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Ranting, puzzling, printing, correcting; it’s all going on in this month’s letters pages.
The crossword puzzle in TheSpectator (18 February) contained the clue, “Wife after course wanting electronic operating system (5)”. It looks as if Linux has made it into the public consciousness at last. Keep up the good work.
Chris Watts, via email
Neil says: What a spot! I think I remember spotting that Emacs had made it into the New York Time crossword. I believe the clue was “Partner of vim.”
MOAH 3D!
Imagine taking a 3D project across the different software programs. For modelling you could use Blender, 3dsMax, Rhino, SolidWorks, FreeCAD. Fixers: Blender, MeshLab and Netfabb (Basic). Across the varying print processes and printers (from low end to expensive) there’s Shapeways, Sculpteo, 3D Hubs and home printing. For materials you could use plastic, PLA, metal, acrylic and sandstone (colour). The different formats include OBJ, STL, PLY, WRL, X3D and so on.
Delve a little deeper into the design process. Available tools that are built in as well as online are TinkerCAD, SVG 2 STL, Inkscape to OpenSCAD, Shapeways 2D to 3D and Voronator. Then you’ve got Blender add-ons: Math Functions, Mesh vs Curve, Poly vs CAD, Modeling for 3D vs Animation, Web and Image.
And finally, there’s the high cost and the complexities of design and the 3D printing process compared to, say, paper copying, word processing and regular printing. So for all the talk of 3D printing, one will also find that conventional production is often cheaper. You’re also limited by the suitability of materials for cooking, the limitations of size as well as the advantages and drawbacks of workarounds.
There are clearly advantages and limitations of the various processes. There still doesn’t seem to be much allowance for fine detail. Your design is very much limited by what will print.
These are things talked about in blogs, in forums and boards, but not so much in more readily available platforms… such as LinuxFormat. As more and more people delve into this new technology, it would seem, like the Raspberry Pi, that there’s a real need for useful, practical, applicable information on the subject of 3D printing.
Mike Moore, Coving ton, WA, US
Neil says: I hope we can revisit 3D printers down the line, but until there’s some serious advances I’m not sure it’s a topic we’re going cover in the next few issues. Like most technologies it’s going through the various stages of adoption, so we’ve gone through the initial early adopter excitement, the period of disappointment and seem to be seeing consolidation with many early projects creating much improved third- and fourthgeneration machines.
Once the price drops on these new commercial printers I’d expect us to revisit what should be a much more accessible and improved experience.
Sudo you
I was reading your magazine ( LXF221, March 2017), in which you have an article about Ubuntu on laptops. I have to comment on the way sudo is used in the article. On page 72, there are two commands like sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xorg. conf.d/30-touchpad.conf
But advanced Ubuntu users (please don’t count me!) don’t advise using sudo this way in case of graphical program like gedit. Instead, they advise to use something like: sudo vim /path/to/the/file
or sudo -H gedit / path/ to/the/file
or gksudo gedit /path/to/the/file
The reason for this is that it is possible to mess up the permissions of some configuration files in the $HOME. Yes, sometimes it’s possible to use sudo like this,