ggcdn

A boring solution for a boring problem - Working with PDFs.

I've been making a browser-based PDF editor that runs on-device via Webassembly / PDFium. Many of the hard parts were done by the open source embedpdf project, and I've been adding my own custom tools on top of it.

It does the usual annotation stuff — highlights, comments, stamps, etc. working on some more advanced stuff now - regex search/redact, measurements and takeoff tools for AEC industry.

https://www.Draftpdf.com

Every time I have to open Acrobat it makes me want to puke, and Bluebeam is quite expensive, so I'm working on a full-featured PDF editor you can run in the browser.

https://DraftPDF.com

Many structural engineering graduate students still get exposed to TCL as its the input language of the OpenSees framework for structural and earthquake engineering.

https://opensees.ist.berkeley.edu/wiki/index.php?title=OpenS...

Luckily, there is also now a python interpreter.

I’ve been using these and vercels v0 to piece together a next.js app, and it works pretty good, for someone with no real ui design experience.

I can believe it, after all, I ingest most of my water in a mixture with roasted ground beans from the rainforest.

This exists and it’s not even that hard or costly when you consider the purchase price of a house. I had a home energy evaluation completed when I bought my house for about $400. A government could easily require it be provided as a condition of sale. It provides a rating [0] which is good for comparing houses, and also a prioritized list of recommended upgrades.

[0] https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy-efficiency/energuide/energuid...

This isn’t correct. You probably saw a concrete residential building and a steel office building by chance. It does not follow that every single office building is built this way. There are concrete office buildings all over the place, usually with thicker slabs than a residential building, because the office building actually needs to be designed for much higher loads.

By the way, the thin steel deck you saw gets concrete poured on it too once installed.

Excel is transformational. If you're reading this indoors, there's a good chance that significant portions of the building around you were engineered using excel.

A hammock hung in a shady grove of trees. Perfect for lazy Sunday afternoons.

A bunch of tplink smart light switches for the well used lights around the house. Deep satisfaction every night to turn off an entire floor with a voice command. Next up will probably be automatic roller shades, though they are considerably more pricy.

If you follow the inlet back to the ocean a short ways, you reach Gingolx (Kincolith) [1] which has < 400 people. It would be a fairly unremarkable place except they randomly started having a big festival called crabfest, which has brought bands such as Trooper, Tom Cochrane, and Nazareth to this tiny village.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ging%CC%B1olx

I suppose it was built without the back pressure (ie doesn’t rely on back pressure for stability) and the change in pressure over time is quite gradual (this drawdown has been occurring over years) so I don’t see a significant problem.

It also gets massively thick as you get deeper. Far more than you would think by looking at the exposed part. Check out old construction photos.

Nice. What was the upfront cost and expected payoff time when compared to grid only?

A bit of UBC apple trivia which I thought was neat is that the trees in front of UBC Triumf facility are descendants of perhaps the most famous apple tree of all, the one Sir Isaac Newton sat under while composing his theory of gravity.

https://news.ubc.ca/2007/06/07/archive-ubcreports-2007-07jun...

its every bored daydreaming passenger's dream come true!

Well, I guess I should rethink my constant urge to leave structural engineering and become a software developer.

“The grass is greener…” fallacy seems to be prevalent in most people. It becomes most intense when encountering obstacles, frustrations, boredom, and stress in the current situation, which makes sense I suppose. And it’s so easy to gloss over all the privileges that come with the current situation. When I was broke and busting my ass in university, I couldn’t wait to start my coop jobs. Then half way through coop, I couldn’t wait to get back to class. Now I have the luxury of living a comfortable life and there are no abrupt changes unless I decide to implement them. Yet the dissatisfaction creeps in…

I made this website for various little calculations and references I need to look up all the time for the day job.

Its useful for me, and kind of relaxing to work on, so I'll keep hacking away at it, adding new tools over time. But I haven't really shared it with anyone yet.

https://calcs.app

Built with React, hosted on Netlify. Probably riddled with bad practices, but it seems to work for now.

My current task is trying to figure out Fabric.js integration with React so I can do some more dynamic graphics (like general frame and truss analysis)

Interesting read, who hasn't dreamt of doing something like this (perhaps at different scales). I've started saving for a parcel of land in the Kootenays to build a.. ahem... much less grandiose dwelling for weekend getaways.

I would invest in a couple of these [0]

[0] http://www.onestopfire.com/sprinklers.htm

fyi email isn't shown, you have to add it to your 'about' to appear

This was really well written and researched, and I say that as a structural engineer who predominantly designs tall buildings. I’m not at all libertarian with respect to things like building codes which protect life safety, but I do agree that we over scrutinize aesthetics and architectural aspects of buildings.

When I think of neat places I’ve been to, places that really filled my senses, awed, inspired, they were not the sterile developments approved by zoning and urban design panels. They were more organic. Some examples of the places That come to mind include Rhodes, water towns outside of Shanghai, and random plazas in Florence.

I believe we need to trust that people generally want to make the world beautiful, and let them do it in their own way. I certainly won’t have the same eye to beauty as everyone else, but that’s okay. It makes the world quirky and unique.

Slightly different because the Burj is empty by design, while the other examples were empty due to market forces

Nope, not interested in paying for photo storage, although I do use it currently because it’s free and convenient.

Would rather just operate in Web 1.0 and download to my computer every few months.

[clarification: I mixed up my unit conversion. A 3/4" A325 bolt resists ~25kip shear or 31kip tension. One of the joys of working in an industry that primarily uses customary units, while codes are written in SI units]

Rigidity is good for some things and bad for others. In seismic design, inertial forces tend to decrease as structures become more flexible (Good!). But the consequence is that things move more (Bad!) meaning that all the nonstructural things get damaged - drywall, chimney, ceilings, etc. If things move too much, they also are subject to various types of degradation - yielding, fatigue, etc.

The other structural aspect not mentioned in the above discussion is strength. You can trivially get an order of magnitude more strength than required by even the harshest of loads using steel in a small structure like this. The same cannot be said about wood. For instance, a single 3/4" A325 bolt will be able to resist about 40,000lb shear or 70,000lb tension. The entire base shear of this size of structure in a code-design earthquake would be somewhere around 4,000lb.

A scissor stair can fit 2 stairways very compactly, looks like this is used on 432 park ave, for instance.

https://images.app.goo.gl/kz1826Y8xydc9G9L8

Right, but I think its the high quality elastic bands that would be difficult to replace.

“$X billion fintech” was my interpretation

That’s why I like buying things from Costco when I can. they have a 100% satisfaction guarantee on most items. And I’m willing to bet on the longevity of Costco more than any manufacturers of goods.

Ironically, that literally describes the intent of the building code, and seismic design philosophy of the past and present codes in the developed world

Being a structural engineer, I usually think the same way. But then I started tinkering with 3D printers, built a MPCNC, and have since busted my share of endmills due to accuracy and repeatability issues. Being off by a fraction of a mm is enough to bust your tool or mess up the workpiece.

Your points are definitely valid criticisms.

And the world (for CS-type folks) would certainly be better. For everyone else, I think it would be a whole lot worse. I don't think its a stretch to say excel had enabled billions (trillions?) of dollars to be realized without the need for CS staff, where CS/software purchases would have otherwise been required. I wonder if this is partly why its a reoccurring meme on HN, which has a heavy CS following?