Linux Appreciation Thread

[Kison]

I have to program in C.

Don't hear many people saying that these days. What are you working on?

Vim is a bitch to learn, but the more you work with it, the more you

force yourself to

start to love it.

I always liked Nano better, but vim is good to be somewhat familiar with because you'll eventually run into a system where it's your only option.
(or run into a situation where even that isn't an option........ )

You just reminded me too, I have a Raspberry Pi sitting in my desk. When I went home last December, my brother showed me his new ridiculous hobby of making these little bead "action figure" type things. Here are two that he gave me(a Mario mushroom and a character from a video game called Maniac Mansion):

Spoiler:

He laboriously uses tweezers to place each bead on a rack by hand before ironing the whole thing together. I was like, oh hell no, this is the 21st century, what the hell are you doing, there must be a

machine

that can just do this for you. He scoffed at the idea of automating this horrible thing he does, so it's my new little side mission to build him something that can place these stupid beads for him.

My not-yet-well-thought-out plan is basically to get a couple of raspberry pis, hook some cameras to them, then hook them to some microcontrollers guiding a hopper or something similar. Basically start off getting the thing to accurately pick up a bead and place it at any given point on the rack, then work from there. But been so incredibly busy.

[Kison]

Why bother with cameras for that setup? It would probably be simpler just to hook up bead containers for each color bead and have the arm move in pre-calibrated values based on the distance from each container to the arm. Other than that the idea sounds really cool

Was more for color detection in a later phase where you wouldn't have to preload beads into specific chambers. I think the biggest challenge here will be finding hardware that is able to handle the delicacy of placing these things. They are incredibly light and need to be put into place precisely.

But as far as the programming goes, I need to take a grayscale pixel value from a webcam and raise an array of pins based on that value for a research project. The goal is to have it done in real time at a decent framerate, which is why it's being done in C instead of Python.

Sounds fun, honestly. I miss working on cool random stuff.

[Kison]

Linux is great. But not as a desktop. I tried using Ubuntu as a desktop back in 2013. Why not? I had just spent six months absorbing as much knowledge of the command line as humanly possible, it was what all our servers used, and Windows was for noobs, right?

But after several weeks I still could not figure out how to do several basic things such as opening the janky spreadsheet program(Calc??) without resorting to an arsenal of aliases I'd built up in my profile. Programs would crash sporadically. I broke all the rules, ran everything as root & had hacks to make it work. I came to the sad realization that I wasn't smart enough for this life.

One hard drive failure later & I got talked into trying a Mac. Not a fanboy but it seems to be the best of both worlds(but overpriced).

[Kison]

If I was 15 and had all the free time in the world again, I'm sure I'd give it another shot. These days, my general philosophy is Tried & True over Shiny & New unless there's an opportune moment or high certainty of productivity gain. Probably the only thing I'd be more reluctant to switch is my text editor (the true secret to superpowers is how quickly you can manipulate complex data)