The best answers address the question directly, and back up facts with wikilinks and links to sources. Do not edit others' comments and do not give any medical or legal advice.
Autodesk Meshmixer: Creating a hole on a thin shell from a selection
I am using Autodesk Meshmixer to create a 3D printed face mask.
This mask has an outer surface and an inner surface. I am trying to cut two eye holes and maybe more holes for the mouth and nostrils but at first I need to have eye holes.
I have selected the area for one eye using the selection tool. I then tried Extrusion tool and input a negative value. Instead of creating a hole, the negative intrusion created a extended part inside the inner surface.
I then tried several other tools such as offset. They are not useful.
How do I cut a hole on this mask having inside and outside surfaces? I only need the name of the tool so I can look for related YouTube tutorials. If possible, I'd like to create two objects: the mask and the eyepiece. The eye object can probably be used elsewhere for Halloween.
The way I would go about it, (i have zero 3d printing and a little bit of 3d modelling experience), is to create a solid "cylinder" the shape of the hole you want, put it in the place you want the hole to be, and subtract it from the mask, leaving the hole. meshmixer boolean] tutorial looks like a tool that will do it. I don't think just selecting a portion of a face that you "don't want" and deleting it is the correct approach in 3d modelling, except in very specific cases. Think of it like a solid object you are actually modelling, rather than just a pair of "faces". Also keep in mind that most 3d printers have "invalid" shapes that are quite easy to create in 3d models, like steep overhangs, but won't print well or at all in plastic. Vespine (talk) 05:29, 5 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
This mask has pretty evil eyes and eyelids. Maybe I'll say they look like the eyes of General Akbar of The Return of the Jedi. So I can't just cut off the eyes using a simple geometric shape. Thank you anyway. May the Halloween be with you! -- Toytoy (talk) 10:07, 5 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Well then you'll just need to make a "non simple" geometric shape? The principle remains the same. By "cylinder" I didn't mean it had to be a "circle": Premise 1) At some roughly "flat" plane on your mask there exists a "hole" (I don't mean that the eye or the mask has a flat spot, I just mean that there exists a plane where the hole, when viewed from one side, appears roughly "flat". . That hole has a "shape", draw that shape and extrude it into a cylinder. Place that cylinder perpendicular to the plane in the place you want he hole and subtract. If premise 1 is very incorrect, the shape of the hole is more complex you just need a more complex shape than an extruded solid. Vespine (talk) 00:31, 6 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Best term for "website where you can buy something"
What is the best generic term for websites where customers can buy some specific goods and/or services, e. g. commercial online games or social media offering privileges? "Webshop", I think, is commonly restricted to traders of goods which work independently of the shop (e. g. music files), but this does not include aforementioned examples. What term may be used - "web offer vendor"? I haven't found any term which is actually in pracitcal use. --KnightMove (talk) 06:12, 5 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, but "An online marketplace (or online e-commerce marketplace) is a type of e-commerce site where product or service information is provided by multiple third parties, whereas transactions are processed by the marketplace operator." - this is exactly the kind of restriction I want to avoid. I explicitly want to include websites that only sell "their own" stuff and services. --KnightMove (talk) 12:30, 5 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Can someone help me to write a program which can auto update all the content of a webpage to a wiki page, with "dest" as the destination website. Thanks! Wetitpig0 (talk) 06:42, 5 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Verbose/non-verbose source file and executable size
If a source file is quite verbose (due to the choice of language, or just due to the programming style), will the resulting executable be shorter than one compiled from a terse source file? Hofhof (talk) 08:50, 5 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Not very reliable, but here [1] is someone claiming: "There is no correlation between the number of lines of code and size of the generated binary."
Think about it, a million lines of redundant definition can compile to tiny sizes, while just a few lines of procedural nonsense can generate giant binaries. Hopefully others can better explain/clarify/give better examples, but I agree with the StackOverflow poster that there is, and can be, no general trend. It gets more complicated if you want to talk about the "same" program (and how you define that), but even for one specific language and one specific task, I don't think you'll find an obvious relations between verbosity of source and size of binary. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:47, 5 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'm guessing this is NOT what you mean, but it might be worth mentioning that there are things which a compiler completely ignores, the most obvious example being comments. So a program with loads of 'verbose' comments, and a program with no comments at all can "look" very different, but will compile exactly the same. Vespine (talk) 23:01, 5 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Another example is whitespace outside quoted strings. Line count or bytes are often used to describe the size of source code but most languages allow any number of spaces, tabs and newlines nearly everywhere. One programmer may use one line to write if a then b else c. Another may use seven lines (including blank lines) to write:
if a
then
b
else
c
Compilers don't care about the amount of whitespace. A third example is the length of identifiers like variable names, e.g. n or number_of_items_in_table_of_widgets. Many identifiers are used a lot of times. Many compilers will never store the identifier or only store it once. A different kind of example is source code which can never be executed, e.g. a never called function or the else part of a conditional that can be determined at compile time to always be true. Some compilers will detect some cases and simply not compile it. It is an undecidable problem to detect all cases, except for some languages which have limited power and are not Turing complete. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:22, 6 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
To be more precise: some compilers for certain languages - free-form languages - do not care about whitespace.
It is not generally true that all compilers ignore all whitespace. Even some modern languages, like Python, interpret whitespace as part of the language semantics. PEP-666, which may have originated as a humorous joke, was actually implemented, and made its way into my system's version of Python 2.7.10; I can actually cause Python to produce an error if any programmer makes "foolish" use of whitespace. Nimur (talk) 17:49, 6 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
There used to be "100%" in the lower right corner on my old computer. When I finally find and click on "Zoom" it says it's at 100 percent. If I click on the minus it is 75 percent but everything is too small. I do know that my monitor was unplugged when I turned the computer on and I heard some weird noises, but I plugged the monitor back in. I have Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 19:45, 5 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I too recently "upgraded" to Windows 10 with Edge, and have noticed that the latter can look a little different to other browsers, possibly because it's more designed than others to work on mobile devices. I presume you're finding Zoom on Edge by clicking the "..." at top right [mouseover: "More"]? I haven't yet figured out how to make this use smaller increments than 25%.
There's also a Magnify function (or "App") in the 'Windows Ease of Access' folder that can be pinned to the toolbar, and whose increments can be adjusted down to 25% but apparently not less that that.
CTRL is what I was looking for. Actually, I turned the computer off, and when I turned it on everything appeared normal again. I didn't upgrade to Windows 10, by the way. It's a new computer which already had it.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:17, 7 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
4. Could a 1980 minicomputer be programmed to display a 24+ bit color 4K image with only 1980 technology? (changing only display, software and I/O). About how long would this take to set up? (programming time etc.) How many frames per second could it do? 0.000x fps? Would telling it what to draw be easier if you just program it to use 24,883,200 consecutive octets of it's hard drive as the red, green and blue values of consecutive subpixels? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 18:57, 6 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Some tricky questions. I have no idea about 1 or 2. Question 3, surely they're talking about Compact disk? 1982 happens to be the year CD players became commercially available. As for 4, I don't see any reason why not. The first digital photos were taken in the mid 70s. It might be horrifically slow but a 1980 computer is just as turing complete as a modern computer. Vespine (talk) 22:41, 6 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Just to add a little to 4, I actually have some experience writing a low level display driver, albeit for a display with only 512 pixels. Obviously your microcomputer would lack the driver and protocol to "draw" the screen in the 1st place, there wasn't even vga until 1987, before then most computer screens were just TVs with analog inputs and 640 lines. So you would need to custom build an interface, which would not be trivial and write a display driver from scratch which would also not be trivial. Have a read of Video display controller to get an idea of the challenges you might face. As for "how many frames per second", I think you'd be more likely counting how many frames per day or even per week. Vespine (talk) 23:32, 6 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't say it wasn't, except in the history of the world I doubt anyone has ever actually used "ten-thousandths of a frame per second" to measure anything, ever. Vespine (talk) 04:08, 7 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
A Red Book CD stores about 4.3218 Mbps × 74 minutes ≈ 1.9×1010 raw bits, so they must have been talking about CDs. (That's about 2.2 GiB, but it includes the coding overhead. You can only store ~1 GiB of useful data on a CD with efficient coding, or 650 MiB with the inefficient coding actually used in the CD-ROM standard.) -- BenRG (talk) 23:49, 6 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it is inefficient in a sense, by design. Fault tolerance, error correction, error detection, encoding, etc. Trust me, you really wouldn't want a CD packed with 2 GiB of raw binary data - if it wasn't useless right out of the box, it would very quickly become so. The fine folks who made these standards knew that people would prefer products that work compared to products that have larger storage specs, but don't work. SemanticMantis (talk) 14:26, 7 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I always guessed it was under a gig raw but I'm sure they did the best they could at the time. Without sealing it like a tape or hard drive but that probably would've decreased profit and/or smallness beyond what the powers that be wanted. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:53, 7 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
They don't really hold multiple gigabytes. There are ~19 billion locations on the disc where the pickup can detect a pit-to-land transition, but the minimum length of a pit or land is three times that. The capacity of a run-length limited channel with a minimum run length of 3 is about 0.55, so the disk can really only hold about 1.2 GiB even in clean-room conditions with no error correction. (There is also a maximum pit/land length of 11, but that has very little effect on the capacity.) -- BenRG (talk) 01:02, 8 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
In answer to (4) it would be NO. Firstly the memory of the minicompute would not be enough to hold a single image. Memories of half a megabyte were common, and you might have been able to upgrade to one megabyte. Secondly the bandwidth and processing power would not be enough to do anything useful, not even enough to copy an image. In that era you could have had a standard definition TV graphical output, or several 24×80 visual display unit terminals. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 13:02, 7 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Not even if you told a TV to show what's in the upper left corner, a TV placed physically adjacent to draw the next pixels, and so on and wait through a lot of loading until all 48 30(?) TVs have an image? How many frames per week could you get doing that? (reusing frames allowed since the entire hard drive's probably 10 uncompressed frames max) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:53, 7 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
This article about the NYIT CG Lab says "The workhorse hardware during the early 80's [included] six programmable Ikonas graphics processors, the largest with 12 megabytes of image memory (an ungodly amount in that day: 2048x2048x24-bits), viewed with rare thousand line color monitors [...]". That's a bit after 1980, and it was a lab with a multimillion dollar budget, but the technology did exist then. SuperPaint had a 640x480x8bpp frame buffer with real time TV output way back in 1972. -- BenRG (talk) 01:38, 8 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I said YES, Guy says NO. I was thinking about this a bit more and I think the answer is "it depends"... I don't think the memory thing is as much a limitation as Guy thinks it is, as you pointed out, read it from disk if you have to, it might take orders of magnitude more time, but it doesn't make it impossible. Impractical definitely, impossible no. Just recently there was a link here to someone who managed to boot up 32bit linux on an 8bit microcontroller using an emulator, similar kind of thing. It's "conventional wisdom" that 32bit software won't run on an 8bit computer since it "doesn't have the address space", but it's not impossible. It took half a day to just boot up, but it "worked". Vespine (talk) 00:18, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Opening lots of links at the same time
Is there a way to open all the links on a webpage into new tabs with a single action rather than ctrl-clicking each one to open in new tab. I use Chrome but have other browsers too. Thanks. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 22:45, 6 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The pause/break, scroll lock, and SysRq keys are all generally regarded as vestigial nowadays; I think our articles on those keys cover their original use and current status pretty well. The application key and insert key are also starting to disappear from keyboards, but those at least still have some kind of consistent use. -165.234.252.11 (talk) 18:57, 7 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
If I may ask a supplementary question - how do modern word processing / text editor applications switch between insert and overtype mode without an "insert" key? Or do people just not use overtype mode and delete the text they don't want instead? Tevildo (talk) 20:03, 8 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, the latter. You can just use the mouse to highlight lots of text and then hit the delete key or backspace (or just start typing the new text) to delete it, so there's really no need for an overtype mode. I occasionally find, much to my annoyance, that I have somehow been put into overtype mode and have been wiping out my previous words while writing. Undo (CTRL-Z) doesn't much help here, in that it may bring back the old text, but only by deleting the new text. StuRat (talk) 02:42, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Don't forget the compose key and AltGr, which we used on SPARCStations! The more time you spend working with weird computers, the more variations of keyboard layout you will encounter. Computers (and stand-alone keyboard products) are sometimes built for specific applications or customers; or for international markets; or for unusual system softwares. There are zillions of variants on the theme. I would not term them "obsolete" - it is more accurate to say that some keys are not commonly used on general-purpose or retail-market computer systems. An excellent example of this: many point-of-sale "cash register"-type systems are still built with physical keys - I saw a restaurant point-of-sale computer last week that had a hamburger-key - and it was brand-new hardware!
I've indeed rarely seen a compose key (I saw them on SPARCstations too), which is a pity, as it's a really useful key. I always configure my system so that one of the less useful keys acts as a compose key. AltGr is common wherever people frequently need accented or other special characters, which is the case in most of Europe. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:26, 8 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The Space-cadet has "super" and "hyper" special keys, along with regular keys like the key. I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for, but if you're interested in strange keys on computer keyboards, it doesn't get much better than the space-cadet keyboard! SemanticMantis (talk) 16:16, 8 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Remove a keyboard shorcut command (Apple)
How do I stop a command shortcut from working? Specifically, I would like ⌘ Cmd+h to do nothing (I have never used it on purpose even once, and sometimes mis-invoke it when intending to hit ⌘ Cmd+g). I am using El Capitan. I tried exploring System Preferences → Keyboard, but saw nothing in there helpful and a Google search failed. Thanks--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 22:42, 7 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, that's an unusual request! As a "work-around", you can assign ⌘ Cmd+h to the Launchpad task for hiding the dock (or similar - there are lots of non-intrusive actions you can assign that shortcut to trigger), which turns that keystroke sequence into a UI action that might be less intrusive to your workflow... meanwhile, I'll see if I can find out any way to do what you're really trying to accomplish! Nimur (talk) 23:06, 7 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Hey Nimur. Thanks for looking. I had no idea the request was unusual. I guess people don't think in terms of turning off commands. I've never seen any use for the hide command though. Meanwhile, can you walk me through, say assigning the command instead to the "Launchpad task for hiding the dock". In attempting to reassign it, I went to the system preferences → keyboard → shortcuts, with keyboard highlighted from the left hand window, but only see in there selections like "move focus to the menu bar" and a bunch of others. I then tried highlighting services, and assigned cmd+h to "add contact" (though I don't even know what that does) but when I then performed the command, it still hid the window (so I am guessing the assignment I made only invokes in some particular context).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:13, 8 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, I haven't forgot about your question... before I try to answer it any deeper, I'm conducting a little bit of homework to make sure everything I provide is correct. I'm not sure who "owns" the keyboard shortcut handling logic (the app or the operating system or some other software piece) - once I have that figured out, I'll report back with some more ideas.
When I hear "business web design" I think of two things: Online market and content management system. I've seen "business web design" as a course listing as multiple universities and read their descriptions. They just reword the title as something like "Professional web design for a business environment." Is it the opinion of the good editors here that online market and content management system covers the topic of business web design? 209.149.113.4 (talk) 13:19, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Please see the header for the purpose of this forum. We do not honor requests for opinions. If you have references (links to sources of information) we can provide for you, please request that. --Jayron3215:02, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I have a pocket camera whose settings are set automatically. Although it does a good job, sometimes I'd like to set things like exposure time or diaphragm by hand.
This kind of task is going to be "nearly impossible" unless you have a few advantages:
Do you have detailed knowledge of the hardware, including schematics and blueprints and datasheets?
Do you have expertise in programming other small microcomputers?
If you don't have both of those, it's a near certainty that you won't be able to "hack" the unknown design of a retail-market consumer camera. Perhaps you should consider buying a camera that is specifically designed for programmability?
Here are details of the "Frankencamera", a research project aimed to help users modify the behavior of the Nokia N900 device. Bear in mind that the original team who "hacked" that device (rather, wrote custom software for it) had significant funding (money!!) and support (engineering man-hours!!) from important partners in industry, academia, and the Department of Defense.
One of the best ways to "hack" a camera is to do the following:
Excel in formal academic training, specifically in the areas of physics, mathematics, electronics engineering, and computer science
Seek admission to a research team or research program who have experience working with these sophisticated modern devices
Spend a lot of hours learning how current cameras work, before trying to modify them to do something new.
These devices are incredibly complicated. A recent public statement by Apple's chief of marketing, Phil Schiller, estimated that the vector-processing supercomputer inside an iPhone camera uses 100 billion operations each 25 milliseconds - that's a lot of computation, and if you think you want to hack it, it's worth your time to test your mettle first on a simpler problem!
I see that changing the firmware can be quite complicated. But as an alternative there is a CHDK (Canon Hack Development Kit) which is a substitute firmware that allows users to customize their cameras. There could also be something like this for my Sony. There are certainly some projects who aspire to produce this, but the ones I found were in their infancy. Or even better, there could exists a kind of live OS that would run in any camera, like a live Cd runs a computer. Although I am afraid that the cameras are way too different from each other, and do not implement a unifying standard. Llaanngg (talk) 12:06, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Google sign-in
Using 'Edge' browser in Windows 10. When I sign in to Google, with "Remember me" switched off, then open a different website in a new tab, then close the Google tab, then reopen google.com, I am still signed in to Google. However, when I close the whole browser and restart, then go back to google.com, I am signed out. How does Google distinguish these cases? How does it know whether I shut down the whole browser or just its own tabs? (Please note that I am not asking for advice about which browser to use, nor seeking advice to switch to a different browser or operating system. Thanks.) 81.152.193.175 (talk) 20:56, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
When you sign in to something in your browser, the site you're signing in to sets a session cookie. Your browser then sends this cookie along whenever it talks to that site. This is how the site identifies you. Google doesn't actually "know" whether you closed a tab or whatever. It just sees whatever cookies your browser sends it. Browsers are generally configured by default to keep cookies around until they expire. This expiration time is set by the site, and can be far in the future. Cookies can also be set to expire at the end of a browser session. This is what happens if you don't select the "Remember me" option. Your Google session cookie stays around until you close the browser. Closing a tab doesn't do anything because the browser authors didn't program it that way. (What actually happens under the hood is the cookie isn't written to disk, unlike "permanent" cookies. It's just stored in the browser's memory. When the browser process terminates, the cookie disappears along with everything else in the process memory.) In some browsers you can modify this behavior by installing browser extensions. --47.138.165.200 (talk) 01:57, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
That is, one that won't let it pop-up a dialog asking if I really want to close the browser tab. I use Google Chrome on Windows 7, but would also be interested if such a keystroke exists, or can be set up, in IE, Firefox, or any other browser. Thanks, StuRat (talk) 14:01, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Ctrl-w tends to be the "close what I am doing without asking me" shortcut key for everything. It is also the "Where Is?" shortcut for many old Unix programs, so whenever I want to find something on a web page or find something in a text document, I tend to press Ctrl-w and suddenly realize that I've lost everything I was doing without any form of confirmation. 66.190.149.73 (talk) 16:25, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Can python crash from adding just by having more lines?
I am doing some procedural map generator on python, the program load, and the player can tell the program to change the size of the map that will be generated, tell the program to generate the map......
The program generated maps that had tiles of 16x16, but this didn't allowed the amount of detail a tile needed, so I decided to change the program to a 32x32.
The only changes needed to do it, was to change just one variable value from 16 to 32, and add the extra ifs needed to know what specific pixel of the 32x32 tile I will be generating and the colors they will have. This added 50000 lines to the program.
Anyway, after changing the single variable to 32, and just adding the extra ifs ("if your tile type value is X and you are at row A and column B of tile image you are generating, put rgb color Y,Z,W there"), the program crashs before starting.
What can be the problem of this?201.79.66.96 (talk) 19:33, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
If you try to allocate more memory than is available, the Python runtime will throw a MemoryError which, if uncaught, will case the program to terminate. If you're not catching it, the runtime will print "MemoryError" on stdout as it exits. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk21:13, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
When opening the program from cmd, it just crash before opening (but not the cmd prompt) and it return no message.
One example of the old code
if object.tile_list[colcheck][rowcheck] == '0':
if whererow == 0 and wherecol == 0:
pixels[(acol),arow] = (15,215,255)
elif whererow == 0 and wherecol == 1:
pixels[(acol),arow] = (15,215,255)
elif whererow == 0 and wherecol == 2:
pixels[(acol),arow] = (15,215,255)
elif whererow == 0 and wherecol == 3:
pixels[(acol),arow] = (0,138,85)
This is part of the code, its the tiletype is 0 it generate the pixels colors on their specific place, on old code the ifs continued until elif whererow == 15 and wherecol == 15:, the new one goes up to elif whererow == 32 and wherecol == 32:201.79.66.96 (talk) 21:38, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
What is "pixels"? It's not a list, because Python doesn't have multidimensional lists (you can have lists of lists, but that's not the syntax for them) and doesn't allow tuples as indices. I guess it's a dictionary (or equivalent), which does allow tuples as indices (which is what you're doing, despite that eccentric syntax you've chosen). And a dictionary even with millions of entries will work fine (again, until you run out of memory). Really, you're asking us to explain to you how a program works (or fails) but you've not shown us the whole program, leaving us guessing what it does. If you want real help, you'll need to come up with a minimal program that generates the problem you get (please don't post the whole program as it is). 84.92.175.198 (talk) 22:12, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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