When I was younger, I used to think the Shard was daylight robbery. But 16 quid for a signature cocktail and a view (or 12 for a spirit + mixer) is no longer outrageously expensive in London and you'd pay that to go up a skyscraper in many countries anyway. Both Rockefeller and the Empire State are $40+, though you can go outside. Even Aqua Shard, which is apparently in the Michelin guide, "only" charges about 20. Which is bordering on outrageous, but the view is great.
Though while the bar is reasonable, Aqua Shard is overpriced if you're going their to eat (the food is good, but you can get better food for the same/similar price elsewhere, including at Hutong, one floor up).
But if you're going to a bar in the Shard, Gong (52nd floor), Ting (35th) and Hutong (32nd) are all higher up. Gong and Ting also has the advantage that you don't have to pass through that ridiculous security scanner (entrance is via the Shangri La hotel)
I recently started playing around with my Palette 3 again
(on a MK3.5S). It’s an amazing piece of engineering that has a reputation for being frustrating to use. It’s now discontinued but Mosaic still sell spare parts and it’s designed to be stripped down and repaired. Despite the problems, it was built by good engineers - it uses one torx head for all screws (and comes with a driver). The next printer I get will probably be an INDX system though, the future is multitool.
I had written it off, because of how irritating Mosaic’s cloud slicer is. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how well it works with a fork of P2PP (vhspace/p2pp), a post processor for PrusaSlicer that is completely local. All it does is swap out the filament change commands with Palette splice instructions. I fixed a few gcode interpreter bugs that solved the issues I had with bed calibration and extrusion, and even splicing seems quite reliable. I’ve been using it for simple 2-color same-brand prints that would require a lot of manual changing, so not complex but it’s much nicer to use than an MMU2.
That one has a strange rendering error for me, the trees and horizon are in front of the mill building and the exterior isn't properly rendered unless you are in orbit mode. But my mind was a little blown when i discovered that I could walk up the stairs. It needs shift to run!
The scene desperately needs some clipping on the boundaries. If you use an app like Scaniverse, you can add a bounding box to cull far away points which are often poorly reconstructed.
If you have a newer iPhone with a LIDAR scanner, highly recommended. You can make dolls-house renderings of your house or garden which is surprisingly useful for planning and measuring walls/features.
I don't know about useful, but the most visible one is copywriting. Even when there's a human involved, every startup/small org I know runs content through them. (And that includes this article.) It's definitely something that companies want even if they don't necessarily need it (like analytics).
By far the best AI+human customer support mechanism I've experienced is through SMS/messages. They support auth, they're asynchronous, there's no app or custom interface to timeout, it's easy to send complex queries as text and you have the log right there. Apple does this really well. Delta also does, surprisingly, because their AI phone bot is garbage. It's also presumably easier for the human agents to multi-task.
Do you folks know any support bot which is actually useful to the customer? No, I don't mean cheap for the company, I mean helping, I mean fulfilling the goal for which (at least according on the powerpoints) it exists?
This is the sort of economics that small companies face when working with large companies, particularly when physical things/CAPEX are involved. Large companies expect net 30/60 terms to pay you. That's much simpler for their accounting/purchasing department. This bureaucracy occasionally necessitates nudging, especially if the intermediary you're dealing with didn't set up the invoice request on time in whichever SAP/Salesforce/Oracle system they use.
This is usually the same the other way; many vendors will give business clients net 30. That's nice if you're a small company and need to plan ahead. But occasionally, because you're considered small (liability), some vendors will want the money up-front. So unless you're very careful with cashflow, you end up in situations where your main sources of income (big contracts) are coming in after you need to spend money on a widget to fulfill deliverables.
Depending on the situation, the contract can demand the client purchase/ship things and work doesn't start until you have them in hand. This is usually the best route as you now have an out, and it's not an unreasonable request, but it doesn't always pan out that way!
RTOS doesn't give any guarantees about "safe to compute/execute" - that's more the domain of formal verification. In the sense that you can make guarantees about how the program will behave given some domain of inputs. But predictable (or bounded) latency, yes.
You might execute formally verified code within an RTOS, which is your two worlds? Consider you have some critical control loop, like an autopilot (see Ardupilot). That control loop must run at some minimum rate, and the action of the system must be well characterized. Similarly you might want to guarantee that you sample a bunch of sensors frequently enough (so the most recent reading is no older than some time period).
Really Useful Boxes are excellent. The best feature for me is that the lids are raised, so you have some room that's slightly higher than the rim of the crate. Sure, buy a bigger crate, but it's nice to pack things just about level and not worry about one annoying part poking up.
I've switched to UTZ Rako/Euroboxes for longer term storage. I even bought a beat-up dolly so I could easily transport 60L boxes around. They stack, they're divisible (e.g. 2x30L on top of a 60L) and the smaller ones fit neatly into a KALLAX cubby. You can buy them used for cheap, if you're willing to spend an afternoon scrubbing factory dirt off them. But they're not significantly pricier than Really Useful.
There are other suppliers like Auer, who make all kinds of interesting variations like toolboxes and latching/lockable boxes, but can get really expensive. You can get insert containers for them, but same problem: no transparent lids, only generic gray unless you want to buy 100.
I've been lusting after some of the Sortimo boxes that Adam Savage recommends, but I can't justify 50-100 quid per compartment box.
As for the original article... I like the idea of dots, but I would try a gridded label with sharpie marks. Having worked in a lot of workshops and labs though, boxes are not efficient. You want a good rack/drawers for things you use all the time (tape). I do like one box per project for convenience, which is often more useful than a box with generic grouped parts. If you really need to, you can do things like cut SMD tapes for each project. This way is much easier to drop back into something you only have time for on the weekend, and it's also what we would do in hardware shops (single sorted organizer with the BOM items for a project).
I do agree about the hardware side being surprising. When I was working on electronics for work, having a 4 channel scope was indispensable. But most of the time, debugging on chip/breakpoints are enough. I switched to a 4 channel mixed signal Picoscope.
(Someone else mentioned kitchen containers. I spent some time in a professional kitchen which hooked me on Cambro-style containers, or whatever Nisbet's sell in the UK. Also standardized alu sheet pans and matching silicone mats for baking.)
I have a Supernote which I like primarily because it's repairable and the developers are very responsive. It's the A5 version. It's very nice to write on and if you haven't tried eink in a while, it's pretty impressive. The soft surface is also a replaceable film. It has a Lamy colab pen which is very nice.
Downside is no backlight which many users tout as an improvement, or praise it as a minimalist perk. I don't really agree, but it does mean that the ink surface is closer to the pen so there's less parallax error. It makes it less usable as an ebook reader though, for example on a flight you'd have to use the blinding overhead lights.
Sure the price is comparable to 20+ notebooks. I think if you actually use notebooks, they're good. If you don't, it's questionable whether it'll change your habit. It also doesn't replace the satisfaction of a nice ink pen on nice paper. I have a collection of fountain pen ink that I've used since university (for years of daily lecture notes which is more writing than I'm ever likely to do again - we're talking up to 20 A4 sides a day) and the bottles are still practically full. So good writing equipment can be very economical. There are other issues like no colour (on mine) and PDF support is still ropey.
I started buying Belkin TB5 cables which are around $50 a pop. They can easily power a laptop at full load and can stream video at any reasonable resolution/framerate I might need. I've yet to find a need for an NVMe faster than 20 GBps nevermind finding USB4 enclosures, or that the cable supports up to 80. They're also not nearly as chunky as the Dell cables, which are good, but seem to have very rigid shielding.
I keep a few converters for older devices and servers that don't have (m)any C ports, but as far as a consumer "forever cable" goes, TB5 feels close. Certainly the cable's bandwidth is beyond what most people need, unless you're editing 8k video or continually shuffling hundreds of GBs between external disks.
I wish the USB spec had mandated labeling. There must be a lovely label printer they make for cables or something that shouldn’t be too expensive these days. Label a few cables a day, finish the whole house in a jiffy.
LTT or another big YouTuber made a cable and made sure to get it labeled. Also complained how difficult it was to find a supplier willing to make a better cable than usual.
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