WorldCAD Access

Our upFront.eZine newsletter is sent by email from Substack. The email can end up in your Junk or Spam folders. Please look for them, and then click Not Spam or Not Junk or otherwise whitelist us.

The Reverse Network Effect

Millions of lost users

 

In my previous post, Why Google (Cannot) Fall, I wrote about the Network Effect, which tends to insulate giant social media companies from decline. When more people use a network service, like Facebook, then even more people have a reason to use it. 

Barely a week after I wrote that, we saw the effects of the reverse network effect: the more people are banned (or quit) from social media, the more depart. By coincidence, my daughter-in-law and I quit Facebook the day before Twitter banned the president of the United States. We quit, because Facebook had broken its promise to never suck up data from WhatsApp.

Facebook will not feel the effect of us two leaving. The last post I made was in 2010. I hadn't used it in years; my wife, who had been using my account to keep up with some distant friends, had also stopped some time ago, as the friends either abandoned Facebook or switched to communicating through texting and good old email.

Indeed, most of our family and friends are now using various forms of texting software to replace the spies operating at Facebook, et al.  Some of our family has switched to Treemo ($5 one-time fee), which is so secure it has no idea who we are.

The president is no longer in

 

When Twitter banned D. Trump, that account had over 80 million followers. In reaction, Rush Limbaugh cancelled his Twitter account, with its 88 million followers. In counter reaction, Google and Apple blocked people from downloading the app for Twitter's small competitor, Parler, to which conservatives had been migrating. 

The Editor's Choice no longer is

 

The bulk mail service used by the Republican party cancelled it as a customer. Some months earlier, mail server MailChimp had promised to block any customer whose emails it didn't like, with no appeal possible (following which I quit it as my bulk email service). Other social media companies, like Pinterest and Redit, jumped onto the blocking bandwagon, because it was a safe thing to do in the current environment.

So what? Conservatives deserve it -- you might think.

Then came the news that the Royal Californians, hyper-progressives Meghan and her husband, will quit all social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, calling them an "addiction worse than alcohol and drugs." They have 10 million followers. As progressives, they felt that they could not promote addictive behaviour.

Progressives are all about freedom. When you are addicted, you're not free.

 

Not the Dogs Facebook Makes Us Out to Be

Now, we aren't supposed to be banning them. 

This is not what arrogant social media titans had in mind when, some years ago, they began the anti-free speech practice of blocking and cancelling accounts. We were supposed to be addicted, and we were supposed to follow their admittedly-capricious rules to be let into their clubhouses.

The fundamental flaw in their reasoning is this: they fell for the lie of Determinism. It says we humans are programmable and can be manipulated into doing whatever the social media monopolists felt like having us do. We aren't, it turns out, Pavlovian dogs; we have, after all, free will.

And so we arrived at the point in the history of the world in which being banned by social media companies has become a mark of pride. Twitter had banned me for a while, I am proud to say, following which I stopped posting commentary there.

And today we are at the unexpected juncture of conservatives and progressives agreeing on one thing: social media systems need cancelling.

Now, blocking an account with 80 million followers does not mean that Twitter loses 80 million customers; it does, however, mean that 80 million people have one fewer reason to access Twitter. First one fewer, then more fewer... As more accounts are blocked and more accounts quit, the network effect shifts into reverse. c.f. Friendster, MySpace, Second Life, and so on.

This is not the end. "Life was possible before they existed. It can be possible again without them," Emily (@ethereal_em) reminds us. 

 

 

Why Google (Cannot) Fall

A reader writes,

 

Here is an article that claims the reign of Big Tech is coming to a close because the huge amounts of data, that currently require huge server farms to process, will soon be replaced by inexpensive and more efficient software and hardware, that can fit on your dining room table (that seems like a wild exaggeration)!

I read this with a faint sense of hope that the monopolies of Google, Twitter, and Facebook could be broken up with inexpensive competition, but I find it hard to take the author's argument seriously. It seems to me that Big Tech has the all-important head-start, the brand recognition, highly sophisticated data bases in place, billions in capitalization, and many of the best personnel in their corner.

I could see some independents taking a serious run at Facebook and Twitter, but it seems to me that Google is in a class by itself. I can't see anyone threatening its domination short of a political move to break it up under anti-trust legislation such as the US government did to AT&T in 1984.

Since I am not well-educated in the field of information technology, I would be interested in your opinion.

 

I read the article, and found that the author fails to distinguish between software and people. Software can be easily replaced; people cannot be displaced so easily.

For instance, pundits have long proclaimed email is dead, but people keep using it, so the software survives. Only when people abandon software, like Second Life, does it die.

Entities like Facebook and Twitter are successful due to the network effect. This is a theory that says that the value of a network increased by the square as it doubles in size. Have twice as many people using a service (network) and it becomes 4x valuable to them.

The network consists of people connected to one other and resources. Early people-oriented computer networks like CompuServe and AOL failed when the Internet became accessible to regular folk, because the open Internet offered far larger network effect. Closed CompuServe and AOL could only a fraction as many connections to people and resources.

The good news is that there already are services that aim to replace Facebook/Twitter/Google; the bad news is that they are not all that popular due to the lack of sufficient connections. Nothing lasts for ever, so maybe one day Facebook will be the next CompuServe.

For what it is worth:

• I don't use Facebook
• I use Twitter to market my stuff; otherwise, I do not contribute directly
• I use Bing for search
• I turn off as many tracking settings as Google allows me to

 

Why BIM Does Not Work

Guest editorial by Alexander Yampolsky

 

Several generations of builders over the decades failed to construct buildings whose commissioning would result in an industrial revolution. In such cases, errors were looked for in the design; below is an overview of what I consider as errors in BIM design.

 

Collaboration based on models; the death of drawings

BIM fans list numerous drawbacks to drawings and so call for a cultural shift by refusing to collaborate on the basis of drawings in favour of collaboration on the basis of models. Collaboration is based on understanding, and essentially the question is, “Which do we understand better?”

• Realistic photos -- the output of BIM-style programs; see figure below
• Conventional images and text in drawings -- "circles and sticks", i.e. linguistic references to knowledge (linguistic means of communication)

A realistic photo of building reinforcement created by BIM; in my view, it's only value is as a puzzle

 

I am a structural analyst. I formalize analysis results as simple drawings because I am sure that it is possible to explain or understand something using only the language of drawings.

Result of analysis

 

If someone requires the report as a 3D model, should I immediately attend training?

If you do not understand drawings (the professional designer language), it means that you don’t understand textbooks, building codes, regulations, and common instructions. If you see them only as “circles and sticks” then what sense is there in collaborating with you? The reason is that people who do not understand “circles and sticks” is that they left drawings and are not going to return to them.

 

Single model, single source of truth

Models sound attractive, but do not operate in practice. For example, the figure below illustrates an intermediate stage when designing a fixed-end arch.

Arch at an intermediate modeling stage

 

The model comprises a pair of foundations and five units (of eight in total) of an arch body. Yes, the model is true in terms of the location and dimensions of these elements. But the intermediate model will misdirect us when we want information about forces at the points where the arch rests on the foundations. Based on the false information, we will construct foundations and end up with a dangerous structure.

The shape and dimensions of foundations correspond to real forces. Where did the designer get the correct information? Probably, the structural analyst created his own highly specialized model, even before creating the "single" model, then calculated the forces and configured the foundations. See the figure below.

Analysis of the arch model

 

The analysis model is a source of lies in almost all aspects and a source of truth only in one aspect: forces in its elements correspond to the real state of the arch during its operation.

The postulate about the single model does not take into account that any bounded system where all elements are interdependent) becomes the universal source of truth only after it is completely built, i.e., after completion of the design stage.

In the design stage, designers are forced to use many highly specialized, partial sources of truth. And this applies not only analysis models; the knowledge necessary may be obtained from reference books, standard construction practices, and similar projects.

Extracting drawings from models

Let's create the reinforcement field drawing in traditional way:

CAD Step 1. Draw a dashed outline, draw a bold line, draw a callout line, write text (diameter, steel grade, rebar spacing). The drawing is ready; see figure below.

Reinforcement field drawing

 

Now do the same using new technology: create a model with BIM.

BIM Step 1: Select the command Reinforcing by Area, draw a contour, and specify properties (diameter, steel grade, direction, rebars spacing). The reinforcement field model is ready. Let's extract the drawing.

BIM Step 2. Adjust the view parameters, adjust the object visibility (only one rebar should be visible), draw an annotation (diameter, steel grade, rebar spacing)., draw an annotation. The drawing is ready. We arrive at the same drawing as in the figure above, but using much more resources and tools.

When comparing CAD 1 with BIM 1, we see that the designer entered the source data (parameters) in both cases following approximately the same approach to create the reinforcement field model. However, the source data are just saved as a drawing in case CAD 1 while they are processed and transformed into the reinforcement grid in case BIM 1. So, here is the algorithm of new technology:

1. Source data entry by the designer
2. Model generation based on source data
3. Extraction source data from the model

If this is a breakthrough, then it is one that breaks through into the realm of absurd.

It would be easier to extract source data from the drawing, create the model, and calculate the specification -- and all of this can done automatically.

 

[This article first appeared on the isicad.ru CAD news portal. Mr Yampolsky also authored "A Third-generation 2D Editor" on WorldCAD Access and "Interpreting 3D Models from Formalized 2D Drawings" on upFront.eZine.]

 

Speeding up a solid-state drive

Install a cache

 

I had been using a tiny Gigabyte computer to power my entertainment room. All it needs to do is run a Web browser, through which we watch Acorn, Britbox, YouTube, and the others. 

In recent years it suffered from two serious flaws, which I detailed in worldcadaccess.com/blog/2020/10/its-hard-buying-a-chromebox.html:

1. For the last couple of years, something kept removing the working audio driver, leaving a non-working one (Solved! See worldcadaccess.com/blog/2020/12/solved-audio-driver-keeps-disappearing-in-windows.html)
   
   
2. In recent weeks, the computer sometimes ground to a crawl, taking a long time to do anything. 

 

At first, I thought that problem 2 was due to CPU overload, but it turns out the crawl is due to the storage drive running at 100% for long periods of time. This surprised me, as the drive is a solid state drive, that Windows only has to run a Web browser, and SSDs are supposed to be fast.

My first solution was to look online for reasons why drives run at 100%, and tried a half-dozen suggestions, like turning off indexing. None worked. 

My next solution was to add more RAM to the computer, so it now has 12GB instead of 4GB, but this did not solve the problem. Windows normally uses only half of the available RAM, so a 4GB system runs on 2GB. When there is not enough room in RAM, Windows automatically pages the overflow to the hard drive, which can slow things down.

Now, this computer is seven years old, and so I wondered if its 64GB SSD could be a slow one, being so old. A 64GB solid state drive suffers from having half the data lanes of 128GB and larger SSDs, hence it is inherently half as fast. 

So I though of replacing the SSD. Buying one large enough, like a new 240GB drive, would boost the read/write speed by 4x. I wondered if 4x speed increase would actually solve the problem, and this would be an expensive way to find out.

The other problem in buying a new drive becomes how to clone Windows from the old one to the new SSD. It is the short M.2 mSata style; see image above.

One solution is to buy an NVMe-to-USB adapter ($30), then plug the adapter into the computer's USB port. After that, use cloning software to precisely copy everything (including Windows) from one to the other. But the combined cost of a new SSD and USB adapter was getting too high for me.

I mulled things over.

RAM! The computer now had lots of RAM, and so I wondered if there still were caching software around. We used to use caching software a lot in the old days, when we operated off floppy drives and slow hard drives. I outfitted my very first computer, a Victor 9000 from 1983, with a then-massive 128KB memory board, and ran caching software on it just to hold the spell check dictionary for WordPerfect v5.x.

The idea behind caching is that a part of RAM is set aside as the cache (storage); software thinks it is still working with the drive, but the cache fools it. The caching software transparently moves data to and from the drive. Because the cache is in RAM, it works very fast.

TIP: There are two kinds of caching software. One uses a portion of RAM to shuttle data between the software and the drive (like we need here).

The other kind turns part of RAM into a drive, complete with a drive letter like Z: (like I used for that old WordPerfect spell checker). We want the first kind.

So I bought a cache program ($30), installed it, and set aside half (6GB) of the RAM for it. Now the computer purrs. 

It is, however, slower at starting up, as the caching software starts up uncached, and then data is doing that initial move to the cache.

The caching software comes with a dashboard that reports how much RAM is used for caching, so after a while I was able to reduce the cache from 6GB to 4GB, leaving 6GB for Windows.

Tip: Samsung EVO and PRO solid state drives include caching software free, which is why I tend to use that brand. Your computer needs at least 8GB RAM for Samsung to implement the cache.

 

 

 

Solved: Audio driver keeps disappearing in Windows

The evil that lies in RAVCpl64

 

For the last two years, I have been baffled and bamboozled by the audio driver going bad in the tiny Gigabyte PC I use in my entertainment room. 

My initial fix was to reinstall the driver, repeatedly, something that took a good ten minutes each time. The fix lasted a few weeks, then a few days, and finally for only a day.

The computer has two audio drivers. Intel's audio driver worked over HDMI; the one from RealTek did not. But the Intel one would disappear, leaving only the RealTek. Ergo, no sound.

Naturally, I searched forums to solve the problem. It is not uncommon. After trying a dozen different things, a comment from one frustrated user struck a chord with me: he noted the problem occurred when the computer lay idle. I realized that that matched my experience. 

The question then became, What was happening when the computer was idle (running, but not being used by me). For some reason, some thing was removing the Intel sound driver during the time of passivity.

My hunt changed to looking for what might be doing the dastardly deed -- was it Windows, or was it something else making the "correction" to my system?

One day last week, I was using CCleaner to peruse settings on the computer. I noticed that RealTek loaded an audio utility program during start-up, called RAVCpl64.exe. I usually try to minimize the number of programs being loaded during boot up, and so I turned it off from loading. As I did, I thought --- hmmm, I wonder if this is the culprit.

 It was.

I monitored that computer for a week, rebooting it from time to time, letting it sit idle for hours on end. The Intel driver hung in there.

Solved: Prevent RAVCpl64.exe from auto-loading during boot-up.

 

 

Upgrading an old PC to the HDMI era

'Tis possible

 

I decided to replace my wife's computer.

It is a 64-bit machine that -- curiously enough -- runs 32-bit Windows 10. Even though I had upgraded it from 2GB to 6GB RAM (for free, using spare memory modules from older computers), 32-bit operating systems see only 4GB -- it's an addressing limitation inherent in 32-bit computing.

As well, Microsoft really didn't want to update the Windows 10 running on it. I made a few manual attempts to update it, but Windows just wouldn't give in.

Microsoft was seen as foolish when it said it would always update Windows 10. Apple controls all the hardware, and even it still suffers from upgrade problems to its proprietary operating system. My wife's desktop was not the only one to suffer abandonment issues: my HP Spectre laptop was also in the doghouse, upgrade-wise. (Spectre is HP's topmost brand of laptop, so I would expect the highest level of support.) The Spectre was running Windows 10 from 15 months ago -- two updates behind the pack. It turns out the problem was with two drivers involving audio causing BSODs [blue screens of death], and Microsoft finally got them fixed this week. 

 

Switching to 64-bit Windows

It is possible to upgrade a computer from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows 10, but the only way is to wipe the machine. So I decided to buy my wife a "new" computer. Typically, I buy lease-return, business-oriented, small-form-factor, HP desktops. The new one cost $150.

I copied all her files to a portable SSD drive, and then I got her new one up and running. It was pretty easy, as she uses only a Web browser and Libre Docs.

Then I turned my attention to the old one. It was now a project computer that took me four days to complete, on and off. As I told my wife, for Christmas I could have either bought myself a 4,000-piece Lego set for $350, or spend $150 (on her new computer) and have a lot more fun with her old one.

As part of the process of installing 64-bit Windows, I had Windows destroy the hard drive's partition, recreate it, and then format it. Here is the curious part: later, when Windows was up and running, it had maintained the Old Masters wallpaper that my wife liked. Curious.

With Windows updated to 20H2 and running on 64 bits, I turned to the hardware. The old HP suffered from these limitations.

1. Only a VGA output; no HDMI or DisplayPort
2. Only ethernet networking; no WiFi

I set about solving the problems.

 

Adding HDMI

This computer is not that old, so I wondered why it didn't even have a DisplayPort port (which predated HDMI). Perhaps it had only VGA so that the security functions of HDMI/DP would not get in the way: the business could then use non-security-oriented cables and monitors. Or maybe leaving out HDMI was just a cost factor; VGA is, after all, capable of 1920x1080 resolution, like HDMI/DP.

(VGA is short for "video graphics array," the high tech name IBM gave its hot new 640x480-resolution graphics board in 1988.)

But modern devices, like my movie projector, expect HDMI input. To solve the lack of HDMI, I ordered a generic-brand VGA-HDMI converter ($15). See figure below. Be careful which style you buy, as some adapters only go the other way, from HDMI to VGA.

This adapter comes with two support cables:

• An audio cable for injecting audio from the computer's headphone jack into the HDMI signal. Devices that take HDMI expect the audio to come from HDMI; VGA does not carry audio signals; HDMI does. 
• A USB cable for powering the adapter. VGA does not supply power; the power is needed for the converter chip inside the adapter that converts the VGA signal to HDMI.

Much to my surprise, it worked, albeit the 1920x1080 image is slightly blurrier than true HDMI output. Movies on Acorn worked well, but Netflix was pretty coarse; I don't know if that was just a bad transmission that evening, or if it was Netflix detecting the VGA source. I might still buy a graphics card to get true HDMI, which I see cost about $55.

 

Adding WiFi

This computer had no WiFi, and I can see why a work computer would lack it: so that data could not be stolen over the air. On the other hand, this compact machine is festooned with 10 USB ports, a workplace security nightmare. It even had a serial port!

To solve the limitation, I looked for a WiFi adapter to plug into the inside of the computer. But as I looked, I found that they really don't exist anymore, at least not new.

So I bought an external WiFi adapter that plugs into a USB port ($30). This is the D-Link Wireless AC600 Dual-Band USB adapter. It is the size of a thumbnail, yet has the WPS button (in gray) and a green flickering LED to indicate data transmission; see figure below.

When I first inserted the USB adapter into the computer, Windows asked me what I wanted to do with it. Huh? This came as a surprise to me, as I had expected Windows to automatically find the device driver for the WiFi dongle. But it turns out that the adapter has a small amount of storage, about 8GB -- like a USB drive -- that holds the setup software. Brilliant! -- once I figured it out. No installation CD to lose.

So Windows sees it as a disk drive, initially. Set-up was a matter of double-clicking on the drive letter, double-clicking the setup.exe file  Once the WiFi driver was installed, it worked well.

I took advantage of that WiFi being USB. I got a long USB extension cord, and then plugged the WiFi adapter into the end of it. The extension cord places the adapter closer to my WiFi hotpot. 

 

Translating textures from one file format to another

It's not so easy

 

by Guillaume Levenq

[This article is excerpted from datakit.com/en/news/textures-one-of-datakit-s-know-how-189.html]

The correct visualization of 3D objects, both in imaging and CAD, requires having, on the one hand, an exact and flawless geometry, and on the other hand colors and/or textures applied with precision on the faces of these objects. 

To put it simply, a texture is a 2D image that is placed as precisely as possible on a 2D or 3D surface of an object, so as to dress it up to make the visualization more realistic. These images can be either simple flat areas of color, or real images representing, for example, a material.

These images most often come from texture libraries, either standard or specific to the editor of the authoring 3D software.

Typical texture library (image source Benchmarq Project Services)

 

These authoring software programs use mapping algorithms, again standard or proprietary, to apply them to the surfaces, which fill the surface by assigning each pixel of the image to a 3D pixel of the surface. These are the so-called procedural textures.

 

From Textures to Renderings

To be usable, this mapping information must be supplemented by lightning information, describing the lighting characteristics of the object -- ambient, diffuse, specular light, and on -- its intensity, as well as the behavior of surfaces with respect to light -- absorption, refraction, reflection, transmission, and so on.

Reflective properties of materials determine their look (image source Cadnav)

 

It is the joint use of the base image with the mapping and lightning information, which constitutes the rendering, giving a realistic rendering of a 3D object, in a given light environment. So much information that it is necessary to retrieve, understand and translate, when we want to transfer a realistic 3D object from one system to another.

An OBJ file, converted to a 3DPDF file with CrossManager in which textures in the PDF file corresponds to those in the OBJ file (image source NASA)

 

How Textures are Converted

When converting from one system to another, the 3D object is recovered, most often in the form of files in B-Rep or mesh formats, with the rendering information that will be applied to it (images, mapping, and lighting).

When converting the 3D object from one format to another, in addition to translating the geometry, it is necessary to calculate from the mapping information the coordinates of the texture on the mesh generated by the tessellation, to apply the image correctly on the 3D, then apply the lightning information to it to have a correct rendering of the object.

Mapping a 2D texture (using u,v coordinates) to a 3D model (image source CJump)

 

If the theory is simple, it is often more complicated in reality. The mapping algorithms used by the various authoring software are almost standard, but with very slight variations from one to another. We have therefore developed our own mapping algorithm, which makes it possible to avoid as much as possible any texture shifts during conversion, regardless of the authoring software, which seems to be perfectly suitable for users of our converters.

But we can also have textures whose format we don't know how to manage. Apart from the standard formats of external images, we can only give information about the presence of an image and the way to get there. In this case, if you want to generate a 3D PDF file, for example, (a format that needs to read the image and embed the associated pixel array) the textured rendering will not be available. On the other hand, for the supported image formats (jpeg, bmp, gif, tiff, png, tga), the 3DPDF will then benefit from the desired realistic rendering, which is very telling, even for occasional users of 3D software.

It will be understood that the conversion of 3D models from one system to another requires a perfect understanding of their geometry, but also of the textures that dress them, in order to make them as realistic as possible for easier interpretation.

[Guillaume Levenq is a development engineer at Datakit]

The best tweets about Google's signon failure

The Top 10

 

Google's signon servers went down earlier today for about an hour, meaning that you could not access its cloud-based software through your account: Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Google News, Google Translate,  Google Ads, Google Domain, Google Cloud Platform Dashboard, Google My Business, and more. Services that don't need an account, like YouTube, Maps, and Search, still worked, if you signed out. Offline software, like Picasa, kept right on working, naturally.

The outage occurred during the night for my timezone, so I never noticed until reading the excited tech media upon waking. I captured some of the best reactions from the twitteratti. As Richard Fernandez reminds us from time to time, Western civilization has become fragile, because it has tossed out too many of the redundancies that would otherwise make us resilient.

As The Register's Tim Anderson put it, "When authentication breaks, everything breaks," and commenter RGP added, "Complexity <> resilience."

- - -

Joe Brown / @joemfbrown: I'm sitting here in the dark in my toddler's room because the light is controlled by @Google Home. Rethinking... a lot right now.

- - -

Jason Jacobs / @jjacobs22: Google outages are the new Snow Day.

- - -

@killedbygoogle: And ya'll want a Google Autonomous car, huh? smgdmfh.

- - -

Harpreet Singh / @harry_jerry: 2020 is so bad it took Google down.

- - -

@iancutress: Annual reminder, while Google is down, that the cloud is just someone else's computer. Always have a backup.

- - -

Ryan Perry / @rynprry: Time to get some Google Candles.

- - -

Dan Gainor / @dangainor: I hear light switches are all the rage.

- - -

Kip Williams / @kiptw: And just think about how Google must feel, not being able to know what room you're in right now, or what you are listening to, or what you are watching.

 

Plus a few political tweets:

Mark Di Stefano / @markdistef: Google's entire suite of products crashing, bringing people to a grinding halt, less than 24 hours before Europe reveals its sweeping new anti-monopoly guidelines. You hate to see it.

- - -

Dan Primack / @danprimack: Well, that's one way for YouTube to prevent election disinformation.

 

 

How to make Eudora 7 work with Gmail servers

Thanks to Hermes

 

Eudora is an old email client. Last updated in 2006, it does not do well on Windows 8/10. It is software that I have been using on my desktop computers since December, 1994, when I first got onto the Internet (from CompuServe). My 96-year-old dad uses it. Today many, who tend to get their email through a Web browser and with free clients like GMail and Outlook, see it as a dinosaur.

 

Eudora's Unique Functions

Except that Eudora does things no modern email client does, and I have tried a dozen alternatives over the years. Here are some of the functions that I cannot live without:

Display two or more mailbox windows at the same time, side by side. This is crucial for me, as my In and Out boxes act as my reminder lists.

• Emails in my Inbox are items I still need to deal with (I color emails that are crucial, like upcoming Webinars, in red)
• Emails in my Outbox are things I am expecting to hear from others, such as outstanding invoices (I color emails that involve income with green)
• All other email is carefully moved to the approximately 100 mail boxes that sort my stuff

With the In and Out boxes side by side, I see at a glance what needs to be done, as well as newly arrived emails. This function is so important that I dedicate one entire monitor to Eudora. (My desktop computer has three monitors.)

Resend Email. I use old emails as templates for new ones. For example, I lead a men's reading group and each week I send out a reminder to the guys. I use the Resend function, which makes an exact copy, which I then modify it as needed. A h-u-g-e productivity boost. (I color emails I tend to resend with brown.)

Queued Send. Some email systems now provide this: the ability to schedule when an email should be sent. I find it useful to write an email days in advance (when I have the time), then queue it to send later -- such as that men's reading group reminder.

 

Eudora's Drawbacks

Being old, Eudora is becoming less and less compatible as Windows changes and the Internet becomes more secure.

Windows Incompatibility. For instance, Eudora expects a 32-bit system, so it only works on 64-bit Windows 7 when you  move some of its files after installation.

It kind of works on Windows 8, and I have given up trying to make it work on Windows 10. Hence, my desktop computer still runs Windows 7 just to accommodate Eudora. (I have a spare Windows 7 machine under the desk should my workhorse give up one sad day.)

Eudora also struggles today with modern HTML code in emails, as well as Unicode extended characters. I can overcome these problems by right-clicking the email, and then choosing Show in Browser.

Internet Incompatibility. Eudora has been working fine with my ISP, Telus, who hadn't done anything over the decades to improve email security. For email access, Telus didn't even require a strong password. But a major lapse last year smartened up the company, when customers went without email for weeks, or, in the case of my dad, months. This month Telus moved the host email system of its business customers (like me) from Dell to Google.

Then Eudora no longer worked. In me, the panic was palpable.

 

The Telus Debacle

Telus shifted my email to Google without particularly informing me. I noticed something was wrong when I wasn't getting any emails throughout the day. I contacted tech support, and slowly it dawned on the techie what happened.

Telus had indeed sent me an email warning me of the switch, but I ignored it. Reason being that Telus allows so much spam through their servers that claim to come from "Telus" insisting I click a button to keep from "losing my account." An email telling me that I needed to take action because I was being "moved to Gmail" was just as worthy of being ignored.

The techie guy said he'd wait a day for the transfer to Gmail to complete and then call me to help me change my email settings. He never did.

In any case, the Gmail settings that Telus lists on its support page are incomplete. 

 

Fixing Eudora

So I was left on my own to fix Eudora. It took about two days. 

My first approach was download and try out a half-dozen email clients. None offered the three crucial features I list above. The "modern" Eudora 8 proved a disappointment, as it is merely a version of Thunderbird, and doesn't do the three crucial tasks.

Thunderbird was helpful in one regard: it does an excellent job of determining automatically the arcane settings for sending (smtp) and receiving (pop/imap) emails. It was thru Thunderbird that I found that Telus posted incomplete GMail settings; eventually I found the full set of settings on Google's support page:

• SMTP and IMAP https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229
• POP https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7104828

The problem is, you can't just fix one setting; everything has to be perfect. So here are the steps you need to take:

1. Weaken GMail's security
2. Open up Eudora's access to port numbers
3. Replace aging security DLLs in Eudora
4. Set up properties properly

 

Weaken GMail Security

You  need to weaken GMail's security to allow Eudora access your email stored on Google's severs. The Less secure app access setting is required to allow SMTP, POP, and IMAP access. Here's how to implement it:

1. Sign into your GMail account, and then click the Gear icon, and then choose See All Settings: 

2. Choose the Accounts and Import tab.

3. Next to Change account settings, click Google Account settings.

4. On the left, click Security.

5.   Scroll down to Less secure app access. Enable it. 

6. While in GMail Settings, click on the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.

7. Turn on the Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded) setting.

(If you plan to use IMAP, them turn on Enable IMAP.)

8. Click Save Changes.

 

Editing Port Numbers

Regular Eudora does not allow you to change port numbers. To do this, you need to add an extension to Eudora, which fortunately is included in the install but hidden away. Here is how to access it:

1. Close Eudora.
2. Go to the C:\Program Files (x86)\Qualcomm\Eudora Mail 7\extrastuff folder
3. Copy the esoteric.epi to one folder higher (C:\Program Files (x86)\Qualcomm\Eudora Mail 7). EPI files are like extensions to Eudora. This one add more options to the end of the Options dialog box.
4. Start Eudora.
5. From the menu, open Tools | Options, then scroll to the end of the Options dialog box. Notice all the new items that the EPI file added.
6. Click on Ports, and then change the default values, which are meant for unsecure email access, to port numbers used for secure access. See figure below for the numbers to use:

Click OK to close the dialog box.

 

Updating Eudora's Security

Eudora is such an important email client that a few intrepid programmers are working on bringing it up to date. The Hermes Mail project has so far produced files that update the security in Eudora, as required by today's mail servers.  

(Do not confuse Hermes Mail with Hermes Web Mail; the latter is not what you want here.)

The following files solve the problem of Eudora 7.1 not accepting and validating Secure Sockets Layer
certificates -- specifically updating it from TLS 1.0 to TLS 1.2:

1. Close Eudora.
2. Go to sourceforge.net/projects/hermesmail/ and then click Download. This downloads the HermSSL.zip file.
3. Unzip the file.
4. Navigate to the lowermost HermSSL folder
5. First, run vcredist.ese. This is a just-in-case Windows support file that is needed by the new code; if the install returns an error, this means your computer already has the needed support file, so no worries.
6. Copy the following four files to the main Eudora folder, such as C:\Program Files (x86)\Qualcomm\Eudora Mail 7:
    libeay32.dll
   QCSSL.dll
   rootcerts.p7b
   ssleay32.dll
   
   Allow Windows to copy over existing files. 

 

Set Up Properties Properly

There are many options for setting up the Properties of a Personality (as Eudora calls an email account). I have pasted below a screen grab of the ones that work for me. Specifically, take note of these settings:

1. Start Eudora
2. From the menu, choose Tools | Personalities
3. Right-click your personality (email account name), and then choose Properties
4. Enter the settings shown below for Generic Properties and Incoming Mail.
   
   
5. When done changing the settings, click OK to close the Options dialog box.
6. Right-click your personality, and then choose Test. Eudora should report no errors. If it does, then the most likely problem is that you did not change Secure Sockets when Sending to "Required, Alternate Port" in the Options dialog box.
   
7. Now press Ctrl+M to download your waiting email. Life is good again!

 

Generic Properties

User name must be the one that you use to log into the Gmail account; in my case, it is grabowski@telus.net

SMTP server must be smtp.gmail.com

Secure Sockets when Sending must be "Required, Alternate Port". This forces Eudora to (a) use security and (b) use the port numbers you specified in Options | Ports. This is probably the most crucial setting to use in Eudora to make it work with Gmail!

 

Incoming Mail

Server must be pop.gmail.com for POP or else imap.gmail.com for IMAP; for a program like Eudora, you probably want POP service

Secure Sockets when Sending must be "Required, Alternate Port"

 

 

 

From LEDAS: The Polyomino Contest!

Ilya Lichman

 

You may have encountered polyominoes at some point in your life, because they are used in puzzles popular for more than 100 years, including ones like Tetris.

A polyomino is a plane geometric figure formed by joining one or more equal squares, edge to edge. The name was devised by Solomon Golomb in 1953 in a now-classic textbook, and then popularized by Martin Gardner in 1960; see the “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American.

Today we’ll play with our updated LEDAS logo, which we released a year ago. As you can see, it consists of four pentominoes. A pentomino is a polyomino of order 5, i.e. 5 equal-sized squares connected edge-to-edge.

 

Splitting the LEDAS Logo Into Polyominos

Our question today is this: what is the number of ways in which to cover this area – a 6х6 square, and missing a 2х2 corner by dividing the inner area made of 12 white cells?

Let's agree ahead of time that two configurations are considered the same if they are just made by replacing colors or mirroring the image. For instance, the following two configurations are the same, because we simply repainted a pair of pentominoes and then mirrored the picture:

But what about the white areas in the configuration? As you can see, they make up three parts of the initial 12-square polyomino. Moreover, there are at least two ways to split them:

We have found a way to split the 12-square white figure into three pieces, and then pack all four initial pentominoes and three white polyominoes into the logo area (the square 6х6 missing the 2х2 corner). This means that there are at least three ways to pack the seven polyominoes into the logo’s area. But is there another way? And how many ways are there?

 

The Goal of the LEDAS Polyomino Contest

The goal is to find the best splitting of the white 12-square figure on N pieces. What do we mean by best? It means that we want to have a maximum number of ways to pack everything back into the logo’s area.

For each found configuration, you get +1 point. But for each additional splitting of the white figure, you lose 7 points.
This means that if you find M different configurations after splitting the white figure into N pieces, you have M – 7 * N points. The goal is to maximize your points.

In our example, N=3 and M=3, so the resulting score is 3 – 3 * 7 = – 18.

 

Reporting Solutions

We invite readers to submit their original solutions. Send your configurations to quiz@ledas.com. In your email, please include the explanation and the expected number of points.

We will post the names of all who submit a correct solution. (If you don't want your name made public, then please say so in your submission.) We look forward to seeing what you can come up with!

Visit https://ledas.com/post/869-from-ledas-the-polyomino-contest/

 

 

Canadian gov't tries cracking bitcoin secrecy

Encrypted transparency

 

Canada's tax man, Canada Revenue Agency, is asking the federal court to force Canadian cryptocurrency trading platform Coinsquare to identify every client going back to the start of 2013. CRA says it needs the data to fight tax fraud and the underground economy. It may also be an issue that Canada's left-wing federal government has condemned the country's children and children's children into paying back a $1.5 trillion debt.

Coinsquare, which has 200 thousand accounts,  says "we understand our customers comply with all applicable Canadian laws relating to their cryptocurrency trading activities." The firm, however, had earlier got into trouble with financial regulators, being charged with $2.2 million in sanctions and costs for faking trading volumes, cover ups during the investigation, and firing the whistle blower.

The court has not yet decided on whether the info can be released. 

CRA opened a dedicated cryptocurrency unit in 2018. Tax lawyer David Piccolo says the Coinsquare case "will be a test of the agency’s ability to process the likely massive amounts of data that generally accompanies cryptocurrency transactions." 

Source: nationalpost.com/news/politics/cra-goes-after-client-details-of-major-canadian-cryptocurrency-marketplace-in-battle-against-underground-economy

 

 

How to buy a new laptop

Higher specs, higher price

 

I despair when I see a customer returning a $400 laptop to the store, complaining that it doesn't work well. Or when an organization struggles with its slow-moving laptop that it just purchased. There was a time I was buying a laptop a year for my kids in high school. 

The low-priced ones just aren't worth it.

For a laptop to run well, and to last for years, you need to spend $$$, typically over $1,000. That's a lot of money in an area of life where we had been conditioned to expect ever lower prices with ever higher specs. That that trend made its U-turn years ago. 

My son-in-law wants exactly that: a laptop that runs well and lasts years. The good news is that a well-made laptop runs well for years because computer hardware specs stalled out nearly a decade ago. Other than Apple's untested ARM-based CPUs, nothing Intel or AMD can do will give our computers a 3x speed boost.

The drawback to 3x speedboosts, of course, is that software developers will suck up all that power for themselves. As Bill Gates apparently told his programmers in some earlier decade, assume infinite hardware. That didn't turn out so well.

So, here is how to narrow down the choices among laptops you may want to buy. Begin by expecting to pay $1,000 - $1,500 for it. (My current laptop turns five years old this month. See figure at the end of this article. It is an HP Spectre X360 that cost me $1,400.)

1. First step is to decide on the screen size. This determines all other factors. I prefer small laptops with 13" or 14" screens. The most common size is 15" and there are some with 17" screens, but they are monsters and tend to be rare.
   
   
2.  Pick a CPU type. I recommend at least an Intel i5 for the extra processing oomph (or the equivalent in an AMD CPU). Look for the highest CPU speed in your budget, assuming it's an option.
   
   I tend to go with integrated graphics. The drawback with discrete graphics, like a nVidia board, is that they consume more power and don't give any speed boast to the kinds of software I use -- office productivity, CAD, and Web stuff.
   
   
3. Next, pick the memory. I recommend at least 8GB. 
   
   
4. Choose the hard drive type and size. I recommend you pick one that is all SSD -- solid state drive. There are some hybrid ones, which pair a small SSD with a large HDD, but I want the all-SDD model for speed and for fall resistance.
   
   I suggest a capacity of at least 512GB, because Windows consumes so much disk space for itself, so that smaller drives will just frustrate you. When I got my HP Spectre X360, I picked the smallest drive (256GB), and then waited for SSD prices to fall, then replaced it with a 1TB one. (Not all laptops allow you to replace the hard drive; in any case, swapping out drives is not a trivial exercise.) I like the high-end Samsung SSD drives (EVO or PRO), because they come with caching software that speeds up the drive even further.
   
   
5. Now you can get into the miscellaneous parts:

• Screen resolution: HD (1920 x 1080) is good enough; higher resolutions just make the text too tiny
• I prefer 4:3 aspect ration over 16:9 to get more height, as most software has all their UI elements at the top and bottom
• Touch screen is a must
• Backlit keyboard is a must
• If you can, try out the keyboards in a store. Some laptops have keyboards that are truly awful; most are mediocre
• Touchpens are useless, I find
• You want at least an HDMI out (for a second monitor); some laptops also have a DisplayPort port for a third monitor
• At least three USB ports
• SD card slot
• While USB-C ports give you access to every kind of peripheral, it is annoying to lug along the external port replicator.
• Battery life is voodoo. You can't rely on the vendors' claims, as they are completely hypothetical. As a rough guide, divide their battery duration number by 2. Or 3.
• Spin or Flip or 360. I like laptops whose lids flip all the way around. 

As for brand names, I like Acer and ASUS, because they make laptops for other companies, along with their own brands, and they are located in Taiwan, not China.

TIP: The #1 consumer of battery power is screen brightness. If you need longevity away from a power outlet, turn down the brightness as far as bearable.

My only peeve with the HP Spectre that I use is that the keys on the keyboard are silver, instead of black. This makes it hard to read the letters on the keys, whether backlighting is on or off. So make sure the keys are dark colored. Silver keys look pretty but aren't practical.Silver keys look pretty but aren't practical.

 

 

Spatial 3D Insider Summit

VR only

 

Well, it's 7:00am here on the West Coast of North America, and Spatial 3D Insider Summit should be starting right about now.

I've attended a couple of them before, once in Colorado at at resort so high in the mountains I had a day of splitting headache (from the lack of oxygen) until I got my hands on some tylonol. Then again in Munich.

The Spatial 3D Insider Summit has nothing to do with geographics or mapping. It's the component arm of Dassault Systemes, which'll sell you an ACIS or CGM license for your budding CAD project. Attending the Insider Summit is like attending the OpenDesign Alliance annual conference: you get the head's-up on new technology that (might) be powering your favorite CAD program next year.

For its online conference, Spatial decided to use the VR [virtual reality] gimmick. This requires attendees to download software from a third-party, install it, sign in with the same uid/pw as we registered for the conference, and then take part.

I suppose.

I downloaded the software, but then couldn't be bothered to install it. 

You know, when it comes to online conferences, I am a passive observer -- well, except for the frantic typing. If I have a question, most online conference services have a Questions or Comments panel. The extra effort of being interactive in 3D just isn't my schtick.

I suppose the folks at Spatial thought, "Hey, this is a conference about 3D, let's hold it in 3D!"

Thing is, even in 3D CAD we interact through 2D.

So, no reporting on the Summit from this Insider.

Ralph's thots on Apple's new CPU

A problematic roll-out

 

There is one reason, and one reason only, why Apple is moving to its own, proprietary CPU: to further lock in its user base.

Windows and Linux can run on Apple's computers only because they use Intel CPUs. With Apple's switch to ARM, Mac-labeled laptop and desktop computers become less flexible and so far less desirable. They can no longer provide "the best Windows experience," as some enthusiasts like to put it.

The experience of Google and Microsoft in using ARM CPUs (to replace Intel/AMD CPUs) on laptops is not good. Sure, they get 5G connectivity and longer battery life, but that does not compensate for sluggish operation and, in the case of Windows, incompatibility with important software.

This is being repeated in the Apple world, where third-party software is slow in arriving, especially software that Mac users depend on, such as from Adobe. One CAD vendor that has been candid about Apple's switch is Vectorworks, who are working on making its software work on the new CPU, but has no timeline for completion. Adobe's "next summer" statement is sufficiently vague to allow for delays and worrisome, given third-parties have already had a half-year's headstart on rewriting their programs. Meanwhile, Apple ships the new MacOs for the new Macs now.

Third-party vendors might, of course, be just a little bit ticked off that they need to do all that code re-write just to stay in a sliver of a falling computer market, one in which Macs in 2020 Q2 sold a mere 6.7% of all personal computers worldwide -- down from 7.4% a year earlier.

The telling part is all that Apple left out of the the presentation and the misleading charts that purported to show the necessary superiority of its ARM CPU. Here are some of the complaints from the tech media [with my responses in square brackets]:

• Love charts without X and Y axis numbers. [The charts are meaningless, because there are no numbers on the X and Y axes, and we don't even know if the Y axis starts at 0.]

• Apple failed to show benchmarks of its new M1 CPU against its own Macs running Intel CPUs. [Perhaps the numbers would look less good, and maybe even be catastrophic.]
  
  
• Why only Thunderbolt 3 ports, instead of v4? [I suspect that the new ARM CPU could not handle the bandwidth for video displays required by Intel in the v4 spec, specifically 8K panels.]
  
  
• A 13" computer with 16GB of RAM max should not be allowed to be called a Macbook Pro. The old Mac Minis cap out at 64GB of RAM; the new Mac Minis are limited to 16GB. The new Macbook Pros cap out at 16GB of RAM; the old Intel Macbook Pros cap out at 32GB of RAM. [This could be an addressing issue, in which a limitation of the ARM CPU is the amount of RAM it can address.]
  
  
• They're hedging hard with lots of “first step” and “multi-year” transition so far. [The introduction reminds me of the launch of iPhone, which couldn't do copy'n paste for the first several years.]
  
  
• Craig Federighi is noting how the Mac “instantly” wakes from sleep. [So does my Intel i5-based Chromebook.]
  
  
• No eGPUs. [Some Apple users plugged in external graphics boards, but this is not possible with ARM-based CPUs.]
  
  
• Today's PC laptops have fantastic screens with tiny bezels; face unlock; touchscreens and pencils; 4G modems; tons of awesome features. This looks like a faster MacBook Pro from 2015 with a tiny touchbar nobody wants. [Possiblereasons as to why Windows computers have that 95% market share.]
  
  
• Apple's new MacBook Air and Pro still have 720p webcams. [This could be a supplier issue, or more likely Apple saving money on hardware.]

As Frank Riff put it, "For those who hoped that Apple was going to use the Apple Silicon transition to course-correct on issues such as ports, Touch Bar, and perhaps introduce a new design language or new iOS features such as FaceID, tonight was a bitter disappointment."

Apple bases its claim of a 3.5x speed increase on benchmarks it did not make public, against Windows PCs whose identities it kept secret. This tells me the company has much to fear from the switch once independent benchmarks pop up in the real world.  

I don't like Apple products. I find the hardware limiting (who ships overpriced laptops without touch screens, and crams ports too tightly together? Apple!) and the software irritating (who designs a mobile touch interface with an inconsistent Back button? Apple!). 

The sliding market share of Macs forces Apple to compete against Windows users, rather than for Mac users -- Windows users who  spent the last two decades showing no interest in Apple's fenced-off products.

I admire Apple's gamble on switching to a power-efficient CPU that it manufacturers to its own spec. As I see it, however, the gamble will not pay off.

 

 

Google is a virus

It's not evil if we don't consider it evil

 

Google becoming more aggressive about inserting itself into my world. Here are couple of recent examples.

It has begun demanding that I use my Google credentials to log into Web sites, ones where I already have independent passwords. In the screen grab below, after I am logged into eBay, Google interferes, and in virus-like fashion tried to hijack my login credentials.

Google hijacking a login

One morning, I had an interview with a developer. When he sent a Zoom invite from his Gmail account, Google inserted its own Meet link, as a virus would. See the screen grab.

Google hijacking a Zoom meeting by presenting its own Meet link

As an editor friend said, "I miss the good old days of 'Don’t be evil'." That bromide, about government involvement in our lives, could be rewritten in 2020 as,

"Hello.

I'm from Google.

I'm here to help you."

 

 

Pay people to attend online Webinars

It's happening

 

CAD conferences have done the pivot thing several times in the course of the history of our favorite software. In those early days, there were general CAD conferences, like AEC Systems, where lots of CAD vendors showed up and tens of thousands of users thronged the aisles. Those were delicious times. 

The problem for CAD vendors was that in such an environment customers could see, hear, touch, and learn about competitors.  The stories of the Autodesk booth being mobbed in the mid-1980s are legend -- and true, for I was there. Competitors scowled at the sight that meant the loss of customers.

 

Side Note

I recall speaking with an Intergraph representative upset with the AutoCAD proposition, considered revolutionary at the time: customize CAD yourself. The rep warned me that this was dangerous (or something like that, I don't recall the exact descriptor), and it was much better to have Intergraph do the programming for you.

This was the year, 1986, when a license of AutoCAD went for $2,500 and an Intergraph station went for $50,000 or $1000,000 or more. Intergraph's solution was so expensive because it included the custom hardware Intergraph itself built. AutoCAD's was so cheap because the customer had to buy his own hardware, which in the mid-1980s was actually not cheap. Even though personal computers (running AutoCAD) were much cheaper than minicomputers (running Intergraph), you could end up spending $50,000 on high-end hardware for AutoCAD. Heck, that E-size plotter alone would set you back $18,000. 

Never mind. The times they were undergoing a paradigm shift, and it was exciting to live through it. A different class of people (like me) wanted to assemble their own computers, and also wanted to customize their own CAD systems. Intergraph didn't get it, and for them that was understandable, as they came from the 1970s era of the turn-key mindset, which was normal: one company provided the hardware, software, installation, training, and customization. In the end, Intergraph eventually became another AutoCAD. 

At the time, I was at CADalyst magazine, and we marveled at what our readers were coming up with. My favorite was the stained glass maker who was delighted that AutoCAD could unequally scale his designs to fit customers' windows precisely! A trivial operation for CAD really, but until PC-based CAD came along, otherwise neigh-impossible.

 

Back to the Story

Yah, so CAD vendors scowled at potential customers having easy access to competitors, and so in the early 1990s began holding locked conferences and exhibitions. There was only one message: us. No distractions permitted.

Whereas before anyone with $1,700 for booth space could show up at an AEC Systems show, now even third-party developers who looked like they might be infringing on the mother corp's products were banned. The lockdown extended to stopping outspoken customers at the door, and blocking uncooperative members of the CAD press from attending.

Competitors were reduced to assuming false identities to infiltrate the proceedings (true story), or else set up shop across the street in hotel suites (also true). Some were brazen, buying up billboards on the road from the airport and across from the convention center, even handing out leaflets in the streets, all to convince the faithful of their erroneous belief system. Why a believer would fall for a billboard was beyond me, but hey, it wasn't me who was in charge of that CAD vendor's marketing budget.

Status report from inside: everyone is happy, happy, happy! And so excited. Oh yes. So much excitement!  

Most conferences were not presents from CAD vendors to their loyal customers. Some were free, most charged, and some charged handsomely. Between the conference fee, jacked-up hotel rates, and air fare, customers could be looking at paying $5,000 annually to prove their devotion to billionaire CAD vendors.

Some customers did see an annual trip to Las Vegas (yuck!) as a tax-deductible vacation. Many went for the training, for which they'd have to pay anyhow. And I hear from CAD vendors that they pretty much never made a profit off these events, even the ones who charged handsomely.

 

We're Back to Open

Then the travel ban killed the CAD love-in business. Where  hijackers and shoe bombers failed in decades of trying, the world's tiniest living entity and the world's largest bureaucracies succeeded in just three months.

Fortunately for CAD vendors, the technology for broadcasting conferences over the Internet was already in place, and so we are hearing that 3x and 4x as many customers now take part.

Unfortunately for CAD vendors, the distraction factor is back.

After a 20-year gap, customers again have easy access to a smorgasbord of offerings from competitors. In this environment, CAD vendors can no longer rope in users. In my case, this year I've been to 4x as many conferences as in former times. They're free, they're open, and they take up a few hours instead of a few days. 

So this week, yet another invite arrived for an online conference. This one had a twist. If you attended, you would get $50 off the purchase of the vendor's software, if you signed up early enough. Earlier in the year, PTC offered free popcorn for signing up early, and they made good: I got mine.

It's just a germ of an idea, but as Zoom Fatigue becomes the next psychosis, paying customers to attend could be a clever technique to get the turned-off to once again tune in.

But I do miss the travel to exotic locales.

 

Seven tips for working with Substack

Hidden and not so hidden functions

 

How to Preview Your Newsletter

SubStack's process for previewing your newsletter is a bit awkward:

1. Click Settings at the bottom of the screen.

2. In the Post Settings screen, scroll down until you reach Secret Draft Link. 

3. Click Copy Link.

4. Paste the link into the address bar of a Web browser. 

5. To exit the Post Settings screen, click the X in the upper right corner.

 

How To Move a Paragraph

Hold down the Ctrl key and then double-click the paragraph. Notice the blue border that surrounds the paragraph. Drag the paragraph to a new location.

How To Add Captions to Images

Click the image. In the upper-right corner of the image, notice the big blue dot with three little white dots.

1. Click the blue dot.
2. Select Edit Caption.
3. Below the image, replace "Caption..." with your caption text.

To distinguish caption text from regular text, SubStack centers it and renders it in a small sans serif font.

When the Newsletter Gets Too long

Although SubStack claims no limits to their service, there is in fact a limit -- the length of the newsletter in bytes. I sometimes produce long-form articles, and eventually this orange warning alert appears at the bottom of the screen:

Click the tiny i button to learn why:

Gmail will truncate emails that are more than 102KB. We display a warning after you've exceeded Gmail's size limit.

The 102KB limit includes text and images. When you have more images, then less text is allowed. To eliminate the warning, remove one image at at time, or else cut and paste text for use in another issue of the newsletter.

 

Working on Multiple Newsletters

I often work on two or more newsletters at a time. I keep each one open in its own tab of a Web browser. In other tabs, I keep a copy of my newsletter's template and the dashboard. In this way, I can add text to any draft newsletter as I come across new and interesting information.

Create a Template for your Newsletter

SubStack does an excellent job when you copy text-figures from one newsletter to another. It does not lose any formatting.

So that I don't have to type things repetitively, I have created a template for my newsletter, which is just a draft one that I have named "Template." See the screen grab below for some of the elements I have in my template. When I start a new edition of my newsletter, I copy the entire template and paste it into a New Post.

Best Time to Send Out a Newsletter

This is a bit of info I learned when I still was with MailChimp. It does an analysis of email opening times to determine the best time to send out your newsletter. "Best" is defined as getting the most opens for each issue. For me, it was 7am in my time zone, Pacific.

To set the time for your newsletter:

1. Click Publish at the bottom of the screen.
2. Click Schedule for Later.
3. Choose the date and time at which to have SubStack send it out.

 

Now is the time to cancel MailChimp

"In our sole discretion"

 

About five years ago I was looking around for the mass email service to take over my homegrown effort. I was spending too much time updating the mailing list, and there were firms who promised to take the work over for me -- for a fee, 'natch. I settled on MailChimp, and for the most part it worked mostly to my satisfaction, at first.

I have just two needs in sending out my weekly upFront.eZine newsletter:

1. Take care of additions, subtractions, and changes to the mailing list
2. Let me create my newsletter in the way I want it to look (one of my other jobs is book designer, so I am picky in how text looks)

Once the relief of no longer having to maintain the mailing list began to wear off, however, I realized just how much convenience was costing me. Translated into my local currency, it came to about $960 a year.

Like most similar services, MailChimp charges on the basis of how many subscribers you have on a mailing list. To reduce my cost, I began manually paring down the list, removing those names MailChimp found never opened the newsletter. Over time, I got the list down to the lowest price level, costing me about $600/year.

No sooner had I cut my cost to the lowest level possible, MailChimp increased the price by about $120/year. Their excuse was that they were adding so many new functions -- none of which I would ever use, nor even asked for. That both events happened in the same week so irritated me that I began looking for alternatives, but found none that satisfied me.

 

We're All in This Together, Except When We're Not

During the summer of COVID-19, MailChimp hit its customers with a one-two punch. First, it made a massive change to its user interface that reduced the names of major functions to inscrutable icons. That was the next breaking point for me. I should not, as a customer, to be required memorize the meanings of icons.

This move highlights one of the primary drawbacks to working with cloud-based software: customers cannot freeze releases to stay with a version that works for them best. This is the reason some of the desktop software upon which my business depends is frozen at releases that came out in 1998, 2000, 2007, and so on. Visio 2000 works just fine, as do Eudora 7 (2007), PaintShop Pro 6 (2000), and Word 2007. Perhaps that was the golden era of software.

Another drawback to cloud-based software (of which I use little, one of the exceptions being this blogging service) is the hesitation of speed. I was one of those who endured the early PC era, where everything seemed painfully slow. The cloud returns us to the 1980s, where I am forced to wait for a screen to change, wait for a file to save, wait for text to update, wait for a preview to show up. Pretty much every interaction is click -- wait -- click -- wait... MailChimp, in trying perhaps to be all things to all marketers, seems to have a lot of code slowing it down.

By late summer MailChimp was piling up demerit points from me. Getting more expensive, inscrutable interface, slow reaction time.

The final straw that broke my camel-like patience was a second price increase that arrived in the early fall, even as the second wave of COVID-19 hit the world. We truly are not all in this together. Again, the same lame excuse that they were adding all kinds of new functions for which I have no use. I was now up to paying about $800 a year to send out my free newsletter on their cheapest plan.

Ratcheting up the cost

 

Sendinblue

Over a period of 2-3 weeks, I signed up for a half-dozen mass emailing services. A couple of them I got seriously involved with, trying to make them work with my newsletter.

Hot tip: All of them import email lists from competitors (usually through CSV format), so remember to export your list before cancelling a service. Some also will import your newsletters.

One, Sendinblue from Paris, was promising in that their annual price was $300 -- about 2/3 cheaper than MailChimp. Tech support was wonderfully responsive. I paid the fee.

But their editor was bug-ridden, including a very weird bug where sometimes it would add a line of JavaScript on its own, and then announce it could not save the document -- because it contained JavaScript. I reported it, and the techies fixed it in a few days. (Even weirder, the JavaScript pointed to a legitimate Web site, making me wonder if a programmer had been copying'n pasting code.)

But it was the second major bug that killed Sendinblue for me: It would not upload most JPG and PNG images to my newsletter. It complained, "File format not valid." That bug the techies never solved by the time I cancelled my account.

Two upFront.eZine newsletters went out with Sendinblue, and this is why they lacked images to illustrate articles. Remarkably, and to my relief, they refunded my fee, pro-rated, so I lost only about $10 on the experience.

 

Constant Contact

Another one I spent time with was MailChimp's largest competitor (I think), Constant Contact. Their big advantage was (or so I thought) that they cost almost as little as Sendinblue. They automatically offer free telephone support to get new customers going. Very lux.

Again, the problem was with images. The live tech support person spent several phone calls with me to figure out my situation, which, on the face of it, is so simple: click a spot anywhere in the newsletter, insert an image file from my computer's hard drive. Both MailChimp and TypePad (this blogging service) do it, so I was left puzzled why so many mass mailing services I tested WON'T do it. Constant Contact had such a weird multi-step workaround that I can't even describe it. Even more weirdly, the techie told me Constant Contact had no plans to repair the problem. This was disheartening to hear.

The entire time I was telling other CAD editors about my experience, and one of them warned me that Constant Contact was known for being very expensive, a claim I found puzzling. When I first signed up, I told Constant Contact I had under 5,000 subscribers, and the fee quoted to me worked out to about $350/year. Some days later, I went to check their range of plans, and the quoted fee shot up to something like $1,200 a year. Yikes! This made MailChimp, in comparison, cheap. The huge change in price made me pretty angry. All that time wasted.

The reason for the Constant Contact name is the constant contact from their sales team. At the end, my contact hung up on me in disgust, as I seemed incapable of grasping all the wonderful features they would offer for their exorbitant fee. Never mind that I didn't need them. The customer is always wrong. 

Fun fact: All of these mailing services stringently check that your mailings could not be considered spam. Indeed, two services refused to take me as a customer because the domain of my email address (telus.net) did not match the domain name of my newsletter (upfrontezine.com). Some, however, effectively sent me spam, as they left out the legally-required Unsubscribe button in their email communications with me, even after I cancelled my accounts with them.

 

Substack

Frustrated, I began looking at the mass emailers were being used by the emails coming in to me. One was Substack. I remembered I had a Substack account, which I had signed up for it at some point, but had never investigated further. In desperation, I tried it. It offered the two things I needed most, at the price I wanted most: free. They even allow ads in newsletters. They make money by charging 10% if you set up a subscription fee through their system. 

The formatting is very limited; there isn't even a way to center text! At least they let me punch in an image anywhere I need one. 

Substack's simplistic editor

So, in the end, after checking out a half-dozen mailing services, upFront.eZine now goes out with Substack. I do worry, however, what this venture-funded service might change in the future.

 

MailChimp Goes Woke

Then  the news came out this week that MailChimp changed the Standard Terms of Service. It had decided to go all Twitter on its customers.

Twitter smothering its customers with mother-knows-best

MailChimp added the paragraph that I highlighted in yellow in the screengrab below, in which it promises to read all the emails you send out and block those that -- in its sole discretion -- it does not like. "Sole discretion" means no appeals:

• It does not describe how the censoring process will take place
• It does not define the word "important," but I think we can guess what it refers to 

As a publisher, I am hard-core pro-free speech. Just in time, I had escaped MailChimp. It may be worthwhile for others -- in our sole discretion -- to cancel MailChimp. There is, of course, no guarantee that Substack will escape the attention of the Woke brigades, but for now it remains a sanctuary site.

MailChimp's desire to be the Twitter of your newsletters

 

Who Had the First DWG Editor?

Felix CAD on first

 

I always thought Softsource's VDraft was the first CAD program to use DWG as its native file format, but it looks like Graebert beat it with Felix CAD by about a half-year or year.

Digging through the historical record, it appears that Felix CAD was first (1995) and VDraft second (1996). Both were developed independently from Autodesk and from each other. Felix CAD in Germany, after Autodesk took away the European AutoCAD distributorship from Graebert, and VDraft in the USA based on a DWG/DXF plug-in it had written earlier for Web browsers. I ended up writing documentation about both CAD programs.

Early promotional slide for Felix CAD

 

The history of Graebert reads, "The first release of Felix CAD in 1995 was 100% written in-house, including the code to read/write DWG files." Felix CAD today is known as ARES Commander.

We here in North America didn't know about Felix CAD, which is why, when I wrote an email in January 1996, I said, "The February issue [of the CAD++ newsletter] will feature the premier article on SoftSource's new $500 CAD software that uses AutoCAD DWG format as its native format -- the first AutoCAD clone."

VDraft boasted multiple windows for editing DWG files, which AutoCAD, at the time, could not do

The first knowledge I had about Felix CAD came in an email from March 1996 written by the German translator of my CAD++ newsletter. He reports interest from "Mr. Stahnke of Felix GmbH." (Mr Stahnke is still with Graebert today, continuing in his role as OEM and Partner Manager.) The Web site at the time was fcad.com, which now is hosted by "Fine Chemical Application Development Corporation (commonly referred as FCAD) is the world's leading fine chemical company."

 

The Distinction

I need to note that Felix CAD was not the first non-Autodesk product to read and write DWG files. There was a distinction back then, as there is today:

DWG Compatible. Some CAD programs can read/write DWG files, translating them to and from their own native format. In this regard, I believe that Microstation from Bentley Systems was the first DWG-compatible program.

DWG Based. Other CAD programs use DWG as their native file format, a much tougher programming job, and that is what we are talking about here.

 

Garage DWG

Then the market exploded. All kinds of independent developers were writing APIs that could read, display, and write DWG files. In August 1997, Roopinder Tara and I talked about me writing a comparative review of DWG-compatible software for Cadence magazine. Our initial list consisted of

• Visio Technical
• Visio IntelliCAD (if a beta is available)
• SoftSource Vdraft
• Intergraph Imagineer
• IMSI TurboCAD
• Bentley MicroStation
• AutoCAD LT
• FelixCAD
• DynaCAD
• CADkey
• Corel VisualCAD

(Those in boldface use DWG as their native file format; the others could read and/or write DWG files to/from their native format.)

Today I count over 30 programs using DWG as the native file format. Most are based on IntelliCAD, some on Graebert's ARES, a very few are developed independently, but all use DWG read-write libraries from the OpenDWG Alliance (now Open Design Alliance), which was launched by Visio in late 1998.

The First First

If we want to talk about the really first in DWG, then we need to jump back to 1988, when a Dutch company, Cyco Automation, released the first ever DWG viewer. They had cracked the code in how to parse DWG files and then display the result in software that did not rely on Autodesk. 

Packaging for the first release of AutoManager, showing its DOS interface

 

Their DWG viewer, called AutoManager, was such a breakthrough that we didn't understand the point of it, at the time. For us, working at CADalyst magazine, we would just fire up AutoCAD if we wanted to see the content of a DWG file. This was under MS-DOS, where you could (for the most part) run only one program at a time. Choosing between AutoManager or AutoCAD as to which program to run, it just made sense to start AutoCAD, as it did more than just view DWG files. 

Then Autodesk went to war over DWG, but that's a whole 'nother story.

 

 

It's Hard Buying a Chromebox

A rare beast

 

For nearly ten years, I've had a Gigabyte microPC in my home's entertainment room, whose job is basic: view movies from Acorn, Britbox, and so on. It runs a Web browser that does all the work streaming us movies.

Initially, I had used an Internet-enabled DVD player, which showed Netflix and other services, as well as played DVDs. But these so-called "smart devices" have short lifespans when it comes to staying up to date and still being able to access Netflix and its ilk. This is something the salesman will never tell you.

Anyhoo, I figured getting a microPC running Windows 10 (free upgrades for life!) would solve the long-term incompatibility problem. It is a minimal system, just 4"x4"  in size, hosting an i3 CPU with 4GB RAM and 64GB SSD. But that's good enough for running a Web browser.

The offending miniPC

 

Fake Audio Driver

But then problems ensued, one annoying, the other really annoying.

A couple of years ago, the sound disappeared. It took me a while to track down the problem: the audio driver had been replaced. Eventually, I found the solution in downloading the OEM sound driver, and installing it.

The problem, however, became more and more regular. Something -- Windows, I suppose -- at random intervals replaces the Intel-branded audio driver with another one. My wife would wait patiently as I did the reinstall of the correct driver, a process taking 6 or 7 minutes each time. The problem became regular, first every few weeks, and then more recently every couple of days.

Reading online, I found that this is a known problem: Windows 10 arbitrarily replaces perfectly good audio drivers with non-working ones. I tried a lot of the solutions that were suggested, but none were permanent.

 

CPU Cycle Eater

The second problem emerged from the muck a couple of months ago. The miniPC would grind to a crawl.

Checking the Task Manager, I could see that the CPU was running at 100% -- right up to the moment I opened the Task Manager. I never did find what was sucking up the cycles, as no virus haunts the machine.

Between not being able to hear movies and movies grinding to a stop, something else needed to be done.

 

The Chromebox Solution?

So last night I made the executive decision to replace the miniPC with a Chromebox. This, I hope, will solve the evil audio driver problem and the even more evil CPU crawl problem. I love the Asus Chromebook Spin 13 laptop I bought a year ago, and so hoped to re-experience the experience.

That was when I discovered how hard it is to buy a Chromebox, if, as in my case, you want the following specs:

• Reasonable price -- its primary job is to merely run a Web browser, after all
• Reasonable specs -- enough to run a Web browser
• Long term ChromeOS support -- well, yah
• Runs Android apps -- nice to have

Firstly, I discovered Chromeboxes tend to have horrendous prices, some going for nearly $1,600 here in Canada at Best Buy.

Regularly $1,586, after tax

 

The prices are especially horrendous especially when you consider the boxes come with no hi-res touch screen, no backlit keyboard with no integrated trackpad and no stylus. I didn't want to spend as much as my Acer Chromebook, which was $850, for something that was so unfeature-ladden.

Then I discovered how rare they are, as compared to Chromebooks. One of Google's lists holds 242 Chromebook models, but only 22 Chromeboxes. And maybe that's why the boxes are expensive -- minimal competition.

So I found a reconditioned one on eBay with a i7 CPU for US$140, before shipping. I ordered it.

 

Android Support

Then a though struck me. I want one that runs Android apps. Does this one? Short answer, no.

Here is Google's page listing the devices that support Android: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/chrome-os-systems-supporting-android-apps.

 

LTS

LTS is industry jargon for "long-term support." It's most commonly seen with the Linux operating system, where a release is supported by the distributor for a few years. It also happens in ChromeOS but in a different way:

Google says they will provide ChomeOS with updates during several years for specific models of Chromebooks and Chromeboxes. The newest models are supported until 2029, while older ones are already dead, upgrade-wise.

The official list is here: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en.  That reconditioned one I found on eBay had got its last update in 2019. Fortunately, I was able to cancel the order.

 

Which? Chromebox

So now the list of Chromeboxes for me to consider was considerably narrowed down, if I wanted Android support and LTS ChromeOS support -- just seven models. All of these have LTS of 2025:

1. Acer Chromebox CXI3
2. Aopen Chromebox Commercial 2
3. ASUS Chromebox 3 CN65
4. CTL Chromebox CBx1
5. HP Chromebox Enterprise G2 
6. Promethean Chromebox
7. Viewsonic NMP660 Chromebox

The list looks slim, but isn't. The Acer CXI3, for instance, comes in nine hardware configurations in the USA, four in Canada with prices that range from $320 to $1,000.

In the end I decided on the bottom-of-the-line CXI3 model, with these specs. In brackets I show the specs of the miniPC:

• 1.80GHz Intel Celeron Dual-core CPU (1.7GHz i3)
• Intel HD Graphics 610 (similar)
• 4 GB RAM (same)
• 32GB SSD (64GB)

I'm interested to see how it turns out.