RobiNZ CAD Blog

When tech is 'good enough' and why I have an 'old' phone

Waking up at 01:00 Monday morning is a price you pay to watch (most) Formula 1 live in New Zealand. For me it means an early night, waking again and ten minutes on phone to review of social media, while making a coffee, before settling in for the 01:10 start. A recently that routine was interrupted by awaking to a phone stuck in a never-ending restart loop. This wasn't a problem, it just meant I had to follow F1 Twitter on my Surface Book while Googling how to get a Samsung out of a boot loop. That turned out to... Read more →

Seek and ye old PC shall die, only to be born again

I've been working from home (WFH) for 9± weeks using my old desktop PC to Remote Connect to a CAD workstation in the office with no problems. I purchased it in December 2009, and it has been used for intermittent CAD, gaming and general home computing ever since. I got a big (for the day) 1.5 Terabyte hard drive as it's my 'download everything' local backup for 800GB of OneDrive cloud stored documents, photos etc. On my mobile machines I just have the OneDrive folders I need set to off-line to reduce storage & sync data. It's an old PB... Read more →

Flickr to limit free users to 1000 images

I wondered what change in ownership (earlier this year from Yahoo to SmugMug) might mean for Flickr and today noticed they are rejigging their free/pro user levels. Free users will soon be limited 1,000 photos, a few less than the 25,000 I have added there since 2005… I had Pro membership free for years, via an historic Telecom/Spark NZ Yahoo link, but reverted to free a couple years ago when they parted ways. The big advantage of Flickr, back in the day, was unlimited full resolution storage of photos when most other cloud services reduced resolution (like some still do),... Read more →

Wi-Fi may reveal more than you think–Dr Karl

With reality capture becoming an important part of CAD/BIM any advance of this technology should be of interest. Imagine a technology sensing physical geometry, human biometrics, even touch device input and speech remotely. Then imagine it doesn’t require any new hardware installation to generate this information, just to capture it… Have a listen to this BBC podcast from 04:30 through 15:00 about what researchers are finding by analysing Wi-Fi signal interference. This is not device tracking or dependent on beacons, just the ambient Wi-Fi now present in almost every building and lots of public spaces. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p046gpcv BBC 5 live's science... Read more →

Autodesk CEO: Yahoo Is Becoming Increasingly Irrelevant

I don't disagree but thought it amusing this showed up in a Yahoo! Finance RSS search feed I've used for years: Autodesk CEO: Yahoo Is Becoming Increasingly Irrelevant | Watch the video - Yahoo Financeby Bloomberg Video 1:49 mins May 19 -- Carl Bass, Autodesk's chief executive officer, comments on Yahoo during an interview with Bloomberg's Emily Chang on "Bloomberg West." Read more →

Seeing with Microsoft’s Cognitive Services

It was interesting to try Microsoft Cognitive Services & Bots after seeing the keynote presentation* from the recent Build conference. I thought www.captionbot.ai did quite well with this photo of Alfie considering the mix of elements in the image. Writing a caption for a dog photo is amusingly impressive but this real application of cognitive computing is magical: About Caption Bot: * Click on the time below to launch the relevant section of the Build Day 1 Keynote video: [2:05:50] Cornelia Carapcea, Senior PM, Cognitive APIs [2:07:13] "What is in this image" demo [2:07:58] CaptionBot Read more →

Phew, mobilised

According to the news today quite a few NZ sites have not yet met Google’s mobile-Friendly Test. Glad of the new responsive themes in TypePad! Read more →

Autodesk Pier 9 | The ultimate Workshop and more?

Imagine the ultimate workshop… A place to think, dream, tinker and play with ideas that could change the world. Imagine it packed with all the design and manufacturing technology you could desire. Imagine the ultimate location for your ‘shop’: harbour side in centre of a beautiful city, a short walk from a bustling commuter hub and market with restaurants, cafés and gourmet fresh food & produce. You just imagined Pier 9 Part of the AutoCAD Blogger Day was a tour of Pier 9. A short walk from Autodesk’s 1 Market Street office, past the Ferry Building Marketplace, you find a... Read more →

The joy of a hosted blog

TypePad was briefly off-line this week but was pretty much fixed by the time I saw this tweet: We really appreciate our bloggers - through this frustrating downtime you have been gracious, witty, and tenacious. Thank you very much! — Typepad (@typepad) March 5, 2014 They were subject to a distributed denial of service attack (and were not alone*): Update on Recent Typepad Downtime - Everything Typepad On Wednesday from approximately 1:15 to 3:45PM Pacific Time, we experienced downtime which prevented the Typepad application and blogs from loading, and we are truly sorry about that. The downtime was due to... Read more →

How Facebook Knows What You Looked at on Amazon

While not CAD related thought this post by Dare might be of interest. Have you noticed adverts showing up that relate to other sites and wondered how that happens? How Facebook Knows What You Looked at on Amazon - www.25hoursaday.com As part of my day job at Microsoft, I've begun to learn more about how advertising across the internet works on a technical level and it is quite interesting to learn how an image of a some head phones I looked at an e-commerce site ended up staring back at me from an ad on Facebook later that day… Read more →