For everyone struggling with clothes sizing and having a hacker mindset, I can't recommend enough buying a sewing machine (~100EUR on a used market, ~150 new gets you a reasonable starter one you won't outgrow any time soon) and giving clothes alterations a try.
Finding a tailor that understands you / you agree with is an option too, if time is a hard limit (though I'm not sure it's altogrther that much quicker).
In my case, I started with tailors, but kept running into small misunderstandings. Also, my taste keeps evolving.
Start small with simple stuff, ideally old / second hand cheap clothes. Shirts, T-Shirts and bodice waistlines / "darts" are almost trivial once you can follow a straight line. First one will take a while, second will be much quicker, by third / fourth it's almost a routine and you can start iterating on your own preferences. They likely "will" evolve as you keep wearing the altered clothes.
Depending on how much help you can get in the beginning, with maybe a 2-3h intro on how to use a sewing machine done by a friend who has sewing as a hobby, I'm pretty sure most people should be able to get their first alterations done within 4-5h. By second or third attempt, this time should be down to around 1h per item, including some setup (pinning - trying - ironing). At that point the DIY option is probably quicker than going to a tailor.
I also fixed clothing sizes for my family using a hacker mindset, but in a different way:
Did you know that most professional sewing charts are just DXF files?
And did you know that DXF is the most common file format for laser cutters?
;)
=> just let the machine cut out precisely the clothing shapes that you need
After a few tries, I also started to add small sideways cuts to the outlines as alignment markers. And then you just need to connect the pieces where you marked them while always leaving roughly 0.5 cm of gap to the laser cut line. I went with 0.5 because my sewing machine has a hardware alignment guide with that offset. And at that point, it takes a skilled tailor only mere minutes to finish a shirt, which means in exchange for their 1x hourly rate they will be willing to finish off 5x proto t-shirts for you.
Oh, I'm not claiming sewing machine is the "only" option :-)
There's plenty of hacking that can be done on the subject of sewing and I admit that laser cutter is a cool one.
I'm still pretty partial to that sewing machine route (or needle and thread, if handiwork is prefferable). Simply because it lets you quickly iterate and build the taste, preferences and heuristic of how to get there. Personally, I still can't read a pattern propetly. But I'm more than happy to put a few pins into a shirt and prototype in front of a mirror.
Also, it gives me a good estimate of what I'm OK doing myself and what I will outsource to an actual tailor because it's either beyond my level, or I simply don't have time to do it.
I have never tried that because it finishes a single piece of clothing so quickly that it never seemed like it would make any sense to take risks of lower fabric layers being uneven/wrinkled in exchange for increasing throughput. Catching fire never seemed to be an issue with the CO2 laser that I used. Most fabrics will kind of melt before they start to burn. And the vacuum table sucking air through the fabric will also cool it down.
I keep coming cross these videos on youtube from Cornelius Quiring, and it's been making me think about trying it out. If anyone is looking for videos about drafting patterns for clothing, I think he's stuff seems pretty approachable!
Adult clothing no. But for kids clothing you kind of need it, because without the cutting function attaching rubber bands to neck, wrist, and belly seams is very difficult.
For some basic jerseys (think T-shirts) a basic zigzag is fine to begin with. That 100EUR sewing machine will have some fancier stretch stitch options that are slow, but "good enough" to look like an overlock (but can't do the cut of course).
If you have the space / money, overlock is definitely what I'd get as a second / third machine. It's much quicker / cleaner if you're working on jerseys or shirts.
But I still keep wearing the T-shirts I did when I was starting. On my list the first thing to do is to understand how to alter something to fit you. It can be done by hand (needle and thread), but to be reasonably efficient, the BOM would be "sewing machine, box of pins, scissors, piece of chalk / ruler and something to press / iron".
-A Memory called Empire (Arkady Martin) both of these are a fairly interesting take on scifi worldbuilding. Could be called "highbrow", but IMO pretty easy reads still.
-Piranesi (S. Clark) - well written fantasy
and plenty of other stuff that I've seen in other comments (Dungeon Crawler Carl does stand out a bit, but it's really a guilty pleasure / escape kind of a read).
Non-Fiction
-Brakneck (Dan Wang) - slightly outdated (by ~2y, which seems really breakneck), but still interesting take on modern China
-Capitalism (Sven Beckert) - still halfway through this one, but it's shaping up to be my #1 for 2025 non fiction
-The Origins of Efficiency - from B. Potter, the author of Construction Physics blog. The blog is fairly information dense, but this basically reads like a textbook. Still a pretty good reference IMO for people working in manufacturing.
I admit it's a nice experiment, but I guess the title should be "detecting iPhone Lidar".
Both the 60Hz frequency and 940nm wavelength are fairly specific. There's a whole world of different wavelengths (1550nm is fairly common) and frequencies (up to 1MHz isn't particularly exceptional).
I regularly see groups of riders with European plates on their bikes, traveling up and down Highway 1 - a very scenic and twisty road up the California coast. So, it must be doable without too much problem.
personally : proxmox /VM is great if You'd like to separate physical HW. In my case - virtualized TrueNAS means I can give it a whole SATA controller and keep this as an isolated storage machine.
Whatever uses that storage usually runs in a Docker inside an LXC container.
If I need something more isolated (think public facing cloudflare) - that's a separate docker in another network routed through another OPNSense VM.
Desktop - VM where I passed down a whole GPU and a USB hub.
Best part - it all runs on a fairly low power HW (<20W idle NAS plus whatever the harddrives take - generally ~5W / HDD).
AirVPNs main proposition isn't "we have a nice app / UX". It's "we give you the most configs / options". AFAIK they're currently one of very few that allow you to configure both port forwards and give you a stable config (keys) to run your own wireguard instance
my $.02 : I tried them, but found their "we support Wireguard" a bit misleading. They only did so via their app. No way to get a stable configuration for a router (other than run a python script to get one from the app, without any guarantee how long is that config valid for).
Also there's the simple physics view of the same problem. The advantage of scanning is that you can focus all the laser pulse energy into one narrow beam. Non scanning means covering the whole field of view at once with that same laser pulse. Then you have a choice. Either somehow deal with the exponentially weaker return pulse (since it's spread over the whole field of view), or try to increase the pulse energy (and there you're limited by laser safety regulations)
From a physics point of view, continuous transmission and correlation detection of a temporally- and spatially-diverse optical signal over the entire field of view addresses the problem of energy being spread out, and gets you better, more robust depth information for less emitted energy than scanning or full-field flashes.
But from an optical and electronics point of view, it's much harder to process the return signal that way, and probably uses a lot more energy due to the processing required (with current tech).
Actually the same rule as for RADAR also applies to LIDAR: single pulse has better energy efficiency, but requires untenable peak power at any vaguely-state-of-the-art signal quality/reception performance levels.
The reason is that you can time-gate the noise out that would otherwise be hitting your correlation accumulators if you have a vague idea of the supposed delay/ToF for the pulse.
However, once you add mechanical scanning, at least for systems with not that many orders of magnitude between range resolution and maximum detection range, you can use systems like mode-locked lasers that for example have around 0.1% native duty cycle, circumvent the issue of peak power through the aperture/scanning 's spatial focusing (each pixel only needs a managable amount of energy, and delivering that in a single pulse won't require unreasonable peak power levels), and still get all the energy-efficiency benefits of single-pulse ranging vs. spread-spectrum/correlation ranging.
The only but major downside is the requirement of mechanical scanning.
Fourth power of the distance, actually. That's the radar equation. You have inverse-square losses going out, as the beam expands with distance. Then you have inverse-square losses coming back when the target is much smaller than the beam. That's the problem flash LIDARs face. It can be overcome with enough laser power out to 20-30 meters.
That's where the beam diameter at the target is much larger than the target, as for aircraft. With a small scanning dot from a LIDAR and a nice big target like a car, almost all the power hits the target, but you still have inverse square losses coming back.
true. My original was just a quick jote on a phone sipping a coffee on Sunday. I admit I simply didn't want to go into the whole "square FOV for the sensor vs. one detector / diode and that combined with the time of flight loss over distance", so I just used "exponential" to mean "it loses power pretty quickly". Apologies for the sloppiness on my part.
Second part of the comment I omitted is was what You mentioned in the beginning. Those 20-30 meters of practical range is why we keep seeing small LIDAR sensors on things like iPhones / iPads (though there I believe the range is even a bit shorter due to the size / power constraints), but not really much beyond that.
For practical demo of what's currently available at the high end of solid state LIDAR (albeit at 40k+ USD), I'd suggest looking at Leica and their BLK2GO PULSE (solid state) vs the rest of the BLK line (rotating laser spot).
Shouldn't it be more of a "why" to install TrueNAS on a RPi?
The only reason I can see is "I have one that I don't use". Because otherwise...
Idle power isn't all that much better than a low power Intel N100 or something similar. And it's all downhill from there. Network transfer speeds and disk transfers will all be kneecapped by the (lack of) available PCIe lanes. Available RAM or CPU speeds are even worse...
That's addressed in the second section of the article:
> I've found numerous times, running modern applications on slower hardware is an excellent way to expose little configuration flaws and misconceptions that lead to learning how to run the applications much better on more capable machines.
It's less about the why, and more about the 'why not?' :)
I explicitly don't recommend running TrueNAS on a Pi currently, at the end (though I don't see a problem with anyone doing it for the fun, or if they need an absolutely tiny build and want to try Arm):
> Because of the current UEFI limitations, I would still recommend running TrueNAS on higher-end Arm hardware (like Ampere servers).
On a somewhat related note, would you trust a Pi based NAS long term? I've not tried doing one since the Pi 4 which understandably because of its hardware limitations left a lot to be desired, but that part aside I was still finding the pi as a piece of hardware somewhat quirky and unpredictable - power especially, I can't count the number of times simply unplugging a usb keyboard would cause it to reboot.
I've run a Pi NAS as my 2nd onsite replica for over a year without a hiccup, it's using a Radxa Penta SATA HAT with 4x SATA SSDs, and a 2.5 Gbps USB dongle for faster Ethernet[1].
Finding a tailor that understands you / you agree with is an option too, if time is a hard limit (though I'm not sure it's altogrther that much quicker).
In my case, I started with tailors, but kept running into small misunderstandings. Also, my taste keeps evolving.
Start small with simple stuff, ideally old / second hand cheap clothes. Shirts, T-Shirts and bodice waistlines / "darts" are almost trivial once you can follow a straight line. First one will take a while, second will be much quicker, by third / fourth it's almost a routine and you can start iterating on your own preferences. They likely "will" evolve as you keep wearing the altered clothes.
Depending on how much help you can get in the beginning, with maybe a 2-3h intro on how to use a sewing machine done by a friend who has sewing as a hobby, I'm pretty sure most people should be able to get their first alterations done within 4-5h. By second or third attempt, this time should be down to around 1h per item, including some setup (pinning - trying - ironing). At that point the DIY option is probably quicker than going to a tailor.
reply