I tend to end up collating far too many open tabs in Firefox – some of them relate to things I won’t be picking up for a couple of weeks or more. I feel like dumping them on this here bloggy pagey thing.
A link being here is not an endorsement of any product / service / person / concept. I am not particularly bothered whether anything here makes sense to anybody apart from me.
Links will get removed from here as and when I see fit and any given link might have disappeared if you come back in the future. Do your own damn bookmarking if you want to keep track of anything.
Alternatives to Fusion 360
Well, Autodesk are shortly going to kneecap the Free tier of Fusion 360 and they have apparently no interest in making a cheap paying-maker tier available. So abandoning that particular ship might be in order.
Siemens offers a free Solid Edge Community Edition which might be worth investigating.
There’s FreeCAD which is apparently heavily parametric – no idea if that will work out for me but it seems to be the dominant open-source option.
Tom Stanton’s hovercraft
- His youtube channel and hovercraft videos one and two
- His STLs and assembly manual + parts list on gumroad
- He’s sponsored by 3dprintz who do filament cheaper than my current go-to UK source
Ben Elton books on Kindle; This Other Eden
Second Life script/build
- Prim Twisting
- The Good Building Practices wiki page
- llCastRay – might be interesting to use rather than physical projectiles for robot shooting game?
- llSetKeyframedMotion – keyframe-based way to move objects around the world
Waterproof laser-printable paper A4
- AQL4, 250 sheets for £33.80
- WeatherWriter Zecom, 100 sheets for £38.40 amazon prime
- XE Digital, boxes of 100 sheets, varying weights
- Rite In The Rain, 200 sheets £40
- Smaller packs:
- Xerox Premium NeverTear, 10 sheets £5.60
- RITR, 10 sheets £5.25
- Unbranded, 10 sheets £7
Tabi boots and socks from Fuji Kimono
Stepmania
- Polish pads (generally well-received on reddit)
- Foam pad from US
- Stuff about packs, one and two
- Best pack source seems to be Z-I-V
Silence – Signal-over-SMS. Delta Chat, secured IM over IMAP (which uses Autocrypt).
Music Production Stuff
- A couple of sample packs from MusicMondays – Altern8 and Hard
- Maschine-in-Ableton template
- Ableton learning resources list and Newbie FAQ
- The Ableton Manual
- A big free drumkit set (and their site also has other stuff)
- Ableton instruction on managing source content
- ADSR’s free Sample Manager
- Free plugins for mastering
- Deezer’s “Spleeter” source separation tool (Metafilter thread)
- Ableton Live Enhancement Suite – an autohotkey+more bundle package which effectively adds some UI niceties to Ableton Live
Trans stuff
Trans men are men, trans women are women, non-binary people also exist and are also people.
I’m cisgender (“denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex”) but will not stand for anyone shitting on the rights and safety of my transgender peeps. I remember how badly gay men were monstered in the mainstream UK media when I was a terrified closeted gay kid and I’m not going to allow that shit to come around again with a new target.
To help me be a higher-quality ally, this is where I’m collecting some links that I think I will want to be able to find and refer back to in future.
“Addressing Concerns over GRA Reform” by Katie Montgomerie
“… People Don’t Even Know What The GRA Is” by Katie Montgomerie
(title redacted because I prefer not to use the new term that TERFs want to rebrand themselves with)
Reviews of books by Joyce and Stock by Alex Sharpe (she/her)
“The UK Media Has Seriously Bungled the Kathleen Stock Story” by Grace Lavery
“There is no such thing as “sex-based rights” (in the UK)” by Rebecca Gellman
“Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over?” by Judith Butler in The Guardian
Some older links:
That article on TERFs from Vox.