jwise0
Joined 14 years ago
Joined 14 years ago
But these days, I do highly recommend Onshape -- it breaks down a lot of the 'rules' that I thought I knew about CAD software. I started using it about two months ago; one of my clients uses it for real industrial design of some IoT hardware, so it is powerful enough to do real things. Before I started using Onshape, I thought that 1) all CAD software was a million billion gigabytes, and required stupidly powerful hardware for no readily apparent reason, and 2) had an annoying licensing model that requires you to jump through hoops to get access to the free tier. Well, neither of these are true with Onshape: I went from 'hmm, maybe I should try this for my personal projects' to 'constraining a sketch' in about 90 seconds ... on Linux ... in Firefox ... on my Shenzhen ThinkPad ... with an Intel GPU. I was blown away at how much it failed to suck.
Anyway, my suggestion on choosing software is: it probably doesn't all that much matter. What you want to learn is the CAD mindset, not the software. An experienced MechE once told me that if you are not careful, you can end up writing 'spaghetti CAD'. These tools these days give you a lot of features that are, in theory, more expressive, but in practice, can result in unmanufacturable parts or unmaintainable designs: be careful!
And yes, the ELEMNT is an ok cycling computer, but I think with a few bug fixes, it would work 'at least tolerably' for hiking (that is to say, at least as well as the Garmin Edge 510 did). The Edge 510 was not a great hiking computer, but for 'datalogging with a separate battery from my phone, and capable of speaking ANT+ to my heart rate monitor', it at least captured correct data...
But also, the other side of this is that the attribution issue is, perhaps, only 50% of my thrust here -- the other 50% being that it's actually a really cool device inside, and it's neat to see how they managed to build a device that's (mostly) competitive with Garmin's rich feature set so quickly. And so that, I think, might be what would be even more interesting to HN, rather than just torching them. If they opened the platform up to tinkerers a little bit -- perhaps if they 1) unlocked the bootloader; 2) provided /system images; and 3) enabled a switch to give you access to adb -- then it would be a really really cool form factor of a toy for a lot of different uses.
In the early days of compilers, of course, you were mostly writing C as a macro language for your system's assembly language. If you wanted your program to perform well, you'd have to write C that was, more or less, a translation of assembly that you'd constructed in your head first. If you wrote bizarre C, you'd either get incorrect results, or if you were lucky, you'd get correct but inefficient results.
But that's also Dan's point: Verilog isn't a "high level language". You don't write programs with it, you describe hardware with it. (In fact, that is why it is called a 'hardware description language'!) So if you try to write a program, instead of describing hardware, you'll get something that isn't really either.
It's still not a perfect solution. I give up a lot privacy that way, and in order to use Contributor, I have to give up some of the other uBlock features that I really like (in particular, element-based blocking).
I will note, though, that I don't feel in the slightest bad viewing Facebook or Twitter with ads blocked. Facebook and Twitter survive by network effects; I couldn't reasonably opt out of using their services even if I want to. Since I'm forced to use their services, then, I think it's reasonable that I do so on my own terms.
http://www.joshuawise.com/