soda-ash #materials in the world market and their importance for lithium extraction
"Fenster" is a GUI library very similar to #Yeso, providing a 24-bit framebuffer, but also has cross-platform audio playback, working Cocoa and “WinAPI” backends, Go bindings, and Zig bindings!
"MicroUI" is a tiny immediate-mode GUI library, 1100 lines of C. It deposits drawing operations into a command buffer for your application to process, similar to dear #imgui.
#Tekknolagi and #akkartik got #MicroUI running on #Fenster this weekend
#precision kinematic couplings and related work. “Just using the most ordinary quality kinematic hardware will produce repeatability between the two kinematic platforms in the micrometer (40 micro inch) range. By using super stiff cermet component parts with the geometry and surface texture held to the highest possible quality, repeatability in the nanometer range can be achieved.” The micron range is ordinary bearing-ball tolerances, so I suspect that as long as you’re not swapping out your bearing balls, you can get much better repeatability than a micron. Lots of ideas about #exact-constraint design that I wasn’t familiar with! Not very well written, though; lots of repetition. Practical tips: “A complete ball can be economically installed in a kinematic platform by first machining a pocket that is nearly hemispherical. A female cone can be used, but it is much less effective. This pocket is wetted with a high strength epoxy glue, and the ball is clamped in place with enough force to squeeze out the excess glue. Wipe the excess epoxy glue away with some absorbent material wetted with Isopropyl Alcohol.” Unfortunately this advice is repeated almost verbatim in almost every single entry! Also not very reliable; it claims EDM uses an electrolyte, for example. #manufacturing #mechanisms
product shill #video on the #Uni steno keyboard from stenokeyboards.com, which is US$25–90, using #Plover. Some stock footage of court reporters; the YouTuber here is a beginner. Recommends the Typey Type website and the Plover Discord to learn.
WSJ news article, “China Harnesses a Technology That Vexed the West, Unlocking a Treasure Chest”: “#China’s success has reshaped the industry. It has infused significant new supply into the market and accelerated a crash in the prices of nickel and cobalt, knocking out Western competitors. The share of the global nickel supply refined within China or by Chinese companies abroad has risen from 34% in 2015 to 58% this year, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. / Meanwhile nickel and #cobalt mines in Australia, France-controlled New Caledonia, Brazil and the U.S. have closed or are being shut, unable to compete with the surge in low-cost Chinese minerals. Australian mining company BHP said in July that it would suspend its West Australian nickel operations, expecting a continuing flood of cheap #nickel.”