HN user
GT EE alum, previously @ VRGluv, Google Wearables and Humane HW. Open for work!
https://www.services.egan.me
Bryan has been working on this forever! Truly a labor of love. Neat to see it pop up here. He also does illustrations of homes around San Francisco (amongst other things), which I highly recommend checking out: https://www.instagram.com/bmacomber_art/
Aerospace looks neat - might have to give it a try.
However, honestly, 99% of my multitasking pain on MacOS comes from the un-removable ~300ms animation delay when switching spaces. "Reduced Motion" changes the animation to a fade and doesn't solve the problem.
If I could instantaneously switch between virtual desktops I'd be so happy. I've wanted this for years.
Came here hoping someone would mention those absolutely cursed cameras - the ones with the pre-canned video of a guy in a back office "monitoring" the feeds?
Gets to me the worst when I'm on my 3rd Home Depot trip of the day BEEP looking through a box of pipe fittings that is filled with everything _except_ the fitting matching the label on the box BEEP okay.. the Home Depot website says it's in stock at the one 20 minutes up the store BEEP but, that's what it said about BEEP the stock at this store so.. but hmm BEEP maybe I could combine these two other fittings and save a BEEP ... trip to the other store, okay I'll look here for... BEEP hmm, the two fittings I would need to combine also aren't in the right BEEP box, but... it looks like maybe there's some that someone put back into a BEEP different box? Oh, wait BEEP _none_ of these fittings are in their correct box? What!? BEEP
Sorry I've just never had anybody to talk with this about. I hate those things with a passion. Let me know if you'd like to start a support group.
Has nobody learned anything from the Humane saga? I don't get it - if you have something so revolutionary and so great, just release it and let it speak for itself!
While this all is super cool, and I don't want to downplay TFAs efforts - I'm kind of at my wit's end here. You've gotten me at a bad time.
I use a computer every day to do electrical (and sometimes, poorly) mechanical CAD. Getting frustrated with/at software is a daily occurrence, but CAD software is some of the worst.
Egg on my face, maybe, but for MCAD I use Fusion360. It's constantly bugging out - and I'm not even talking about the actual modeling workflow or tools! I'll get windows disappearing and floating above other windows. It won't work if you don't install updates within a few days of their release. If I go offline it pops banners in my face. Sometimes, duplicate copies of itself open up, presumably because the updater put a new binary somewhere on my machine that spotlight indexed while I had the previous version running... Sometimes you can't delete files in the cloud because they're referenced by... other deleted files?? A few weeks ago I installed an update like a good boy, and it literally broke the functionality of _being able to click on things_ in the model tree.
On the ECAD side, I use KiCAD for most personal/professional projects these days - very, very few complaints there, actually. However, a new client is using Altium, so here we go... My primary machine is a M3 Max MBP, and I know it's running through the ARM translation layer inside Parallels, but Altium was completely unusable! Opening the component library or moving the explorer window took multiple seconds.
I dusted off an X1 Carbon, which admittedly is 6-ish years old, but it was even worse there! You must understand, for schematic editing, this software's primary use is to drag rectangles around and connect them with lines. How difficult can this be? I had to get a new Windows machine just to be able to navigate around Altium without constant stuttering. Honestly, even on this new machine it's still slower than I'd like. This software is upwards of $5k a year for a single seat license! [1]
I grew up using Macromedia Studio 8, which I installed from a box of CDs, watching my father use his Pentium 4 machine to make complex block diagrams in Visio 2002. In the mid 2000s he was laying out PCBs in PADS without any issues on a laptop! Now a single tab of Lucidchart takes more memory than my old PC could even address, I can't resize the godforsaken library viewer window in Altium on a machine with 16 cores, and if I want to change the settings on my mouse I have to sit through Logitech asking me if I want to log in and join the mouse community to share usage tips? What the hell is going on!?
So, forgive me, and not to go full Casey Muratori, but when I see companies like AdamCAD trying to push this new paradigm, I just can't handle it. Can we please, please, please, just go back to making decent software that enables me to do my work without constant hassle? I don't give a single damn about the AI features if I can't count on the software opening and being usable day in and day out. I lose actual time each and every week to dealing with software issues and I'm so so over it.
[1] $5k for a single site license, of which to attain, you'll have to sit in a sales meeting for a half hour, during which the sales rep tells you that - technically the EULA establishes a 0.5 mile radius for your "single site" but - don't worry - using it at home 3.5 miles away is totally okay, he's not going to make you buy two $5k licenses - thank god!
Concepts is nice. Subscription model IIRC but I’ve been happy with it. Nice options for different papers, can cut and paste/transform objects. Has multiple layers.
...his speech, which was attended by the CEOs of dozens of the world's largest automakers...
I don't recall Biden reading off a price sheet for a single corporation. Seems a bit different than what happened yesterday the White House.
Location: SF Bay Area
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies:
Embedded systems design
Consumer product prototyping and production
Bespoke art/installation design and small-scale manufacturing
Email: matt AT egan.me
Looking for new clients! My background is primarily in the consumer hardware industry doing system integration, but I've done everything from simulating thermal throttling for wireless charging to (most recently) building laser cut art for Figma's holiday parties. Particularly interested in opportunities in climate tech and electromechanical art.
It pains me deeply that they used Autodesk Fusion in one of the app screenshots. It is by far the worst piece of software I use on Mac OS.
Wish the nano-texture display was available when I upgraded last year. The last MacBook I personally bought was in 2012 when the first retina MBP had just released. I opted for the "thick" 15" high-res matte option. Those were the days...
Your app is stunning! Love the real-time map!
I'm working on some hardware in this space (I've been up to my eyeballs in GTFS lately) and I can tell just how much went into parsing and presenting the transit data.
If you're willing, I would love to chat about some of the UX decisions you made - specifically in summarizing and grouping the trips available at each stop, and your backend!
Plugging my own project here [1] for SF's Muni to say I 100% agree with you - the phone is a trap! There's something so charming about having a thing you know you can look at anytime and __no matter what__ it's doing exactly what you expect it to be doing.
Great writeup! You show things are difficult to debug even when you have a board where all of your signals of interest are easily accessible.
It's a bad week when you have a bug that only is reproducible on form-factor hardware. Imagine something like a tiny earbud where the only pin accessible while the device is assembled is a single UART (bidirectional) pin? Ouch. Then, if you can manage to disassemble the earbud - the PCBs are usually so small most signals never appear on the outer layers - so you can't probe them even if you want to! Oh, and the issue is only appearing on one out of every few thousand earbuds? Better not break your failing unit while taking it apart! Good luck!
Just watched the Kickstarter video too -- looks like a great product y'all! Best of luck :)
Wow! Thanks for this!
This is the second time that the EMF file format has come in handy for me. In college I used to export my Matlab plots as EMF so they'd import into my Word documents all crisp - it was the only format which enabled that (please don't tell the LaTeX folks I did my lab reports in Word).
I cannot stand the lack of SVG support in Google slides. When I worked on the hardware team there I hated that I had to import my polished vector block diagrams into slides as PNGs.
There was a 10+ year old bug thread with 100s of +1s for SVG support in Docs. IIRC the reasoning behind the delay was security concerns - seemed like a bit of a cop out, but what do I know?
Sweet! Would love to host this myself and get rid of my Strava subscription.
I wrote a Python script that iterates through all of my activities there and downloads the `.gpx` for each - I could share the code if interested! Not sure how you'd integrate it into your app - maybe a "import from Strava" page could handle the Strava API auth?
I also love this idea of self-hosting some web apps (especially if they're containerized). I setup a `util.` subdomain and have started putting a few things there at different root directories. It's fun!
I love simple light-based data transmission stuff. I've seen it included in things like guitar pedals that have just a few config bits that someone might want to change infrequently. An app to change some settings can be as simple as just a little webpage! So simple!
Here's a (tiny) demo of this for my PCB business card project from years ago [1]. If IIRC this proof of concept was as simple as using a phototransitor on a GPIO connected to the UART peripheral with a very low baud rate.
[1] https://www.matt.egan.me/entry/electronic-business-card-pt3#...
That's fair! I'm just not a big trackpad person since I find doing ECAD or MCAD with a trackpad to be not so enjoyable :)
Like others have mentioned, Sumatra is one of a few Windows-only utilities that I routinely miss when on Mac or Linux, primarily due to two simple interactions which I miss every day viewing schematics, mechanical/technical drawings or datasheets -- Alt + Scroll == Zoom and Right Click + Drag == Pan.
Does anyone know of any viewers on Mac or Linux that provide these two features? Skim on Mac implements Option + Scroll and Left Click + Drag Pan, but it's not reconfigurable to any other keys or mouse buttons.
Cool to see this here and people talking about it. I volunteered with the American Chestnut Foundation during my summers in high school. Usually spent a few weeks on the Meadowview research farm collecting catkins off trees, “processing” the catkins to bottle the pollen, bagging trees to prevent uncontrolled cross pollination, and pollinating trees by hand.
My uncle and I also usually took hikes in NC to try and find remaining trees with pollen in the wild. From what I understand, the pollen from these few remaining living trees is used to help re-introduce regional biodiversity into the backcrossed American/Chinese hybrids.
Highly recommend going and helping out on the farm if you can spare a week or two, or joining your state chapter if you’ve got one - or sending your kids!
Before COVID I was going to Endgames almost every week, sometimes 2x a week. Highly recommend.
Thunderdome on Wednesdays was also great. It's a "running bracket" competition. Two teams, 25 minutes each, audience votes on which performance they liked better, winning team continues onto the next week.
One of my favorite pastimes during COVID has been browsing the "free" section of the sfbay CL. Some truly weird and confusing things on there.
Can someone help me understand something regarding gift cards as a way to support businesses during this shutdown?
Gift cards are basically outstanding liabilities, right? If they're not accounted for correctly, when large amounts of people are able to redeem them again, they're left with no money to pay those expenses in the future. Obviously, things aren't as bad if ratio of gift cards to cash spending is somewhat reasonable when the business reopens.
Seems unless you can commit people to not redeeming the cards, you're essentially time-delaying the reduction in revenue.
Also, it's my understanding that gift cards are pretty difficult to account for normally (requiring looking at historical redemption data to prevent liabilities from growing indefinitely on the balance sheet). Some of these places are going to be accepting gift cards for the first time in their history. Is there any room here for a guide to help these places navigate the accounting of them?
I had a similar idea on a flight last week and decided to implement it using Love2d's shader support. It works with Love 0.10.0. Had some fun with it, if you hit "h" while it's running, it spawns a grid of gliders across the entire window, which you can then disturb by clicking on a cell. It's fun to watch the disturbance propagate.
Yes. Though they are pretty "hush hush" about the differences between the two classes, in fact, the course numbers are the same, it's just common knowledge that one professor teaches "Modern" physics, and one teaches "Classical" though, those are kind of informal, the differences are not in the material, but mainly in the teaching style.
At Georgia Tech, the labs associated with Physics I and II have a large programming portion. They had us use VPython [1], which is a strange package which includes a version of python and a graphics library. It worked pretty well, and I got a good kick out of it. They had us model gravitation of planets (using discrete time steps). In Physics II one of the assignments was to create vector field displaying a magnetic field, and then animate a magnet around the field in a circle.
I think the programming might have been a little too complex for some, as some people took physics first or second semester before having a programming class, and it became difficult for the TA's to help people with their code as they taught how to accomplish things, not accomplish it in a clean manner.
Overall though, I think it added a good bit of value to the course.
The integration of acceleration is velocity, integrate again and you have position.