I saw one posted somewhere that’d been polished to a mirror finish. It looked awesome, but then I remembered how much more dangerous such a thing would be on the road and I shelved it into the “cool, but fuck no” part of my brain

Is this in anyway similar to Turtledraw? Looks like a similar concept (programming the maths to make a turtle draw graphics). I’ve seen a load of different implementations, from something similar to Logo (where it’s drawing on the screen), to where it’s drawing using a physical robot with a marker pen and a big sheet of paper on the floor, to a variation called Turtlestitch which controlled an embroidery machine.

I spoke to a woman at a conference last year who uses Turtlestitch to teach 7 year olds advanced programming paradigms.

The other main thing that kills the feature for me is having to have a second SIM. if I could somehow have two SIM’s on the same unlimited contract I use for my phone, it’d obviously be a no-brainer. but I really don’t want to be paying an extra £20/month just so I can avoid tethering.

Yeah, my point isn’t that F360 sucks or that FreeCAD is awesome, it’s that basically no one uses either of these apps in the grand scheme of things. Doing CAD is just not something most people do. To be honest, the same goes for Photoshop which is another often-touted point, as though even a small percentage of PC users ever go near Photoshop!

if you’re squeamish about flashing custom recoveries and ROMs, the e.g. pmOS install process is way, way, way more involved and failure prone. if you go with ubuntu touch or mobian, even more so.

What?? PmOS and Ubuntu Touch both have very easy, foolproof installers. No idea about Mobian to be fair.

I’ve been using only Linux-based mobile OS’s since my first smartphone, and while you’re right for a lot of the new breed made for the Pinephone and Librem, Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch are both perfectly useable for lots of people. Both have a decent app ecosystem and both support running Android apps to fill in the gaps (I’ve used both, the proprietary Jolla one is about as good as it gets and is practically seamless for like 99% of Android apps).

Of course there’s going to be people who will respond to me to say they can’t possibly switch because of that one app that they and 5 other people in the world use, as though they’re in any way relevant to what I’ve said. Just the same as when I post about people switching to Linux on the desktop and there’s always that one Fusion 360 user who thinks everyone in the world also uses Fusion and so Linux can’t possibly ever work for anyone.

I have a laptop with a SIM slot and I can use mobile data, SMS and even make voice calls. It doesn’t support 5G though. Also the mobile hardware is crap, and I get like a 10th of the speed over 4G that I do on my phone, plus it chews through battery.

So yeah, awesome feature but not as nicely implemented as I’d like. Hopefully the Thinkpad version is better!

Volvos for dads

Is he also aware that basically the entire world outside of America thinks American cars are shit?