Edit: I posted because I was curious about your opinion, but now I realize it just looks like I stopped by to insult TurboCAD for no reason.

A display that you could actually read outdoors was super useful for me. I used the XO-1 for a few months as my actual laptop after my macbook died and I bought a macbook pro. Those were literally unusable outdoors and for a while I would carry the XO-1 around with me instead of my laptop just because I could actually use it. Honestly if they keyboard had not been complete crap I might have never replaced my macbook.

Even today my laptops 500 nit display is only usable outdoors at 100% screen brightness and destroys my battery life.

But yes vacuum clamping is still annoying. There are of course strategies like onion skinning, leaving tabs. On nesting machines I often cover the table with laminate if I'm running small parts and need to prevent vacuum loss through the spoil board.

Most people that I talk to that brought CNC into a shop haven't seem to have laid anyone off but instead seem to be able to retrain people and grow sales because of the new capacity it brought.

Although if there are people who are actually button pushers and legitimately bring nothing else to the table I think their time is limited. I wish I could find the video but last year our CNC vendor sent me a video of a concept manufacturing cell using an autonomous guided vehicle. It blew my mind. There was no operators or conveyors just robots cutting a whole lot of different sized parts of of different material at the same time. The parts got stacked on a pallets which the AGV drove around to the different operations. They were even showing off handling non rectangular parts with no problem.

Probably not that expensive either I was thinking maybe $2 million based on the prices of machines I knew and... wildly guessing at the price of the robotics. Expensive but imagine 15 more years?

We had a customer with a reception desk that had solid wood 5-piece raised panels in it. One of the panels cracked, so we sent them a new one under warranty and over 3-4 years it cracked more times. We finally sent someone to try to figure out the issue.

It was winter and the building was unusually warm and humid. The desk was positioned in front of the front door in a way that whenever it was opened the panel would get hit with an large blast of dry cold air. After convincing them to replace it with a more stable plywood raised panel simulacrum we haven't heard of an issue since.

Wondering how finances come out ahead is silly. Take for example take a CNC beamsaw. It does one thing cut straight lines. A person stands in front of it (or a robot but smaller shops it's a person) and puts a board on the machine. The machine grabs and executes a series of cuts. Then you take the parts it spits out rotate them feed them back in the machine to cut the other way. A person standing at a cabinet saw can do the same thing, faster even, with a nicer finish... for the first 10-20 cuts. The machine gives the same 95% quality cut every time in the same amount of time from cut 1 to cut 10,000.

When my shop first got one I by myself cut twice as much material in 1/5th of the time as it took 3 workers on cabinet table saws. And I actually had enough downtime while the machine was running to also put the parts through an edgebander to put a finished veneer edge on the cut parts at the same time.

The 3 CNC machines I run now don't screw up often and waste time or material. Even when there is a problem it's actually often due to user error. I just had to spend some time fixing our 5-axis machine because the operator accidentally left some loose material in it which a sensor on the machine detected to prevent the machine being damaged. The emergency stop it triggered ruined the part and the machine stopped so fast that the machine racked and I needed to re-calibrate it. But that is fairly unusual. Maybe instead of crappy tech they should have bought quality machines? Or maybe the machines were fine and someone should have invested in software instead of a crappy vb script? Or maybe the operators just needed more training?

A master craftsman can use a machine to create the same quality of work in less time if that is the goal. You can steam bend a board and then 5-axis machine it to create a very complicated edge detail that would be tedious to do by hand. Or you can glue blocks up with different grain directions and materials so the completed railing has an interesting design that would be impossible to create otherwise. Or even spend some more effort gluing up those blocks to make a better grain match.

The reason they are gluing up blocks and machining them is because it is cheaper and faster for an okay quality. Almost no one buying the "McMansion" staircase was going to buy your bespoke custom master craftsman spiral staircase. I work in a shop that makes all custom-built to order furniture. Sometimes potential clients call and have sticker shock when they hear the price or sometimes they need to furniture sooner than we can build something custom. They just go and buy something they can live with from a larger company that mass produces a furniture line where they will have inventory.

I don't see an issue with making something affordable for people who want it. I'm not even sure anything is lost, there are still people who will want the high quality product and someone will be there to supply that.

There is whole world between button pusher and master craftsman. Master craftsmen that embrace the technology can expand what is possible. And a button pusher cannot exist unless there is a master craftsmen to do the setup work.

Asking before you sign up, "will you allow my account to be hacked through social engineering?" isn't going to an answer other than no. Even if the answer is possibly yes.

I would suspect the boox actually has more capable hardware because it needs to run android 10. I don't care enough to check though.

So in order to sell that machine to me I would require a safety compliant door. My guess is a new door would be around $2800. That is an expensive hole.

What I know that you don't is that that machine is sold with a camera as an additional option. So there is already a place inside for mounting a camera. They would just need to make their own mount. Otherwise if I was just filming a demo to sell the machine I would override the door closed safety interlocks and film with the door open temporarily.

This is the machine I was running like 20 minutes before posting that comment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AuwwPdBSf8

I have no idea why the people in that video cut a hole in their door. Seems like a really stupid idea to me. But you can see in a normal machine that someone hasn't modified to be more dangerous you can't get to the the spiny sharp bits.

In woodworking the new trend is to put pads on the gantry with pressure sensors so if the machine smacks you it stops.

That is really great when you are testing new programs you can see what is happening without binoculars. The only downside is that they limit the max rapid speed on the machines so when it hits someone they are much less likely to get knocked over.

When I'm stuck on windows I use https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/ctrl...

Of course adding setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps to ~/.xinitrc seems way easier to me. But I'm probably in the minority.

First result for my search was https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year...

So turns out that there have been fatal school shootings in 2020. Not a lot and I wouldn't really classify all of the items as school shootings. I was still a bit surprised though.

The one about the ROTC accident I found especially strange. I don't know anything about ROTC. I for some reason assumed that learning to shoot was something they would do. Reading the article it seems that the weapon is contraband.

Of course I was using sqlite when there weren't nearly as many users as there are today or when I had federation disabled.