RobiNZ CAD Blog

2022 Blogging Highlights

Happy New Year! I usually begin this post with "Another year has flown by..." but 2022 was a strange mix of COVID-19 impacted lockdown time dilation—where it both flew and dragged simultaneously—and a (temporary) change of lifestyle for me. I spent most of it—January to August—travelling New Zealand and then started a new job (still design software related) in a different industry! Time to look back from a bloggy/social media (not just CAD blog) perspective at year: Best social media related event(s): While riding I've been contributing, in a small way, to a few episodes of Walk The Pod podcast.... Read more →

upFront.eZine CAD industry legend Ralph Grabowski retires

The final upFront.eZine #1.138 This email, the final upFront.eZine #1,138, marks a significant event in the history of the CAD industry and media. I don't remember when I first read Ralph Grabowski's eZine but it long pre-dates meeting him in 2003. He presented at a CAD Productivity Conference in Auckland NZ and I have stayed connected, as a reader/commenter and meeting occasionally at US cad conferences, ever since. Ralph's in-depth coverage and straight talk about the CAD industry, often deep into the core technologies sitting under the end user products we know so well, is second to none. I was... Read more →

Enthusiasts can upgrade non-compliant older PCs to Windows 11?

Update: Mary Jo Foley reports: Microsoft leaves a loophole for those wanting to run Windows 11 on 'unsupported' hardware An "unsupported state," in this case, means your PC won't be entitled to receive updates via Windows Update. These may (or may not) include security and driver updates... It seems Microsoft are relaxing their security hardware requirements for Windows 11 a little: Microsoft Keeps Windows 11 Hardware Requirements, But Will Placate Enthusiasts | www.thurrott.com Microsoft said that it will not step back from its stringent Windows 11 hardware requirements, but it will make concessions to enthusiasts…. Behind the scenes, Microsoft will... Read more →

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 →