I signed up for updates! I have been looking for something exactly like this for home automation, to detect occupancy, pets, etc. I am very excited to pair it with HomeAssistant!
"Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Edwards is a good introduction to drawing. I think in particular it is a good explanation of how much of drawing is learning to look at the world, and exercises to improve your skills of looking at things. One of the big takeaways from this book and other drawing courses I have taken is that once you learn to draw what you see, nothing is particularly easier or harder to draw; in every case you are drawing what you see. The feeling of difficulty in drawing a particular object often comes from trying to parse it into visual symbols, then draw those symbols, rather than seeing the object as a pattern of light and reproducing that on the paper.
This does sort of beg the question though: how do you draw things that don't exist?
Everything (or, almost everything) I personally care about drawing is sci-fi or fantasy, and sort of the whole point of it is that it doesn't actually exist, and therefore I can "see" in a physical sense only my own drawings or those by other artists.
I generally make abstract or surrealist pieces. I don't know where ideas come from, but I do a certain amount of "making things up as I go along"
Realistically, though, sci-fi and fantasy objects are based on objects we have in everyday life. If you look at sci-fi through the years, they have the era's aesthetic: The lines of 50's sci-fi are different from the 80's appeal, for example. And this is where you start to draw the imaginary stuff.
Sci-fi ships? Based off of a combination of naval ships and planes. Get reference photos and use these to guide you, adding and taking away as you see fit. Plant life on another planet? Use plants and fungus from earth as your guide. Again, get reference photos and use these to guide you, changing what you like. Want an easy way to start something more surrealist? Find 3 unrelated reference photos and combine them into one image - use a digital art program to combine them if you'd like.
Note the heavy use of reference photos: I use them whenever I want something shaped in a specific way. If I want a goldfish in a space portal, well, I look up a picture of a goldfish. If I'd like koi instead, I look it up.
I also recommend the Betty Edwards book. It took me from stickmen to realistic drawings of chairs and hands :-)
It also makes you appreciate paintings.
Curiously the book from the TFA is doing almost the exact opposite of what DotRSotB recommends. The former is about parsing things into shapes while the latter is like tracing from an imaginary glass in front of you.
That book temporarily broke my brain. I had trouble turning off that mode of seeing. Possible that my undiagnosed-at-the-time ADHD was finding the shapes of people more interesting than what they were saying. 10/10 would recommend ;)
I've seen this recommended, then criticized, back and forth for ages. But your description makes it sound practical as a beginner, so I think I'll just finally check it out. thanks!
Thanks! At first they were rendered HTML of the entire article (because nextjs makes that easy), but that caused performance issues, especially on mobile Safari. So now they're auto-generated screenshots. Glad you like them!
That's kinda a shame from a size POV. The screenshots are 1/2MiB each for a bit of text and common styles. I wonder if it would be feasible to go back to HTML but somehow smartly decide where to chop off the article to avoid much overflow, image downloads and whatnot.
Right? The problem is articles could potentially have early media content, specifically a fat youtube iframe, in the case of the DIY 3d scanner article.
I'm glad for this feedback, though. I'll play around with slightly dropping image quality (currently it's JPEG output at quality = 100), and lazy-loading.
Yeah, I saw the iframe and it definitely made me think. You could filter out "expensive" elements or smartly replace them with a thumbnail but eventually you will slowly go crazy. The image preview approach is definitely the sane and simple solution. It just feels less elegant. I would have a hard time resisting the urge to make it work somehow.
I would say you should try it. If it calls you like it called me, it will feel like you're in the right place. Yes, you can meet amazing people and no, the insane beauty of twin peaks never wears off. I would say it's a bit harder to meet people than in Oakland, which feels more approachable. I also met my partner in SF though :)
The problem is rather that the GNDs on both computers might be at a different potential and substantial amounts of current might start to flow once connected (read: something between computer A and computer B catches fire).
That is why all serious inter-computer USB devices use galvanically isolated connection (e.g. using optocouplers)
Most laptops and desktops will disable the USB port/controller or at least cut power to it.
It won't stop you from sending 200V into it and frying something, but it will stop short-circuits and faulty/non-spec USB devices from doing serious damage.
I guess it's a cheap safeguard that works pretty well for consumer products.
This won’t help you if the GNDs on both devices are different.
If the GNDs are different then neither device will be “providing power” in the traditional sense. Rather current will flow from the GND of one device to the GND of the other, and GNDs are normally not protected.
You will probably also see power flow on the V+ rails as well because they will be referenced against the GND in each device. In that case the devices can cut the power, but that only protects the V+ rail, not your GND rail that could still be transporting enough current to melt something.
They can still be plugged into different ground supplies. If they have different potential, you could get a large amount of current flow. If they're plugged into sockets in the same house, this is unlikely to happen.
This is usually more of a problem with audio equipment that has analogue signals with very high sensitivity. A ground loop can convert any nearby magnetic fluctuations (like say from the electricity flowing through the mains cables in the walls) into a nasty bit of noise.
Way back when computer to computer serial connections were a thing, you could get a cable that erroneously connected the power as well as the signal. Even if the two computers had the same ground, if the voltage regulator of one computer's power supply was slightly higher voltage than the other one, then it would try to power both computers, with the power flowing through the cable. This would tend to break either the cable, or the power supply. This particular thing shouldn't be a problem with USB, as the power supply has protection circuitry.
If you did this each device would provide +5V to the same line in the cable and nothing would happen (as there is no load). Same as if you had 2 batteries connected in parallel. If this was an issue than those ‘Y’ shaped USB cables that provide extra power for external HDD enclosures would also cause damage.
Wow, this is exactly the project I have been working on for the past few weeks, down to the abstraction of "tables," "starting a new table," and shuffling around at will! I was even building on top of jitsi. Mine was going to be called "lunchbox"...
It's amazing to me how many people had this idea, and that it seemed not to exist before. I am curious how far we can go to make video chat feel as good as in-person socializing.
