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
Learn Krita. David Revoy, artist of Pepper and Carrot, has a ton of great tutorials on using it.
“Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.”
If that’s too basic/open ended, learn to animate in Krita.
Came here to say the same thing.
Krita is a fantastic image editor.
The ability to script it with Python is a huge plus. I’ve created posters by having it read files from a directory and place images precisely spaced, etc.
Krita is a fantastic name for a KDE drawing app if you speak Swedish. Krita means crayon, and traditionally KDE apps were prefixed with a “k”, also Rita means to draw.
Reminds, there’s mypaint too.
Yeah. Krita, mypaint, I neglect, living 99% of the time in gimp.
Thanks for sharing this! I’ve had Krita on my tablet for a while now and have been meaning to learn it.
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.
Take up the synth, but using software on a computer instead of a keyboard. Learn how to write MIDI. 😌
Or get a keyboard (or digital piano), but hook it up to your computer via MIDI and then compose music with it.
It’s a lot nicer using a real keyboard than trying to input notes with a mouse.
I usually used the computer keyboard when I messed with that stuff cuz I couldn’t get a real one back then, just so I could still feel somewhat like playing a piano. 🤣
The world needs more “tracker tunes” :D
You can combine the two with something like Overtone (programmable synth) or similar
Factorio
This is just pure evil
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!
I really like openscad! It maps well to how I think through modeling a part. I was just using it yesterday
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.
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]
SQL - understanding how to interact with databases will be an incredibly useful skill for whatever rabbit hole you next want to fall down.
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 don’t know what I expected… I love the Internet
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
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.
vi
or vim with
vimtutor
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.
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
Docker and Docker Compose. Once you know that, you’ll be able to self host almost any FOSS.
Take it one step farther and learn podman and quadlets. It’s like learning docker/compose, but it’s also rootless if you do it from userspace.
Docker can also be run rootless, though not by default.
True, but I personally don’t see the point in adding a bunch of new packages to a system to make it work the way another system does when the migration process is minimal.
Using podman compose, I’ve migrated multiple docker compose to rootless with basically no required refactoring until I made it a quadlet so it would always just run.
Yeah I also switched all my docker containers to podman as well. I wasn’t making any point for using either above the other
I wasn’t making any point for using either above the other
I know, but I AM making a point to use podman over docker because it’s rootless by default and requires less work/admin overhead to implement and maintain.
It’s all well and good that docker can run rootless with a good amount of tweaking and configuration, but the juice isn’t worth the squeeze IMO. I pulled the pin on that once I realized podman was the much better option.
I’ve never understood why Docker doesn’t work like that by default.
Docker was initially only rootful. So I’m assuming for compatibility’s sake they kept the default that way?
