WorldCAD Access

Update: Getting Eudora to Work with GMail

Opinion One of the most frequent questions I get is how to make Eudora work (again) with GMail. The problem is that Google keeps changing its Web pages with your security information, and then my older instructions no longer work. So, here is the version as of September, 2023. In the Eudora menu bar, choose Special | Forget Password(s) Switch to your Web browser, and then log into your google account: https://myaccount.google.com On the left, choose Security In the center, choose 2-step Verification Scroll all the way down to App passwords, and click it Enter a descriptive name in the... Read more →

Will ChatGPT Replace CAD Programmers?

Opinion by Nikita Vorobyov, LEDAS You must have heard of ChatGPT, that artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. It interacts with humans in a conversational way by supporting queries made in natural languages. (Image at left created by AI.) For developers, ChatGPT’s most attractive feature is its ability to generate code in any programming language. But how useful is AI-generated code? Let's find out by asking ChatGPT to solve some simple tasks that arise in CAD development projects. (We conducted this study some time ago; since then, ChatGPT has perhaps become smarter.) In our experiment, we asked ChatGPT to solve... Read more →

Smart LED Bulbs Are Peak Technology

Opinion I bought a pair of smart light bulbs the other day. The pair was $4 at Home Depot, marked down from $18. The reason: the product was a slow moving product. I've never understood why anyone would want/need smart lightbulbs, but at $2 each the deal was too tempting to ignore an opportunity to try out the technology. Back in the day of tungsten bulbs, we consumers had a single choice: how bright? 150W was bright, 15W was dim, 60W was normal. Sometimes, for fun, we'd buy ones coated with paint, like yellow or red. CFD Bulbs To the... Read more →

A Tiny Case for the Smallest Solid State Drive

Opinion One of the things that happens when you replace the SSD in a computer with another one is that you end up with a collection of SSDs -- solid state drives. These make great monster USB drives, in size and in capacity. The SSD I pulled from my Dell Latitude, however, was the rarely-seen smallest size. M.2 SSDs can be made in one of four official sizes. Most are the largest size, known as 2280, which is short for 22mm wide and 80mm long. The one in my Dell was 2230 -- 22mm wide by 30mm long. Remarkably, the... Read more →

My new favorite laptop isn't new and isn't a laptop

Opinion I have four Windows laptops, which may be no surprise, after I left a laptop behind at Stockholm airport and the airport charged me me $440 to get it back. In retrospect, it would have been cheaper to abandon it, and purchase a reconditioned one for the same or lower price. The one I lost (and recovered) was the 14" HP Spectre X360 (see image at left), their top of the line laptop at the time I bought it in 2015. But it has one glaring flaw: the keytops are silver, which, combined with the built-in backlighting, make the... Read more →

Reliving the Jornada Era

Opinion There was a time when designs of small computer devices were flourishing, a Renaissance period where everything was possible. This, in our era monopolized by slab phones with zero distinguishing features, seems inconceivable. Going back to the mid-1990s, the Palm Computing had ignited the personal device market with the Pilot handheld computer, called a PDA (portable digital assistant) at the time. Other companies, like Radio Shack and Epson, sold slightly bigger models with slim displays and keyboards. The demand was generated by laptops of the time still being heavy. And so there was, in this earlier time, a desire... Read more →

A different kind of earphone

Opinion Just as there are foods that are normal in one part of the world but not in the other, the same goes for earphones. Small earbuds are normal in North America, but in Asia big ones are common. I decided to try out a typical set. I went with a low-priced model from Linsoul-7Hz named "Salnotes Zero" ($27). See image at left. Why is it called the Zero? "By naming it ZERO, we intended to deliver our philosophy of life to every customer." TIP How to tell if a set of ear or headphones will sound pretty good: look... Read more →

Fixing what ails HP's Pro X2 tablet

Opinion The Pro X2 tablet from HP is a remarkable device that gets ignored by the tech media, who instead swoon over Microsoft's Surface tablet, oh, and iPads, as well. Because it is ignored, there is little demand, and so I paid as little as $380 reconditioned on eBay -- including backlit keyboard and stylus -- for a device HP sells new for $2,500 and up. The G2 model (second generation) suffers from two shortcomings: a single USB-C port and a wonkily-designed keyboard. Just Two USB Ports One problem is that the X2 G2 has just two USB ports, one... Read more →

What our future under AI will look like

Opinion Sometimes, I write reviews of products I bought from Amazon for Amazon. All the ones I've written have been accepted, until last week. I had written a review of the new MP3 player I had bought with my usual forthrightness: here's what I liked, here's what didn't work for me. But then Amazon rejected the review but could not say why: We couldn't post your review because it doesn't meet our guidelines for one or more of these reasons: Spam Promotions Reviews given in exchange for cash, discounts Links to other sites Attempts to manipulate helpful votes Plagiarism Infringement... Read more →

My New MP3 Player

Opinion Apple used to dominate the MP3 player market with its iPod line, both in product sales and mindshare. People who don’t use Apple products still refer to iPods and podcasts in everyday speech. Apple no longer makes an iPod, having moved the name to its line of headphones: AirPods. If you want to listen to music on the go in the Apple ecosphere, then you have to buy one of their expensive cellphones. There are alternatives, of course. Used iPods in excellent condition remain available from sellers on eBay. (That’s where, in the past, I got mine.) Other companies... Read more →

Updated: When your Dell laptop's fan races

Tip Some people -- like me -- find that when we start up our Dell laptop -- an Inspiron 14, in my case -- the fan races for a disquietingly long time. Checking Task Manager, we see that some Dell services are using up a lot of CPU cycles. It turns out that Dell's software is creating a restore point, in case you need to repair the computer's state to an earlier one. This is a duplicate of what Windows does each time you install an update to Windows, but the Dell one apparently is more thorough and takes place... Read more →

PTC’s Tri-lemma

Opinion Software firms selling mechanical CAD software tend to have two products: a really expensive one for prestige and a less expensive one for popularity. In the world of architectural CAD, this tends not to be the case. So we have... Vendor High-end Mid-range Dassault Catia Solidworks Siemens NX Solid Edge Autodesk ... Inventor, Fusion PTC Creo Onshape Autodesk doesn’t have a really expensive CAD program; by really expensive, I mean in excess of $10,000 and ranging up to $20,000. Each. PTC last month added a third CAD program, Creo+. This one is just like Creo, but uses PTC’s new... Read more →

Does Apple Despise Seniors?

Opinion As a computer-aware kind-of-guy for 42 years (longer, if you include my mainframe days at the University of British Columbia), I help out neighbors and family who don’t really get them. Elderly people, even me, grew up in a world of stable technology. We had two ways of communicating, by letter or by telephone. The only irritant to ever occur with letter technology was the price of postage stamps going up; for telephones, the only technological change was the interface changing from rotary dials to push buttons -- which I never liked, because telephone push buttons (with 1, 2,... Read more →

Puzzled About Making Mailto Work (Again) with Eudora

Opinion When you click a link in a Web page for emailing someone, a simple piece of HTML code in the link opens your default email software with a new message, and with the recipient’s email address automatically inserted (see figure below). Very handy! This, however, hasn’t been working with Eudora for a while now. I just ignored it, as my Web browser nicely offers to copy the email address for me, as shown below. Then I paste the copied email address into the new message in Eudora. In the Registry A reader recently asked if there was a way... Read more →

Twitter’s Take on Apple’s Vision Pro

ThereOpinion The share price of Apple rose in anticipation of the release of its augmented reality goggles, and then fell once they were announced, because... Won’t ship until next year, meaning the hardware and software are not yet ready Price starts at $500 higher than the whisper price of US$3,000, and it will cost much, much more once options like different head straps, second battery, and prescription lenses (think of how Apple overcharges for watch straps) Most of the demos involved looking at 2D screens Weight not announced The CEO of Apple did not once, during the 2.5-hour-long event, put... Read more →

Lessons Learned From “Whatever Happened To?”

Opinion For some CAD vendors, the tides of time wash away the plans for their future, no matter how well-executed. In 38 years of writing about computer-aided design, I’ve seen numerous companies disappear, perhaps through acquisitions, or else crushed by competitors, and even through pivots by the market. Some were the giants of their times, like Artist Graphics, the nVidia of the 1980s, who threw the biggest parties at CAD conferences (my favorite: the long desert-only tables served on the Queen Mary); today, the Internet has almost no record of the company from Minneapolis that invented the first proprietary graphics... Read more →

I Went To Liveworx 23

Opinion I’ve visited PTC in Boston a number of times, but this was the first time for their annual user conference, dubbed Liveworx (originally the name of one of their software packages). This was the first in-person event since 2019, owing to the covid lockdown. One of my earlier visits was for the 2011 launch of Creo, the “new” CAD program that combined the direct editing of CoCreate (originally ME/30, Hewlett-Packard’s in-house 3D direct modeling CAD system) and the parametric editing of PTC’s own Pro/Engineer. (Creo is Latin for create.) Both programs were developed in the 1980s. The theme for... Read more →

The Limits of Evolution

Opinion Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False Book written by Thomas Nagel Reviewed by Ralph Grabowski There are some people, who believing in deterministic materialism, cling to Darwin's theory of chemical and biological evolution as if it were a life raft, kicking out into the cold any who dare counter them, such as, say, religious nutcases. But there’s a problem: the random mutations that drive evolution cannot explain the higher levels at which humans operate. Unlike animals, we have the ability to reason and to hold values. Evolution also lacks explanations for how... Read more →

How AI Tells Lies

Opinion A friend decided to get AI to write an article about the Open Design Alliance and Russia. When he saw the result, he sent it to me: Ralph Grabowski is a well-known CAD industry analyst and writer who has been following the CAD industry for over 30 years. In 2013, he was appointed as Director of the Open Design Alliance's (ODA) Moscow office. The ODA is an independent organization that develops software tools for CAD applications. Grabowski's role as director involves overseeing the development of the ODA's software for the CAD industry, as well as providing strategic guidance for... Read more →

Book review: The Secret Life of Groceries

Opinion The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket Book written by Benjamin Lorr Reviewed by Ralph Grabowski One of the greatest facades we face in modern life is the grocery store. Everything is plentiful, clean to the point of sparkling, and prices savings are galore. Behind the scenes, the facade crumbles fast, which you know when you’ve ever had a peek behind the swinging doors to the warehouse portion of the store -- or looked at the final total on the till bill. In our two-person household, groceries represent our largest monthly bill. The store... Read more →