OK, fairly specific question - how did You get to that pants silouhete? It seems from the pics You went for something like a straight leg plus some extra room and fairly fitted waist / butt. Is that a response to a trend (oversized work clothes seem to be the thing these past few years), or is there some practical reason too (mainly for the extra room in the leg shape)?
Two reasons: 1. My thighs are bigger than usual for my waist size, so I adapted. 2. Indians (Bharat) have a culture of wearing lose clothes, and I also like lose clothes. They are more comfortable.
The waist is fitted, but with elastic bands on the side for added comfort (my belly gets bigger during evening, when I sit down and after I eat).
For everyone struggling with clothes sizing and having a hacker mindset, I can't recommend enough buying a sewing machine (~100EUR on a used market, ~150 new gets you a reasonable starter one you won't outgrow any time soon) and giving clothes alterations a try.
Finding a tailor that understands you / you agree with is an option too, if time is a hard limit (though I'm not sure it's altogrther that much quicker).
In my case, I started with tailors, but kept running into small misunderstandings. Also, my taste keeps evolving.
Start small with simple stuff, ideally old / second hand cheap clothes. Shirts, T-Shirts and bodice waistlines / "darts" are almost trivial once you can follow a straight line. First one will take a while, second will be much quicker, by third / fourth it's almost a routine and you can start iterating on your own preferences. They likely "will" evolve as you keep wearing the altered clothes.
Depending on how much help you can get in the beginning, with maybe a 2-3h intro on how to use a sewing machine done by a friend who has sewing as a hobby, I'm pretty sure most people should be able to get their first alterations done within 4-5h. By second or third attempt, this time should be down to around 1h per item, including some setup (pinning - trying - ironing). At that point the DIY option is probably quicker than going to a tailor.
I also fixed clothing sizes for my family using a hacker mindset, but in a different way:
Did you know that most professional sewing charts are just DXF files?
And did you know that DXF is the most common file format for laser cutters?
;)
=> just let the machine cut out precisely the clothing shapes that you need
After a few tries, I also started to add small sideways cuts to the outlines as alignment markers. And then you just need to connect the pieces where you marked them while always leaving roughly 0.5 cm of gap to the laser cut line. I went with 0.5 because my sewing machine has a hardware alignment guide with that offset. And at that point, it takes a skilled tailor only mere minutes to finish a shirt, which means in exchange for their 1x hourly rate they will be willing to finish off 5x proto t-shirts for you.
Oh, I'm not claiming sewing machine is the "only" option :-)
There's plenty of hacking that can be done on the subject of sewing and I admit that laser cutter is a cool one.
I'm still pretty partial to that sewing machine route (or needle and thread, if handiwork is prefferable). Simply because it lets you quickly iterate and build the taste, preferences and heuristic of how to get there. Personally, I still can't read a pattern propetly. But I'm more than happy to put a few pins into a shirt and prototype in front of a mirror.
Also, it gives me a good estimate of what I'm OK doing myself and what I will outsource to an actual tailor because it's either beyond my level, or I simply don't have time to do it.
I have never tried that because it finishes a single piece of clothing so quickly that it never seemed like it would make any sense to take risks of lower fabric layers being uneven/wrinkled in exchange for increasing throughput. Catching fire never seemed to be an issue with the CO2 laser that I used. Most fabrics will kind of melt before they start to burn. And the vacuum table sucking air through the fabric will also cool it down.
I keep coming cross these videos on youtube from Cornelius Quiring, and it's been making me think about trying it out. If anyone is looking for videos about drafting patterns for clothing, I think he's stuff seems pretty approachable!
Adult clothing no. But for kids clothing you kind of need it, because without the cutting function attaching rubber bands to neck, wrist, and belly seams is very difficult.
For some basic jerseys (think T-shirts) a basic zigzag is fine to begin with. That 100EUR sewing machine will have some fancier stretch stitch options that are slow, but "good enough" to look like an overlock (but can't do the cut of course).
If you have the space / money, overlock is definitely what I'd get as a second / third machine. It's much quicker / cleaner if you're working on jerseys or shirts.
But I still keep wearing the T-shirts I did when I was starting. On my list the first thing to do is to understand how to alter something to fit you. It can be done by hand (needle and thread), but to be reasonably efficient, the BOM would be "sewing machine, box of pins, scissors, piece of chalk / ruler and something to press / iron".
-A Memory called Empire (Arkady Martin) both of these are a fairly interesting take on scifi worldbuilding. Could be called "highbrow", but IMO pretty easy reads still.
-Piranesi (S. Clark) - well written fantasy
and plenty of other stuff that I've seen in other comments (Dungeon Crawler Carl does stand out a bit, but it's really a guilty pleasure / escape kind of a read).
Non-Fiction
-Brakneck (Dan Wang) - slightly outdated (by ~2y, which seems really breakneck), but still interesting take on modern China
-Capitalism (Sven Beckert) - still halfway through this one, but it's shaping up to be my #1 for 2025 non fiction
-The Origins of Efficiency - from B. Potter, the author of Construction Physics blog. The blog is fairly information dense, but this basically reads like a textbook. Still a pretty good reference IMO for people working in manufacturing.
I admit it's a nice experiment, but I guess the title should be "detecting iPhone Lidar".
Both the 60Hz frequency and 940nm wavelength are fairly specific. There's a whole world of different wavelengths (1550nm is fairly common) and frequencies (up to 1MHz isn't particularly exceptional).
I regularly see groups of riders with European plates on their bikes, traveling up and down Highway 1 - a very scenic and twisty road up the California coast. So, it must be doable without too much problem.
personally : proxmox /VM is great if You'd like to separate physical HW. In my case - virtualized TrueNAS means I can give it a whole SATA controller and keep this as an isolated storage machine.
Whatever uses that storage usually runs in a Docker inside an LXC container.
If I need something more isolated (think public facing cloudflare) - that's a separate docker in another network routed through another OPNSense VM.
Desktop - VM where I passed down a whole GPU and a USB hub.
Best part - it all runs on a fairly low power HW (<20W idle NAS plus whatever the harddrives take - generally ~5W / HDD).
AirVPNs main proposition isn't "we have a nice app / UX". It's "we give you the most configs / options". AFAIK they're currently one of very few that allow you to configure both port forwards and give you a stable config (keys) to run your own wireguard instance
my $.02 : I tried them, but found their "we support Wireguard" a bit misleading. They only did so via their app. No way to get a stable configuration for a router (other than run a python script to get one from the app, without any guarantee how long is that config valid for).
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