RobiNZ CAD Blog

Vale Rich Sales (Salesoft CAD Solutions)

I am sad to hear Rich Sales, founder of NZ Autodesk Reseller Salesoft CAD Solutions, passed away unexpectedly, but peacefully, at his home recently. Rich was an Architect who saw the potential in this thing called CAD in the early 80s and pioneered use of AutoCAD for design in NZ. That grew into becoming an Autodesk reseller, customisation/extension/application development, and an extensive knowledge of the entire Autodesk portfolio. I knew of Rich from those early days but really got to know him, and see his genius, when I joined The Warehouse in the mid-1990s. As we transitioned from AutoCAD LT... Read more →

March 2025 - 21st Anniversary!

March 31st means it is blog’iversary time. Twenty-One years since that first tentative post. I really appreciate the connections blogging, and more recently Mastodon, Bluesky, Substack, Discord, & Facebook, has enabled. While the other platforms have taken over much of the day-to-day activity, I still prefer having the content I really value, in terms of wanting to retain, on my ‘own’ platform. It has been a quiet year for the CAD Blog, but that's OK because I have been mostly retro-blogging on the other one about old cycle trips! To everyone, everywhere, thanks for visiting, reading, and subscribing both here... Read more →

TechSmith Snagit confidential: Coincidence or great marketing?

Either way, nice one Techsmith Snagit, my essential screen capture tool. This arrived in my inbox today: TechSmith Snagit Advert about hiding sensitive information While I was listening to radio news about... Journalist releases texts sent by US Defence Secretary about military operation | Radio NZ | 22 minutes ago Details of airstrikes that would normally be closely guarded secrets were also discussed in the chat... (Text and Audio) Read more →

Microsoft Calendars still a mess...

I wonder if Microsoft New Outlook, Microsoft Phone Outlook and Microsoft To Do will ever get their $hit together and present consistent options? Take, for instance, snooze times on a task reminder, you can set a great range of options on a New Calendar Item (1), but at the time Snooze offers +- 5 or 10 minutes (2), or just 5 or 10 minutes, and that's it. What's worse, I found this in draft, first written in September 2023 and it's no better today. Oh, and the best options were in the old, now dead, Windows Calendar app (3). Read more →

Not all CEO's can be Carl Bass

i was listening to this, podcast link below, and the recent news of tech CEO pilgrimages to Florida to meet with the incoming... Conversation with Carl Bass - Former CEO of Autodesk and Maker of All Things Awesome | Manufacturing Spaces By Pete Oxenham This week Carl joins us to share his story - programing some of the first 3D software, being the CEO of Autodesk, and using the very software he created to build everything from canoes and self-driving vehicles. If still at Autodesk I wonder what he'd do? I bet he would still be this (2016) Carl Bass: Read more →

Happy New Year, and a look back 2024's Blogging Highlights

Happy New Year! Another year has flown by, time to look back from a bloggy/social media (not just CAD blog) perspective at the year: 'Me' on the web Twenty three, and a bit, years after starting a blog I finally got around to getting my own domain for it. It's still published with TypePad, but can now be found via www.robincapper.net. CAD Still learning more about Civil 3D, QGIS and more supporting IT in a Civil Engineering company over the year with a great team. Might get around to blogging a bit more about that this year. Best social media... Read more →

Maurice and I - Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoney Architects

I missed the limited cinema screening of this, was good to see on DocPlay. A timely and intimate look at one of NZ's greatest architectural partnerships. It also documents the unnecessarily destructive aspects of the Christchurch quake recovery, which almost claimed one of their finest works: The Christchurch Town Hall. Maurice and I - DocPlay The fragile legacy of a unique architectural partnership. Throughout the 60s and 70s an architectural revolution took place in New Zealand, largely led by two young Christchurch architects. Their partnership, which spanned 37 years, gave rise to a uniquely New Zealand modernist movement that was... Read more →

Kiwi affordable housing design, build, operation innovator

I posted this on my personal blog, but it has a lot of design and construction innovation. Simplicity Living is a non-profit retirement/investment fund that is building high quality affordable rental (they'll own and operate) and rent to own (they'll fund) housing. It's simple, when you know how | simplicity living . kiwi - RobiNZ Personal Blog (typepad.com) Read more →

March 2024 - 20th Anniversary!

March 31st means it is blog’iversary time. Twenty years since that first tentative post! I really appreciate the connections blogging, and more recently Mastodon, Substack, Discord, & Facebook, has enabled. While the other platforms have taken over much of the day-to-day activity, I still prefer having the content I really value, in terms of wanting to retain, on my ‘own’ platform. It has been a quiet year for the CAD Blog, but that's OK because I have been mostly retro-blogging on the other one about old cycle trips! To everyone, everywhere, thanks for visiting, reading, and subscribing both here and... Read more →

2023 Blogging Highlights

Happy New Year! Another year has flown by, time to look back from a bloggy/social media (not just CAD blog) perspective at the year: @ a new 'me' on the web Twenty three, and a bit, years after starting a blog I finally got around to getting my own domain for it. It's still published with TypePad it can now be found via www.robincapper.net. [2024-09-01 reverted back to Typepad as the domain mapping has broken] Back to CAD A new role, new industry, meant catching up with some new software. Fun to learn more about Civil 3D, QGIS and more... Read more →

CAD and car design at Renault

Patrick le Quément, Renault Design, on how he fostered the use of CAD at Renault... Of Mouse and Men – Driven To Write Amongst the traditional activities to be found in any design department there was one oddity which drew my immediate attention when I perused the organigramme — it was named CAD Design, staffed by 6 and headed by a gentleman named Philippe Gassie... Read more →

Curing 'phantom screen touches' on an old Surface Book?

My Surface Book 2 is old, well out of any warranty, but still performs really well for my own needs. It's a home machine but can still run CAD, Revit, even (just) Microsoft Flight Sim, well enough to not consider a replacement. It was a little tight for storage (only 500GB on board) but a card in the SD slot doubled that for storing Flight Sim (about 450GB on its own)! The then phantom touch arrived... I didn't get a screen shot (below is my reproduction) but the other day on start-up it looked like a phantom finger was permanently... Read more →

Breaking pinned taskbar shortcuts out of Taskbar Overflow Menu jail

If, like me, you pin a lot of commonly used shortcuts to the Windows 11 Taskbar it will eventually put excess ones into a ...Overflow Menu. How do shortcuts you want end up in there? If an application is updated it will be added to the end of your pinned apps. If a saved browser app update it will unpin from the taskbar, then when you re-pin it will be added to the end. Moving shortcuts out of Overflow confinement If Windows 11 were anywhere near finished you could just drag an icon from overflow to your preferred place on... Read more →

A challenge for Andrew Anagnost, make this using only the advertised product

Why do Autodesk show things that can't be done with the product being advertised? I recently got this advert on Facebook: The link went to a bundle offer for AutoCAD LT subscription: Look at that image: Can AutoCAD LT do proper 3D? No. Can it render? Not that I'm aware of... AutoCAD LT is fine, for what it is, but imagine you paid out $1888 expecting it to create what is shown? A challenge for Andrew Anagnost, make this using only the advertised product or stop marketing fantasy. Read more →

A new home for my blogs, Me Dot Net?

It must be a procrastination record; start a blog in March 2004 and only now get my own domain? Yes, my typepad.com/rcd blogs are now at www.robincapper.net I must credit this toot from NZ IT Journalist Bill Bennett for prompting me to, finally, do it. His article about owning your content resonated, the reason I still author all the content I really care about on my blogs, CAD or Personal, and link to it from social sites. I don't mind having it on TypePad as it is a portable format that can be moved should the need ever arise. Not... Read more →

Better controlling Word image placement

I saw this meme, on Mastodon, about the fight that is Word images. They hide the anchoring controls in a ribbon fly-out + dialog. Once you set them (per image sadly) to keep with text it becomes much more manageable. With the image selected access it from the flyout Layout Options > See more... link. or the Ribbon Picture Format > Position > More Layout Options > Position (tab) and set the Move with Text or Lock Anchor options. You can also accurately set the X,Y position relative to margins, paragraph, line etc Read more →

Fix a MindManager file with XML Processing Illegal XML Character Error

I recently opened a MindManager file and got this XML Processing error: Followed by this error, even though the file was in the folder, and then the file not opening. After some web searching, found this is a known error with MindManager Files and the recommended fix was to send the file to MindManager Support for them to remove the offending character. I didn't have time for that so tried fixing myself and it worked. DIY Fix NOTE: Everything that follows worked for the error I encountered, there may be other errors of this type it doesn't help. Be sure... Read more →