I need to quench my thirst for knowledge and learn something new just for the sake of it.
I’ve already learned:
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Equations and pivot tables in Excel
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Vector graphics in Inkscape
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Music mixing in rekordbox
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Personal VPN on a raspberry pi 4 with OpenVPN
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LAMP stack web hosting
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Streaming & video capture with OBS
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Manual & automatic backups with FreeFileSync
Things I’m open to:
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FOSS (even beta) or free-as-in-beer software
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A high or low learning curve
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Tools for niche fields that I’d otherwise have no reason to learn
How did you learn inkscape?
Over the years I’ve gotten proficient enough in GIMP that I can usually accomplish what I set out to do.
Inkscape is a foreign language that I have no frame of reference for.
It is tradition (and fun) to start your Blender journey with the Donut Tutorial.
Nice I haven’t done that one! Haven’t even touched blender in years, but I’ve gone through like 3 of his donut tutorials over the past decade or so. They’re really fun and show off how impressive the program is.
Adding to that, since I work at a computer I was never motovated to stay at tbe same place to learn blender so I changed to Nomad Sculpt at the tablet and I love it, I can do it from my couch (or toilet lol). It is a different aproach tho
SQL - understanding how to interact with databases will be an incredibly useful skill for whatever rabbit hole you next want to fall down.
Factorio
This is just pure evil
Ardour, it’s a FOSS Digital Audio Workstation
Have you gotten ardour to accept input from guitarx’s USB interface? I hate falling g back to windows stuff for audio recording.
Honestly never had a reason to try, piano and vox
I know you said software, but I would like to suggest a musical instrument. They still require learning a new language and typically provide a huge level of self satisfaction. A cheap keyboard or guitar can provide literally thousands of hours of study.
You can combine the two with something like Overtone (programmable synth) or similar
I don’t know what I expected… I love the Internet
OpenSCAD. 3D modeling as code.
I’ve gotten a lot out of it, and their tutorial is excellent.
Is it perfect? Nope.
Is it useful? Yep.
Is it fun to play with? Most definitely!
How does this compare to FreeCAD or CAD in general?
It’s very unique in the CAD space. It’s almost more akin to a hardware definition language like VHDL than it is a traditional CAD solution.
You don’t ever do any direct manipulation of your model through visual tools. There is a visualizer so that you can see your model, but all changes are done via plaintext editing of the model’s definition file.
This has a lot of advantages, not the least of which is being able to version control your 3D models.
It has some disadvantages as well, in that some transforms that are easy in a traditional CAD software are a little more manual in OpenSCAD. I’ve definitely had to dust off my highschool trigonometry once or twice to get something the way I wanted it.
Specifically with regards to FreeCAD. I found FreeCAD to be a little inaccessible. It’s unintuitive at best, and I found it unpleasant to work with, as it was exceptionally fiddly. OpenSCAD feels far more intuitive to me, but I also have a software engineering background. I think OpenSCAD may be trickier for someone without that, but it’s hard to say.
Thank you for the thoughtful explanation!
It’s quite different. I’m a programmer and find it substantially better suited to my mental model than FreeCAD. Don’t get me wrong, I respect FreeCAD – even envy it a bit and all the features – but I need to imagine my shapes and describe how they fit together. I spend so much of my free time thinking of equations that product shapes (yay game dev) that it comes pretty naturally.
If you don’t program or prefer a more visual, arguably professional, workflow, you probably won’t like OpenSCAD.
I really like openscad! It maps well to how I think through modeling a part. I was just using it yesterday
Oh yes… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4 (keep watching. Is relevant.) [… and oddly relevant to my earlier suggestion list that also included emacs]
ssh and scp (secure connection and file transfer)
grep (the standard command-line search tool)
sed (Stream EDitor, good for find-replaces once you learn how to use it)
awk (can operate on text files or command output that’s organized in columns)
sc (terminal-based spreadsheet)
trash (safer replacement for rm that moves things to your desktop’s trash directory instead of deleting immediately)
trash is a nice idea, but i guess it’s hard to overcome the muscle memory, i might need to rename rm for it ;)
btw: does somebody else pronounces awk as awkward?
I was thinking that too, I wonder if rm can be aliased to trash. I mean it probably can as I do have
alias rm='rm -i'. Wondering if it breaks anything.from what you wrote, i would guess bash is first checking through aliases. anyway that’s something to better read up before trying on a non-test system
FreeCAD
Mango jelly on YouTube
Second this. Not because I have experience in it, but because I’m learning it this week so I could have a friend 3D print a part for my car, as I’m deleting some original equipment and now need something that doesn’t exist as a spare part.
I came here to recommend frecad too!
Yes def freecad its really fun to fuck aound in
Blender and buy a 3D printer afterwards
Real cad software (like Freecad or OpenSCAD if you want FOSS) would be more useful for 3d printing, unless you only plan to print useless plastic figurines
vi
or vim with
vimtutor
some suggestions for your consideration in order of empowerment and learning curve first,
- AWK
- ffmpeg (~ & imagemagick ?)
- bash, zsh, or fish
- kew (it’s just a really simple nice tui music player, no fuss). (… “Am I the only fun one in Digit’s list here?” – kew)
n_n
Some other things that sprang to mind, (generally tending to more gui things, some distro/packagemenent things)… audacity/tenacity, fontforge, gimp, gentoo and portage, bedrocklinux and brl, peertube self hosting, forgefed self hosting, suckless.org’s tools, CRUX or KISS/Carbs, just playing around in stellarium, playing around in pioneer space sim, learning how to evade humanity’s detection as an ai in the game called singularity, ;3
Oh… Here’s an idea for you… Learn a text editor.
Think it’s not fun?
Depends on which text editor you pick, and how much the fun suits you. … Emacs has so many things (including games, like tetris and doctor). Even neovim has some extra things (~ opencode runs on neovim… tho it’s not the same, lol). Or maybe you want something simpler, like nano, mcedit, or fin (I wrote fin, don’t use it, it’s scruffy… and only able to do that from learning some of the things mentioned, and more).
Yay for learning. Yay for asking for what other fun things to learn. Good post. Good question. … Sorry my answers were not better. Heh. Caught off guard, answered just what first sprang to mind. n_n Doubtless many other more fun things exist.
I’d say GIMP for photo editing would be a good one to learn. It’s come in handy in a pinch both at home and at work when I’ve needed something done up real quick.
Latex is worth knowing, its most commonly used for academic papers, but it opens up a whole world of scripting automated documents. But, to make it really interesting, throw in
tikzand/orpgfplotsfor some interesting power tools. Tikz does A LOT, and is really powerful. But can definitely be overwhelming.And all this time, I thought Latex was just for condoms!
If all you want is to make documents and you don’t have the constraints of academic publishing, I would rather recommend Typst. It’s way more modern and less painful.
LaTeX is useful but the layers of abstraction makes it difficult to troubleshoot. I recommend the TeXbook and typesetting something with plain luatex, it’s actually a joy to use. Maybe borrow some macros from OpTeX if needed, but those are philosophically aligned with Knuths TeX.
That is very true. If you just want to learn it, starting even at something like basic tex may make more sense. The latex ecosystem is where it starts getting interesting though, since there’s been so much created and written for it. BUT that does mean you’re stuck in a weird abstraction area. For when I’m just making documents (and not stuck to a specific journal format), I’m really enjoying org-mode and then piping its output to a tex PDF. I think markdown would work too, but org-mode inherits all the emacs modes, so you can get some pretty complicated in-document scripting done.
Plain TeX is simultaneously straightforward and impossibly complex. Want to change the left margin, just set hoffset to something, but if you want double sided output where the left margin changes depending on verso or recto page, then you need to redefine the output routine. Which admittedly is quite simple in TeX compared to the monster output routine in LaTeX, but still. To me, TeX is to LaTeX what C is to python.
