coloursoft), and a Galaxy Note 10+ --- being able to use the same stylus on all of my devices is quite nice.
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