WorldCAD Access

CAD in Russia: February 2023 Update

Life after Putin The turning point, perhaps, in Russia's war to exterminate the Ukrainian state came in mid-January when Germany's do-nothing minister of defense stepped down, and to be replaced by a do-something politician. Germany got the big tanks moving, however reluctantly. Meanwhile, political attitudes within Russia are hardening, as this series of headlines attests to: Russian Tech Giant VK Orders Workers to Return From Abroad or face dismissal, as the company fears that remote workers could deliberately sabotage VK, if family members were drafted into the Russian army. Critical Russian Emigres Should Have Property Seized, said the speaker of... Read more →

Apple Fans Flip Out Over New M2 CPUs

M2 20% faster than M1 Apple released computers with its homegrown M2 CPUs inside, and Apple fans were flabbergasted. It’s fun to notice that when Apple compares the performance of its M2s against other, older Apple hardware that sported Intel CPUs -- not against the M1 nor against the latest CPUs from AMD and Intel. One spec suggests the M2 is only 20% faster than the M1. Here is what some tweeted about: - - - Tom Warren (@tomwarren): If you max out Apple's new 16-inch MacBook Pro M2 Max with 96GB of RAM and 8TB of SSD storage then... Read more →

Best Takedowns of Macs with Touchscreens

Steve Jobs called them ergonomically terrible The rumour mill this week announced that Apple will ship laptops with touchscreens -- two years from now. The twitterati had their say. (For the record, I do not buy laptops that lack touch screens. I find that some onscreen actions are better with the precision of a mouse, and some better with the speed of the finger. With a touch screen, you have the choice.) - - - Harry McCracken (@harrymccracken): If this happens, it will set some sort of record for how long it took for a shoe to drop. Mike Murphy... Read more →

PD Power On the Go

Some successes, some failures Portable chargers for things like cell phones have been available for quite a few years now. What's newer is the PD charger; well, not so new: the spec is ten years old, but only in recent years has it become widespread. PD is short for "power delivery," and these portable chargers are powerful enough to recharge laptop computers through a USB-C port -- a port that my friends who reside on the other side of the Great Wall of Apple are beginning to learn about. I was interested in PD batteries, because I now have two... Read more →

CAD in Russia: January 2023 Update

2300 by 2030 (All links to Russian news sources are run through Google Translate to present them in English.) With the isolation of Russia now a hard fact, the government is pushing hard to replace Western technology. I suppose it is an aspiration resurrected from the Soviet era, when communism ran all things centrally. On the CAD side of things, we learn from isiscad that the goal is “to develop about 2,300 import-substituting CAD and PLM engineering programs by 2030”-- a goal as laughable as “30 by 30” (30% of the world’s surface being protected by 2030) or “100% by... Read more →

Going old school camera

Yashica GS rangefinder I grew up in an era when the SLR was the true way to take photographs. Rangerfinders were sniffed upon. (SLR, single-lens reflex, cameras showed us the true view, directly through the camera lens -- hence the SL part. The R part came from the mirror, which allowed us to look through the lens, flipping up when we pressed the shutter button, exposing the film to the light. Rangerfinders, by contrast, mounted two viewfinders above the lens, so we saw an offset image. There were two viewfinders, so that as we rotated the focus ring, one moved... Read more →

PayPal is Replaceable

There is a wiser alternative PayPal was a brilliant idea, an way for people to send money to each other easily, and pay for things without giving online retailers our credit card information (and having hackers steal it from them). The convenience outweighed its high cost: just specify the amount to send to an email address! It was particularly useful for receiving payments internationally, such as for someone like me, as nearly all my clients are are outside of my home country of Canada. While PayPal costs nothing for buyers to use, sellers lose about 3.5% on every transaction, an... Read more →

Finding the Bottlenecks in Solidworks

Between one and multi cores Alin Vargatu of TriMech researched where the single-core bottlenecks in Solidworks are, and reported it in a Webinar at trimech.com/resources/upgrade-your-hardware-and-software-for-maximum-productivity (email required). While the purpose of the Webinar is to sell upgrades to Solidworks 2023 and new Dell hardware, it contains useful information. Let’s take a look at some of what he and Dell’s Scott Hamilton had to say at the “Upgrade Your Hardware and Software for Maximum Productivity in 2023” session. The poster benchmark reduces the time to open a large assembly from 8.75 minutes to 1.75 minutes -- 5x faster. The changes being... Read more →

Running Linux in Windows 10/11

The tyranny of Linux The promise of Linux is that it would free us from the tyranny of Microsoft and Apple and their operating system "tax." But then the two near-monopolists broke the narrative by making their OSes (mostly) free. Instead, Linux imposed a different kind of tyranny: choice. Here's a chart from 2016 of many kinds of Linux available back then; since then, choice has magnified. Choice I was a faith-filled follower, until I wasn't. After keeping up with Mint Linux upgrades and several others (hey, they're freee!) I finally realized that Linux would never be successful as a... Read more →

Rethinking Power Supplies

From one to many I began with personal computers back when they still were called "micro-computers" and cost $6,000 for a bottom-of-the-line model; triple that amount for 2022 dollars. The parallel cable alone cost $100 in 1983 dollars, required to connect my Victor 9000 desktop to the Epson MX-80 dot-matrix printer ($800). Parallel connector (left) and USB-A connector Living in North America meant that 110V-only computers weren't a problem. A good friend, moving to Israel for his higher education, had in 1985 bought a portable Compaq computer in anticipation of the move. Portable, as in "portable sewing machine size and... Read more →

Using a Used HP Elite X2

7x cheaper than new Computers come in standard form factors, such as big boxy desktops and wear-on-your wrist smart watches. One form factor that has been around since the 1990s was popularized in the late 1960s in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey -- the tablet. In the movie, however, tablets were faked by having a film projector under the desk “react” to the astronauts’ interactions. Tablets seemed to come of age in the 1990s with the unexpected success of the PalmPilot handheld organizer. But then the unexpected failure of Microsoft’s Windows for Pen Computing initiative, along with the failure... Read more →

December update: CAD inside Russia

Expanding inside, and outside I am getting the impression that the CAD industry inside Russia is resigned to accepting the new reality: the divorce from the Western world is not going to go away anytime soon. If we take a pariah from an earlier era as the template, after Germany imposed a six-year war on Europe, it went through a three-year de-Nazification program, followed by war crimes trials, followed by the rebuilding program funded by the USA. (In this case, rebuilding Germany was seen as the better approach than the post-WWI approach of keeping Germany financially in jail.) So, we... Read more →

Moving bookmarks, passwords between Operas

If you know how The Opera Web browser is one I've been using ever since the days when floppy diskettes were still considered the acceptable form of software distribution. Although, if you needed to use a Web browser, you'd have an Internet connection, and so you could download it. Opera used to be programmed in Norway, but now it has Chinese owners, which is annoying. Still, it remains the best Web browser around: it's based on the Chrome browser (as are most these days) and then adds all kinds of useful extras. (The founders of Opera subsequently developed their own,... Read more →

Movies Still Come on Discs: Bullet Train

from Sony Pictures I sometimes review movies I’ve seen on Netflix in 288 characters on Twitter, and so it’s a different experience having Sony Pictures send me a complimentary DVD of their recent movie ‘Bullet Train’ in the mail for review. As is common these days, the one DVD case included Blu-ray, standard, and digital versions of the movie. I couldn’t use our Blu-ray player, as my wife and her friends had taken over our movie room. Windows never supported Blu-ray (out of pique that Sony’s format won out over its own HD DVD format), and even dropped support for... Read more →

Getting PaintShop Pro 6 Compatible with Windows 10

XP, Pleez The About screen for PaintShop Pro v6 I've been using PaintShop Pro as my go-to raster editing software since version 4. Version 6 produced a mature program that does everything I need of it; I did get version 8, but it lost an important feature: the ability to resize an image without losing quality. So, v6 it is. Here's the thing: PaintShop Pro v6 came out in 2000. Yep, it's 22 years old. But being that old has for me three big advantages that no recent version can boast (it's now owned by Corel or whatever that company... Read more →

Beat inflation, buy reconditioned

Buying a computer for 7x less HP's X2 series of expensive tablet PCs It is completely normal for us to buy a house used, a car used. That's because they are mature products. A 15-year-old house or car is as good (and sometimes better) than a brand-new one. With inflation inching closer to 10% a year, and groceries up 25% in some cases, it pays to look for ways to save money. One way is to buy reconditioned electronics. Reconditioned is better than used, because reconditioned or renewed implies there is some guarantee that the device is in pretty good... Read more →

Outrage at repair shops

Oi! Get yer hands off my stuff! The Register reports on a study from University of Guelph researchers Jason Ceci, Jonah Stegman, and Hassan Khan on the privacy policies and practices of electronics repair shops. They sent a laptop to 18 repair sites, asking them to replace the battery. The three were checking on the kind of privacy customers could expect, given that a typical laptop contains personal information like letters, Web site histories, photographs, and passwords. Some findings of the firms, which the trio did not name: 17 out of 18 firms asked for login credentials 0 firms posted... Read more →

NYT puffs SBF, gets slammed

"It could be worse" The second biggest story in tech this week is SBF. It's second only to the breathless "did you hear what Musk did now?" updates from a digerati who fear the unleashing of free speech in their favorite playground. (In brief, Sam Bankman-Fried, 30, known as SBF and head of FTX, a firm wanting to make itself the largest crypto-exchange in the world, borrowed between $1 and $10 billion from customers, plunging FTX into bankruptcy after the illegal act was unveiled, sending the value of FTX and 120 associated firms from $32 billion to $0 billion. It... Read more →

Bricsys enters construction

The final frontier This week was the BricsCAD V23 launch event, during which new ceo Rahul Kejriwal announced his plan to go after the construction industry with his software, even though 80% has no interest in it. Listening to the several keynote addresses, Bricsys made it clear that it is definitely going after the construction market, as another CAD vendor, Autodesk, has. Bricsys displayed a slide showing that 95% of data in construction and engineering goes unused. Clearly, that needs to have a solution! The "why" behind the dis-use of reuse of data in construction was not explained by Bricsys,... Read more →

The Engines That Power CAD Software

Offering proprietary MCAD formats in a while Recording the conference for broadcast There are software companies who toil in the background, who are content to remain largely anonymous, and without whom our CAD/CAM/CAE industry would collapse. These firms quietly write programming toolkits, translators, kernels, and even complete programs. They seem quiet because they don’t need to market to the wider design audience -- just to CAD vendors. Programming toolkits (aka SDKs, software development kits) make it possible to read, display, edit, and write CAD objects. The most popular ones are for objects defined by Autodesk’s near-universal DWG format, along with... Read more →