I need to quench my thirst for knowledge and learn something new just for the sake of it.

I’ve already learned:

  • Equations and pivot tables in Excel

  • Vector graphics in Inkscape

  • Music mixing in rekordbox

  • Personal VPN on a raspberry pi 4 with OpenVPN

  • LAMP stack web hosting

  • Streaming & video capture with OBS

  • Manual & automatic backups with FreeFileSync

Things I’m open to:

  • FOSS (even beta) or free-as-in-beer software

  • A high or low learning curve

  • Tools for niche fields that I’d otherwise have no reason to learn

      • DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz
        4·
        25 days ago

        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.

    • MissJinx@lemmy.world
      2·
      24 days ago

      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

    • xylogx@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      25 days ago

      “Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.”

    • Thales@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      24 days ago

      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.

      • CAVOK@lemmy.world
        8·
        24 days ago

        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.

    • Digit@lemmy.todayEnglish
      3·
      24 days ago

      Reminds, there’s mypaint too.

      Yeah. Krita, mypaint, I neglect, living 99% of the time in gimp.

    • Cxyz@lemmy.zip
      2·
      25 days ago

      Thanks for sharing this! I’ve had Krita on my tablet for a while now and have been meaning to learn it.

    • 0ops@piefed.zipEnglish
      3·
      25 days ago

      I really like openscad! It maps well to how I think through modeling a part. I was just using it yesterday

      • testfactor@lemmy.world
        8·
        24 days ago

        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.

      • josephc@lemmy.ml
        2·
        23 days ago

        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.

  • Thwompthwomp@lemmy.world
    26·
    25 days ago

    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 tikz and/or pgfplots for some interesting power tools. Tikz does A LOT, and is really powerful. But can definitely be overwhelming.

    • pmk@piefed.caEnglish
      2·
      25 days ago

      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.

      • Thwompthwomp@lemmy.world
        1·
        24 days ago

        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.

        • pmk@piefed.caEnglish
          1·
          24 days ago

          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.

    • ivn@tarte.nuage-libre.frFrançais
      2·
      25 days ago

      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.

  • smiletolerantly@awful.systems
    23·
    25 days ago
    • MuseScore 4 is a (the!) free music notation software. It is genuinely fantastic. It’s also a lot of fun, if you know some notation basics and want to play around.
    • Darktable is a Raw photo editor in the vein of Lightroom. Except where lightroom is sleek, polished, user friendly and Adobe (🤮), Darktable is FOSS, and clearly so both in the design and functionality: it could easily make a UX designer cry, but if you’re willing to give it a try, there does not exist a more potent raw editor on this earth. Lightroom is a toy in comparison. (Now whether you need that is another question… But I’ve been using it for more than 10 years, and am still finding new, incredibly useful sub-menus, drop-down contexts on hidden sliders,…)
    • rmpc is a really cool TUI music player
  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
    19·
    25 days ago

    My suggestion already submitted was Blender, but any of these ideas require a purpose. I don’t think you truly learn an application or language (even human languages!) if you don’t have something you’re trying to do with it. Even music (it’s a language), you can learn how to play something, how to put together notes and sounds, but you really start figuring out how to do things when you have a need to accomplish.

    I would say 90% of my coding and application knowledge comes from decades of having a need or inspiration to do something, and having to find the right tool and learn how to use it to make my idea become something (even if it doesn’t get finished). When that purpose or desire disappears (for whatever reason) I stop wanting or caring about learning more about the tool I was using to do it with.

    Your initial request seems to point to a different style of learning, wanting to do it for the journey itself. That’s cool, I just wonder if you had a reason for doing it, would it make the effort more fun and worthwhile.

    • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      25 days ago

      Thats why i struggle so much learning any type of programming. What’s the point. Any software I’d want is super complex, and there’s a billion simple tiny ones that have already been made.

      • Rhaedas@fedia.io
        2·
        25 days ago

        I definitely look to see if the wheel is already invented, but I guess I started early enough when there wasn’t a lot out there and had to make it work on my own. I totally enjoy having to hack together things and google answers (god, that’s gotten a lot harder than it used it be), so that’s also part of why I jump to DIY unless I find something that’s perfect and already made.

        A recent one where I stopped myself was automating backups. I was going to try to throw together something, but then ran across restic and Backrest and wow, it’s so much better than what I could have done.

  • ascendings@fedia.io
    19·
    25 days ago

    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.

    • Kaldo@fedia.io
      3·
      24 days ago

      I like numbers and was really tempted to go all in into this rabbit hole but this ends up being a lot of work and stress if you try to maintain it manually. It’d be ideal to be able to automate imports from your banking apps but those don’t really exist, or depend on some possibly sketchy 3rd party services that I dont trust with my finances

      • sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        2·
        24 days ago

        I use a paid service (which might itself depend on one of those 3rd party bank syncing companies, idk), but it’s wild to me that banks haven’t figured this out yet and cut out the middleman. They can’t want their customers to be exposed to more risk than necessary

    • Anivia@feddit.org
      11·
      23 days ago

      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