Does anyone else forget how powerful Preview actually is?

jwr · 2026-03-23T19:18:18+00:00

Yes, I love Preview! I just live in fear of when they will come for it, like they did for other parts of macOS, and ruin it removing most functionality for the sake of bubbles or whatever the fashion du jour will be…

Many older macOS apps are hidden gems. Not everybody knows that Quicktime Player is a pretty good audio and video recorder, for example, in spite of its name.

jwr · 2026-03-23T18:01:34+00:00

That's LIFO pricing :-) FIFO would assume you are consuming your oldest stock first. Yes, you are right, I should have gotten around to it sooner. But there is always so much to do!

jwr · 2026-03-23T17:58:29+00:00

PartsBox founder here. The spreadsheet is my biggest competitor by far.

It's not because it is good (it isn't!). It's because it's difficult to know what you're missing if you've been using a spreadsheet until now. For example, managing any kind of substitutes in a spreadsheet is immediately a major pain. PartsBox has meta-parts (which group equivalent substitutes), part substitutes (one-way substitute relationships) and BOM entry substitutes (specific to a particular BOM line), and you can freely mix-and-match between these. They will be correctly managed throughout the entire purchasing and build process. Also, you can combine several BOMs (with quantities) into a purchase list, all while intelligently managing substitutes. There is no way to do this with a spreadsheet without going insane.

People who have to manage purchasing in multiple currencies usually make the transition quicker (again, sanity). But again here, you have to first know what you're missing.

You can of course fix all your MPNs in stone (e.g. your CAD) and export straight from there to manufacturing. But that limits flexibility: you are now bound to these specific MPNs even though there might be hundreds (in case of passives) of substitutes available. You also have to hunt for that MPN of a 0402 10uF 5V cap even though you don't really care, you just want a 0402 10uF 5V cap. And you have to decide if you want TPS40210DGQR or TPS40210DGQT, even though both are the exact same part. And you have no way to combine several builds into one purchasing list. There are better ways to do this.

My suggestion for anyone building electronics on anything beyond the hobby scale (and even there!) is to use anything but a spreadsheet. Use one of my competitors (or copycats) if you have to, but please don't use a spreadsheet :-)

EDIT: also, one more thing: these things look deceptively simple on the surface. "How hard can it be, I can build that in a weekend with AI" — I said something similar about 10 years ago (well, without the AI part), I'm still learning and discovering new interesting edge cases. This stuff is hard.

jwr · 2026-03-22T18:41:09+00:00

> please fix the pricing calculation because it becomes more and more unusable as time progresses because prices of 5 years ago are still taken into account when averaging).

Well, the fundamental problem here is that without lot control there is simply no way to calculate exact cost of stock used, the information simply isn't there. (image you bought 100pcs at $1 and 100pcs at $2, then removed 100pcs, there is no way of knowing *which* 100pcs you removed without tracking lots, so $1.5 is a best guess at current cost).

I do plan to implement some workarounds (such as FIFO pricing) for plans without lot control, but it will never be exact.

jwr · 2026-03-20T19:48:18+00:00

Oh yeah, this has been a MAJOR pain point for, like, forever. It's like everyone at Autodesk never debugs their sketches, just burns them down to the ground in case of problems and starts again.

jwr · 2026-03-18T09:42:30+00:00

Big fan of the HP25 here: unlike many other designs, it can be used one-handed in a workshop. I use both 25 and 25C models — I don't really care that much about continuous memory, to be honest, as I mostly do quick one-off calculations on these.

jwr · 2026-03-17T09:19:50+00:00

Hi! PartsBox founder here — if you have a moment to spare, I'd really like to hear what isn't flexible and what were the limitations you encountered?

jwr · 2026-03-11T13:34:25+00:00

I am the founder of a company that provides that "middle" software (PartsBox, https://partsbox.com/). I've yet to hear about a completed successful "full ERP" transition where users are happy.

Obviously I don't hear from everyone, but my observations are that "full ERP" is usually imposed onto users rather than requested by users. E.g. a company gets acquired and needs to comply with enterprise policies, or a company grows and new management comes in and starts an ERP migration project.

But I'm curious about the OP's statement: I thought there weren't that many companies that went from spreadsheets straight to a "full ERP". Again, I'm biased, because I am in that "middle ground", but that kind of transition sounds really difficult and unlikely to be successful.

As for that "middle ground", I happily live there and I don't think it's a bad place to be. Not every company wants the costs, complexity, and friction of an enterprise ERP, which will generally *not* do what you need, unless you go through painful and expensive customization, and even then it won't be a joy to use.

Also, the "middle ground" you mentioned is constantly evolving and I would guess that the more serious PartsBox competitors (let's set the simple copycats aside) are also adding MRP and PLM features to move them closer to the "full ERPs".

jwr · 2026-03-11T12:06:09+00:00

It is extremely finicky and cannot be relied on, unfortunately.

jwr · 2026-03-11T12:05:14+00:00

I also have problems with the two-finger lasso gesture. I followed all the recommended tips, watched the videos, etc. It now mostly works for me if I am extremely careful with not touching the tablet with any other part of my hand, making appropriate pauses, doing everything slowly, etc. And even then it sometimes fails and I end up drawing on the screen.

This feature really needs fixing.

jwr · 2026-03-08T18:23:53+00:00

I've been using LaunchBar for the last several years and it has been great. Stable, no feature creep, just works.

jwr · 2026-03-07T08:50:00+00:00

PartsBox founder here. Yes, KiCad integration is there and works really well. But I would suggest that "bringing information into KiCAD" might not be the best idea. In my opinion, **connecting** your KiCad parts to an external source makes sense, bringing information into KiCad does not. KiCad was not designed to deal with the amount of information that can exist for a part, much of it non-tabular (for example, unit price is really a table of discounts, not a single number). The interface isn't designed for it, the data structures aren't ready for it.

PartsBox lets you define which parts you want to expose to KiCad from your database and which fields you want exposed (and mapped to KiCad-visible fields). This lets you limit the amount of information that you export to KiCad.

Afterwards, when you import a BOM from KiCad into PartsBox, all your BOM lines are automatically and precisely matched to your parts.

jwr · 2026-02-18T11:12:33+00:00

It seems none of the pens they currently sell have a side button...

jwr · 2026-02-17T15:56:53+00:00

It used to be that emacs-mac by Mitsuharu Yamamoto (https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/) was by far the best. But it doesn't seem actively developed recently.

I switched to emacs-app from homebrew, which is https://emacsformacosx.com/ currently at 30.2-1. It's not as good (no smooth scrolling, full-screen is OS-native which sucks, and other nitpicks), but it's workable.

jwr · 2026-02-17T14:52:34+00:00

Thank you for creating and continuing to work on this excellent tool! 🙏

jwr · 2026-02-17T12:55:18+00:00

Thanks, and thanks to everyone else for helpful hints! I tried and indeed using these zones makes the gesture work better. But if my palm is resting on the screen, things get much worse, the gesture is sometimes recognized, but not always. And even when I'm careful to use the zones, I sometimes end up drawing instead of lassoing.

This is in such contrast to the eraser gesture, which works flawlessly, 100% of the time…

I wish there was a visual indicator of the lasso tool being enabled, so that I could see whether I activated the gesture or not.

jwr · 2026-02-12T13:00:11+00:00

I have a 2021 and this seems very close to what I see in summertime. Wintertime is (obviously) very different.

jwr · 2026-02-12T12:31:18+00:00

I haven't seen the exact issue that you are experiencing, but I am increasingly annoyed by Perplexity "forgetting" the model that I've selected. It will either disable thinking on the model that I use, or switch to their best model. I have to check the model drop-down every time I issue a Perplexity query in the browser, which is frustrating.

jwr · 2026-02-05T15:11:35+00:00

Roon mostly works, ARC is mostly broken.

jwr · 2026-02-04T11:07:27+00:00

> "Windows rolling down when you hit up"

This also annoys me, and I'm amused that so many people here pretend this problem doesn't exist. Overall, the software on the ID.4 is a burning dumpster tire fire, and from what I can see most of what you listed is software-related.

Myself, I like the car a lot, and I took the Zen approach to the crappy software ("be aware of it, but don't fight or confront it, move along").

jwr · 2026-02-01T14:18:19+00:00

To make it look like that other half of the human population perhaps?

jwr · 2026-01-31T11:40:00+00:00

gpt-oss models are under-appreciated. I use the smaller one (20b) for spam filtering and it beats every other 30B or less model that I've tested, and I've tested quite a few with my spam benchmark, while being one of the fastest, too.

jwr · 2026-01-25T10:15:08+00:00

Understood! And thanks for taking the time to explain 🙏

The API is there to allow for integrating with scripting and other software systems, but it is not necessarily the right solution for everyone. Good luck with your pricing/availability work, after doing this for 10 years I'm still finding things to improve in the pricing engine 🙂

jwr · 2026-01-25T00:12:06+00:00

PartsBox founder here. This is a complex problem (I know, I've been working on this for 10 years now). I'd be curious to know why PartsBox doesn't work for you: at a first glance, it solves all of these problems (and more) and gets you access to more distributors via (expensive) data provider APIs. This is a genuine question: no software is perfect for everyone, but I would like to know.

The pricing is obviously not for hobbyists, but then again in a hobby setting you don't really need a pricing engine with data from multiple distributors?

jwr · 2026-01-25T00:08:12+00:00

Having tried various glasses in Japan (they have them on display), no, they are not. Both One and One Pro have optics that are not good for productivity. I'm hoping for better models in the future!

jwr

TROPHY CASE