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I feel so seen … from 1814
So it seems my lifelong nickname is/was a Piedmontese word for noise, crash/clatter/bang or scream/shout/squawk:
![[french/piedmnotese dictionary text]
Scruss s.; Bruit, fracas, cri.
La porta a la fait un scruss;
La porte a crié, a fait un cri.](https://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/piedmontese-scruss.png)
from Capello, Luigi. Dictionnaire portatif piémontais-français suivu d’un vocabulaire français des termes usités dans les Arts et Métiers.. Impr. V. Bianco, 1814. An early 19th century dictionary written by an Italian count had my number all along.
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FreeCAD on Raspberry Pi 4
Hey! This is really old! FreeCAD 0.19 is in the Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye repo now:
sudo apt install freecad

FreeCAD 0.18.4 running on a Raspberry Pi 4 FreeCAD and the Raspberry Pi haven’t always got on too well. For complex technical reasons the standard package would load and immediately crash on a Raspbian system. For user reasons, this was just another annoyance.
Recent releases seem to run fairly well on a Raspberry Pi 4, though, but only after building them from source. Here’s a method that got FreeCAD 0.18.4 running for me. It’s lightly modified from FreeCAD forum MartijnD‘s post:
sudo apt install cmake build-essential libtool lsb-release swig libboost-dev libboost-date-time-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-graph-dev libboost-iostreams-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-python-dev libboost-regex-dev libboost-serialization-dev libboost-signals-dev libboost-thread-dev libcoin-dev libeigen3-dev libgts-bin libgts-dev libkdtree++-dev libmedc-dev libopencv-dev libproj-dev libvtk6-dev libx11-dev libxerces-c-dev libzipios++-dev qt4-dev-tools libqt4-dev libqt4-opengl-dev libqtwebkit-dev libshiboken-dev libpyside-dev pyside-tools python-dev python-matplotlib python-pivy python-ply python-pyside libocct*-dev occt-draw libsimage-dev doxygen libcoin-doc dh-exec libspnav-dev wget https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/archive/0.18.4.zip unzip 0.18.4.zip rm 0.18.4.zip mkdir freecad-build cd freecad-build cmake -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python2.7 -DPYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/python2.7 -DPYTHON_LIBRARY=/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpython2.7.so -DPYTHON_PACKAGES_PATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ ../FreeCAD-0.18.4/ make -j4Notes:
- The only modifications I made to Martijn’s method were in the Python paths in the cmake command. Some of the paths given aren’t valid any more on an up-to-date Buster system
- I built this on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB of RAM. It takes quite a bit of free storage: I wouldn’t attempt to build this with less than 4 GB free
- make -j4 took 95 minutes, and even with a fan my Raspberry Pi 4 was at 70°C
- Yes, it’s using Python 2.7, but it works
- I’ve got no idea how to make it install properly, but it runs from the freecad-build/bin directory.
If you want to learn how to use it, look at the tutorials: even the Raspberry Pi Foundation have written some. The UK Traffic Cone model you can have: it’s what I made to learn a bit more about FreeCAD. Don’t worry, I’m still on Team OpenSCAD …
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a bad scene, a worse infographic
CBC says that Alberta’s looming multibillion-dollar orphan wells problem prompts auditor general probe. I mean, I’d say it does: estimated costs to clean up abandoned petrochemical wells outstrip the industry cleanup fund by over 132×, so it’s gone way past looming and is well into omnishambles country. But I’m not here to talk about the environmental mismanagement (well, not much: lolRedwater …), but more to talk about CBC’s terrible infographic:

Total estimated liabilities: $30.1 billion; Total security held: $227 million. It doesn’t take Wilkins Micawber to tell you that the result is misery The image is accurate, technically. The estimated liabilities ($30100000000) are 132.6× the total security held ($227000000), and the red square’s length is 11½× (= √132.6) the blue one’s. But people are generally terrible at comparing areas.
Here are the same numbers, but in bar chart form:

They’re not even on the same page, are they?
(Graph badly put together by me in netpbm. Yes, netpbm …)And there’s the problem: it’s too big to comprehend. CBC’s comfortable little chart fits on a page; you can tweet it, even. But reality is a whole lot of scrolling down the page.
Even the manky old pie chart would be better than CBC’s squares-by area:

Securities are a 2.69° wedge. Liabilities, the rest At least pie charts used linear measure as a proportion of the full 360° pie. But comparing areas is hard; in the diagram below, the teal-coloured part is twice the area of the gold part.

Confusing, isn’t it?






























