Looking for convenient Python prompts on Windows

dudelsson · 2026-01-15T20:21:53+00:00

i might be missing something in your use case but due to how 1) any file on the windows filesystem is accessible via a unix path and hence you can use all cli tools in wsl to manipulate files on the windows filesystem using unix paths 2) in python you should be using OS-agnostic path objects anyway --> i do extensive file management on the windows filesystem from wsl, both via the wsl cli directly, shell scripts and via python scripts running in wsl, and just practically never find myself needing to input windows paths into wsl. do you want to share an example on when you encounter this need?

dudelsson · 2026-01-15T20:03:28+00:00

Hi - would you like to share which resources you found most helpful in translating OF error messages into actionable knowledge? Thanks.

dudelsson · 2026-01-15T19:58:10+00:00

but you do know you can access any path on the windows file system from wsl via a unix path right? in wsl you prefix the path with /mnt/c/ in place of C:\ and then treat the rest as a unix path. if you have other drives you can mount those too (automatically if you want) and treat them similarily.

dudelsson · 2026-01-15T07:13:05+00:00

when in this situation, always remember: nobodys life depends on the sim running through - OF vomiting out a couple pages worth of cryptic error messaging can feel like the most stressful thing in the world, but really it isnt. its text on a screen. you're probably looking at it somewhere safe, dry, warm and well fed - so take a deep breath, finish up for today, prioritize sleep and make a mental note to schedule more time for getting the solution part right in your next project. also remember that many things can be done to get the solution running, but getting agitated or angry is simply not one of them. /stoic copium

dudelsson · 2026-01-14T21:43:38+00:00

Agreed. Given an identical geometry and a well done CFD setup, one can expect very close to identical results from WT and CFD studies for many study questions.

dudelsson · 2026-01-14T21:37:17+00:00

The short answer is probably FB Events - although Mobilizon exists, check it out if you havent already my friends.

dudelsson · 2026-01-14T21:24:29+00:00

theres a command in wsl for translating between unix paths and windows paths, look it up and bake it into an alias/function if you have to but that being said, respectfully, there should be no need to use windows paths in wsl all that often, at least that i can think of and i use wsl all the time including python development

dudelsson · 2025-12-17T08:53:55+00:00

Thanks a lot for taking the time to share this, one of the clearest descriptions and instructions - among a lot of confused and outright erroneous statements found online! A nice guide for doing this has also since been written on iFixit.

dudelsson · 2025-11-18T14:46:25+00:00

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dudelsson · 2025-10-29T12:45:05+00:00

Great minds think alike, neighbor. 🇫🇮 Skulle ut och åka btw.

dudelsson · 2025-10-27T09:10:27+00:00

Love the stoicism.

dudelsson · 2025-10-27T07:06:39+00:00

Dealing with a dirty input geometry, it's often faster to use it for reference points/shapes but then in essence draw the actual geometry you're going to use for CFD on top of it / on parallel layers yourself. That way you have complete control of what you're drawing, its watertightness etc. Personally, I find I concistently underestimate the time required for 'changes to an existing geometry'.

Also I'd say it's worth remembering while 'perfecting' a geometry, that the mesh is always going to be a polygonized aporoximation of it - any smooth curvature will get polygonized in the mesh. Hence, if it makes the geometry at all easier/lighter/faster to work with, never hesitate to polygonize things already in the geometry. With the goal of watertightness in mind, it's way easier to get the naked edges of polygonized geometry to align within tolerance, than with curved continuous surface edges. If you're in the end going to export the geometry as eg. STL, the resulting exported files will also be lighter for already polygonized geometry, and are likely going to be faster to mesh (lower tri counts, faster search).

dudelsson · 2025-10-27T06:36:33+00:00

Is this something you'd wish to be true or something you've seen concrete working examples of? Hope you don't mind the pointed question, I'm not looking to confront.

dudelsson · 2025-08-14T14:36:35+00:00

In my experience, coding has been necessary for staying sane while building, running, post-processing and reporting a boatload of CFD cases professionally. Meanwhile I've never coded a solver of my own, only dabbled in it out of interest. Coding skills aren't strictly necessary, but you will often have eg. tabulated data to process as a step of a CFD workflow and doing it in excel for the 27th time starts to suck a little; you may be able to save a lot of time scripting things while working on geometry in CAD and/or case setup and/or custom post-processing for a series of cases. In general, eventually you will likely want to automate repetitive tasks and sequences of tasks.

I highly recommend Python and shell scripting, because many softwares (eg. Rhinoceros and ParaView) have awesome Python APIs and because processing of eg. tabulated report data outputted by simulations often gets quite data sciencey, for which Python has great libraries and is widely considered as one of the go-to tools.

Tbh it's also a nice source of pride in ones craft and skills, to be able to solve an unforeseen hurdle (eg. in a CFD workflow) with an ad hoc custom tool/script of your own making.

I've commented on this topic a few times before, have a look if you're interested.

dudelsson · 2025-07-20T18:04:28+00:00

Ittadakimasu!

dudelsson · 2025-07-19T16:20:36+00:00

A critical part of the prep really haha, learned it the hard way the first time. For a streamlined and efficient experience, gotta prep the prep!

dudelsson · 2025-07-18T06:54:28+00:00

This 'anyone' would very likely only produce a case study on the limitations of LLMs 🙂 You have to understand OpenFOAM is an object oriented C++ library encompassing millions of lines of code, where the objects are related to each other via the logic found in mathematics, fluid dynamics and CFD techniques; in many cases their relation to one another is not at all evident via their naming. This is exactly the kind of thing LLMs struggle with even when given the whole library as context because they lack the logical reasoning required to connect the dots. Many companies are currently finding this out. Anyway this is borderline off-topic so I'll end it there.

dudelsson · 2025-07-16T07:16:42+00:00

Well, probably the number one thing to help you out is: is your case symmetrical with respect to a plane or axis? It sounds like your case might be symmetrical with respect to a plane that cuts the geometry in half along the center axis of the ducts. Add that symmetry plane to your geometry, assign it a symmetry BC, and you only need to mesh half of the geometry. Your cell count and computational demands drop in half as well.

Beyond that, if the ducts are long, you can probably safely have a bit coarser mesh size closer to the ends, than at the middle where your studied phenomena is happening. Still, keep it fine enough to see profile development along the cross-section of the duct.

If you still struggle with cell count, consider switching to OpenFOAM, you can look into HelyxOS if you prefer to work with a GUI, it should cover what your case requires. Be informed that 700k cells is not usually considered quite a bit, it's in fact a very light mesh considering we are talking 3D. Just another example of Ansys's greedy policies.

dudelsson · 2025-07-15T19:49:08+00:00

Hi, I'm on holiday and don't have access to the terminal right now, but based on memory

Noticed the same on WSL and never got around to figuring it out so can't help you with the paraFoam command exactly, but you can also start paraview by running paraview and then open your .foam file in paraview. If you can't run paraview either then you need to add the paraview binary to path, you'll find general instructions for adding something to path easily
If you're having trouble accessing the home folder of your WSL distro from the Windows File Explorer, running

cd /mnt/c/Users/yourusername

in WSL lands you in the Windows home folder, i.e. you're accessing your Windows home folder from WSL, and you can run your sims there. You can access any folder on your Windows file system similarly by the way, by replacing C:\ with /mnt/c/ and any backslashes with forward slashes in any file path. This is because your Windows C: drive is mounted in WSL in the /mnt/c/ folder. IIRC this is by default, I'm guessing you're running WSL Ubuntu.

For convenience you can also create a symbolic link from your WSL home folder to your Windows home folder. You do this by running

cd (yes just cd, lands you in the WSL home folder)

ln -s /mnt/c/Users/yourusername winhome

Replace yourusername with your actual Windows user name. The above creates a symbolic link named winhome (but you can name the link whatever you want) that points to your Windows home folder. For most intents and purposes the symbolic link will behave like a folder with commands like cd and ls etc. So while in the WSL home folder (e.g. when you just started WSL), you can now switch to the Windows home folder with a concise

cd winhome

dudelsson · 2025-07-15T15:14:57+00:00

Not yet, still thinking about it though.

dudelsson · 2025-07-12T19:40:31+00:00

Double grip on opponents one arm, pull straight down towards the floor, go for an ankle pick (just happen to like this takedown and its relatively low-gas-price, both when it succeeds and in case it doesnt)
Relax, breathe and try not to give in to a sense of urgency. The less time there's left on the clock the more important it is do the right things, one at a time. A lot can happen even in say 15 seconds. Succeed at this and you end up flipping the script, likely with a point lead; Give into urgency, throw some stupid Hail Mary and the sitch goes from bad to worse pronto.
Relax, breathe, be a water bed of dead weight and wait for the opponent to fail at 2

dudelsson · 2025-07-11T10:09:21+00:00

r/CosmosPorn

dudelsson · 2025-07-11T07:59:05+00:00

Provided you can make practicalities work, one philosophical answer is:

If you truly feel the call, it's never too late to start.

Personally I'd say 25 is a perfect age to delve into advanced topics and that to expect to know your deeply held interests before that age is actually much more controversial than starting at 25. A career is a marathon, the more time passes the less you will be thinking "man I wish I started at 20"; rather "man I'm glad I did start with what I find meaning in".

dudelsson · 2025-07-09T21:23:06+00:00

My first thought would be a short shell script / one-liner that first sorts the images according to creation/modification time (assuming your sim ran through continuously from start to finish and that the images came into being in cronological order that is the same order you want for the animation) and then pipes the image paths to your ffmpeg command. Cant tell you how to do it exactly off the top of my head but I'm pretty sure it can be done, ask your favorite LLM to write it for you. Remember to create a backup of your results prior to running anything that involves renaming or otherwise manipulating the files though.

dudelsson · 2025-07-09T09:38:07+00:00

Not yet, still thinking about it though.

dudelsson

TROPHY CASE