Day 52 - A Hexahedral mesh in Ansys; Reddit Android clients comparison

10 Apr 2017 Tweet 100daysofwriting · ansys · latex · mechanical · reddit

Today was almost like yesterday, continued. More LaTex editing, more Ansys simulations inside Static Structural. It’s been so long since I saw YouTube tutorials for things (I think the last thing I saw them was for figuring out how Python’s IDLE worked! That was 5 years ago, I guess. I had no clue about what a Python shell was.) It’s surprising how easy it is to find Ansys tutorials. It probably tells people that it’s an insanely complex software.

I am sure it’s for good reason, but couldn’t it be made just a little bit easier? All I wanted was a fine hexahedral mesh. I had to watch 3 tutorials to figure it out, and it was actually a very simply fix. I got pulled into MultiZone meshing, and so on. I was able to figure it out, eventually though. And once I did, the stress distribution didn’t change as much as I thought it would. It changed a bit, I guess. I haven’t had the time to even look at the results properly yet.

Which is also the reason I haven’t seen Homeland’s 6.12, Season 6 finale episode yet! I know it’s out, I don’t follow anyone who might give me spoilers about it, I read this one tweet that I am sure I will forget by tomorrow. I have stayed off of Twitter for this reason, I am bound to come up on a Gif made from the episode sooner or later.

That also gives me a good chance to get on Reddit, but I didn’t realise that unlike Twitter which provides a feed that is impossible to get to the bottom of, Reddit’s feed is static until you refresh it. So, it’s like an article that’s constantly changing in the background but you can’t feel it at all. There are no obvious markers anywhere on any subreddit or any reddit android app.

I tried a bunch of those today. I was using the Reddit official Android application for the past 3 days, and it was fine. There wasn’t anything crazy about it, it was definitely not as good as Relay at the speed that it was loading things at or in the intuitiveness of Reddit’s comment threads. Comment threads are some of the weirdest and hardest understand features on Reddit with things like “context”, “show parent” and “mark as read”. Every comment reply gets added as an unread message, it’s very confusing to me.

I tried Boost for Reddit which is another Reddit android client. I was liking it until I realised (about 3 minutes in) that when I am looking at reply 3 to my comment, I can’t see reply 1 or reply 2. The only way to do that is to go to the complete comments thread and then manually scroll down and find my comment somewhere and then dig into the replies.

Of course, Relay for Reddit has the nifty “MINE” feature which lets me switch back and forth between the comments that I posted. This feature is probably the one that I use the most because always, after understanding a story and reading all the material, once I start discussing it’s only my comments and the replies to them and my replies to those replies that matter. Everything else is just background noise that I will catch up on later.

This is a blatant plug for Relay for Reddit. I was around when the Reddit official android app was first released and they changed their API and barred everyone else from using the Reddit icon in their client icons. It was all very aggresive and all, but Relay is clearly still the better one amongst the two!

POST 52 is OVER