Oh, yeah, I understood sketches being the starting point, I just lived on the struggle bus any time I tried to sketch anything. The interface is close enough to vector drawing, that it constantly felt like I knew what I was doing, except everything I did threw an error 😅 or the things that in vector drawing would be a simple ‘click on an anchor and drag’, are multi-step processes involving a spreadsheet here.

I know a lot of it is a matter of practice, and I’m sure there are also growing pains for the software. I’m genuinely excited by the changes they’ve made to modifying sketches, and the little explanations at the bottom of the screen, I hope they are able to keep the momentum going.

TinkerCAD has a low enough learning curve that it is successfully used to teach elementary school students how to model. I disagree with your “but it’s a complex program, so it can’t be easy to pick up.”

Something being inaccessible to the masses shouldn’t be a badge of pride. Make the basics relatively easy to learn, and design the complex elements in a way that builds on the knowledge used for whatever was needed to get to that point. If we want to increase usership of FOSS products, we need the barrier to entry to be at least on par with the commercial products, if not lower. In fact, dedicating a few dev cycles towards new user onboarding to walk people through sketches, extruding, etc. to make it as accessible as possible would make such a difference.

I’ve been learning CAD for printing. I really want to use FreeCAD, but every time I try to do anything, I sink 2 hours into reading wiki’s and watching videos. When I apply what I’ve learned, I end up with a cube (sometimes a cylinder!) and a wall of errors. Then I hop into tinkerCAD/fusion360 and create what I need in 15 minutes.

I’m looking forward to the day that FreeCAD is intuitive enough for me to hop in and do what I need in 15 mins without feeling like I’m manually programming a lunar landing. It’s not there yet, but I’m happy to see the update.

Genuinely curious: Stoat’s Community Guidelines list the legal jurisdiction for their Service Operator as the United Kingdom (sorry for the awkward sentence structure) I know that any online platform that provides “risky” content to the UK has to perform age checks, but I’m curious if the privacy impact increases when the service is hosted in the UK? Eg, would they be required to conduct age checks for all users, rather than just UK users?

Obtainium is a decent way to make using sites like apkPure, uptodown, etc. a little easier to handle.

A hyphen or dot couldn’t serve the same function as a carriage return here? (Not being a dick; genuine question)

I would rotate the text 90 degrees so that it has the full length of the top tab, that should give you more room to work, and most humans can read rotated text.

Another suggestion would be to try a different font that works with the printing limitations: something curved like Exo 2 might be a little less of a fight.

Around my area, “contactless payment” became further normalised during the initial Covid lockdown (of all the changes to keep, we went with that one 🙄). Many of the smaller businesses seem to prefer it. I suspect it reduces error and effort - fewer errors during the transactions and direct data-to-data conversion in the accounting. I wouldn’t be surprised if it saves them money on insurance, too, as there’s no reason to rob a bunch of debit receipts.

I’m sure you -could- insist on paying with cash, but unless you’re have exact change, it’s not going to be a smooth, unremarkable exchange. And that also defeats the anonymity factor of privacy: they’re definitely going to remember the “weirdo” who insisted on paying cash, who argued about your sign being illegal, and then the PITA it was to find them change.

Don’t get me wrong, I make an effort to dominantly use cash. And I also recognise there are some places I either have to accept I can’t use cash (my pharmacy, which talks to my insurance, so moot point anyway), or have to find an alternative that does take cash (my favorite ramen place, RIP).

Seconding Skarn’s comment. Heliboard has a lot of options for what is and is not displayed, shortcuts, etc. If you can’t get it the way you want it through the options, a feature in settings allows you to edit the scripting for the layout. I have all the punctuation to the left of the space bar so I don’t put periods between each word. It took me no more than 10 mins to configure that, including wasting time backing up the original script (it has an option to return it to defaults), and I’m a “hobbyist” progammer at most.