sepples

Back when I was in grad school I set up an HTML/CSS to PDF workflow for making posters. It was surprisingly difficult to find a decent way to render nice-looking web pages with reasonably modern CSS to PDF without having things get cut off or reflowed. I had to use a specific prerelease build of a webkit-based tool to get my template to render correctly. I wonder if there are any better tools in this space these days.

Apart from that, the main issue was the lack of publishing-quality text justification, so I just manually added line breaks where needed to make it look decent. It still beat fiddling around in PowerPoint.

I first used FreeCAD around version 0.12 for designing simple parts for my 3D printer. At the time, it was very buggy and would reliably crash or corrupt your model if you ever tried to go back and edit a previously specified dimension or even just clicked the wrong thing. I ended up starting a new model from scratch whenever I needed to go back and change something.

I started using the latest versions (0.18, 0.19) again recently, and the experience is dramatically better. I’ve designed about a dozen distinct models and have been able to make major changes to a part without any crashes or bugs, and a number of much-needed ergonomic improvements have made the part design process much quicker and less frustrating. Thanks, FreeCAD devs! Your efforts are greatly appreciated.

That's actually a "feature" for IR cameras because 9+ FPS brings it into a different category for export control.

Northern Ireland is part of the UK, and the government currently grants licenses to carry a concealed handgun there despite having highly restrictive laws elsewhere in the country. I highly doubt this would be the case if there wasn't a strong recognized need.

Typical page loads were much slower two decades ago than they are today by my recollection, unless you were lucky enough to have something better than 56k dialup.

I don't mind it that much for programming languages like Python. The one annoyance I have is related to editor tooling: In languages that use braces to denote blocks, I can paste a block of code wherever and have my editor autoformat it to the correct indentation level, while in Python I have to be more deliberate with increasing or decreasing the indentation of a pasted snippet, and sometimes I'll make a mistake in the process that isn't caught until later.

I dislike significant indentation for configuration because the nesting tends to get deeper than for programming languages and it can be harder to see what's going on.

This is something that was fixed in the forthcoming TOML 1.0 spec. Parsers that have been updated to support it will allow heterogeneous types in arrays, which your application can convert to a vector of floats or whatever collection type it uses internally.

TOML is great if you think of it as JSON, but optimized for being written by humans instead of machines. I hope no new first-class types or syntax features ever get added after the 1.0 release so it can have the same stability that makes JSON great. The vast majority of the proposals that I see in the repo's issues would collectively destroy the value of TOML, and I'm glad the current maintainer seems to have the sense and fortitude to resist such additions.