WorldCAD Access

Finding the Ultimate Travel Keyboard

Hardware review As a roving correspondent for the CAD (computer-aided design) world, I desire the lightest device for writing and communicating with. Carrying a multi-pound laptop, power connector, and additional cables and backup devices is not pleasant. I experienced the ultimate device back in 2000, of all things. Then, I had a Palm Pilot, a clip-on modem, and a Stowaway keyboard. This keyboard was comfortable to type on, yet folded down to a size that was the same of the Palm Pilot itself, with its 4” screen. (See image at left.) During a conference, I would type my report (in... Read more →

Bank Run, Day 5

Opinion Monday morning, as everyone is patting themselves for a job well done over the weekend protecting businesses small and large who depended on a bank that made a foolishing investing decision, the stock markets are punishing the banks that are still alive. Here is what I'm reading on Twitter: - - - @vcbrags: big week ahead for venture capitalists finding ways to take credit for things they had nothing to do with. Rachel Louise Ensign (@RachelEnsignWSJ): It was the first bank run ever organized over Slack. Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen): Do we trust Silicon Valley to be able to correctly... Read more →

“Payroll > good will”*: The SVB is down.

Opinion *) Quote from Jessica Lessin: “The thing I am hearing from a lot of founders is, in the words of one, ‘payroll > good will’. It is such a tremendously challenging situation.” Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) holds something like 44% of all venture capital (VC) funds. That’s the millions handed out by venture capitalists (investors) to new and not-so-new companies. These companies need a place to store their newly-acquired millions, and so they deposited the cash into accounts with SVB, about $170 billion worth. Last fall, SVB made a mistake in putting $21 billion into ten-year bonds at a... Read more →

Onshape holds its third user conference

Opinion Surfacing in Onshape At first, I was surprised to learn that Onshape would hold its own user conference just two months before PTC, which owns Onshape, holds its annual user conference. But then, I realized, it made sense. Onshape would be buried under the onslaught of information on all of PTC's other software programs. We saw the same happen after Microsoft bought Visio. The Onshape conference seemed prerecorded, and was held online. Parts may well have been presented live, but given that another CAD vendor fakes questions from users, you just never know these days. There were tutorials on... Read more →

What Did Dassault Promise Solidworks Users?

Opinion Dassault Systemes has been trying, since 2010, to get Solidworks users to trade in their desktop computers and move on over to its V6 cloud-based CAD system, now known as 3dexperience. It’s been a long haul, and the more Dassault tries, the more Solidworks succeeds. Since 2010, the number of Solidworks users has grown to over seven million*, and license and other revenues give Dassault over a billion dollars a year, one-sixth of its total revenue. The problem is that Solidworks is fundamentally incompatible with 3dexperience: Solidworks 3dexperience Model storage Discrete files Enovia-based database Kernel Parasolid CGM Operating system... Read more →

Cold weather shelters for homeless people

Real world A news item caught my eye: "The [homeless] shelter in Langley [Canada] reopened after a brief shutdown due to staff shortages." The reason this occurs is due to two effects: More shelters were funded this last year by the provincial government's BC Housing department, but there aren't necessarily more volunteers available to work at them, hence the shortage. Volunteers are literally that: we do not get paid for our 4.5-hour evening and 8-hour overnight shifts. Volunteers become burned out, and so are reluctant to put in more hours to cover gaps in shifts. The shelter at which I... Read more →

Harvesting BIM Data

Webinar Cyril Verley, founder of CDV Systems, last week gave a presentation on his company’s Collectus software. I took in the presentation; here is what I learned. - - - Collectus is a Revit standards library of 36,000 imperial and metric components. As well, it is the first to integrate a BIM Execution Plan (BXP). BXPs are used by facility owners to specify modeling requirements for architects, engineers, and contractors working on the design and the construction of the new building. You would use Collectus, from CDV Systems, to model and then enter all required room and asset data at... Read more →

Hexagon’s Big Launch of Nexus

Opinion The company had been teasing a new product for several weeks, with count-down reminder emails arriving a day, an hour, and 15 minutes prior to the launch hour. And then Hexagon unveiled Nexus, their new Web-based platform for working with manufacturing software and hardware, with an emphasis on “open.” The entry screen to Nexus Nexus offers inter-software and inter-person communications, along with new app development through the cloud. For the launch, the offerings are, however, sparse, with just five items ready to go: Nexus Digital Reality platform -- includes 3D Whiteboard for project reviews Three in-house apps -- Metrology... Read more →

Autodesk’s Next Grand Design

Industry cloud x 3 Autodesk has, for the most part, been for architectural design. The favoritism was shown at last fall’s Autodesk University 2022 by numbers of sessions: 243 classes were offered on building design and construction, 74 on manufacturing. This is, in some ways, understandable, as the MCAD/CAE/CAM problem has largely been solved; building construction, by contrast, continues to be hugely under-digitized. Look at any building site: those aren’t iPads construction workers are carrying around. Digging into the AU presentations, we learn that Autodesk is using MCAD’s success to move along building design. Figure 1 shows MCAD as part... Read more →

Rethinking Power Supplies

Drawers-full You know how we have all these spare phone chargers laying around, infuriating government bodies like the EU? I now have that problem with too many spare laptop chargers. USB-C is a revolution that I think we haven't fully comprehended, much more important than ChatGPT (which, in my opinion, is a ruse). The initials in USB are short for Universal Serial Bus, and only with the third generation did it truly become universal by handling data, low levels of power, several graphics standards, networking, and now high levels of power. All portable devices in our home now use USB-C... Read more →

Solid Edge 2023 Becomes Xaasy

Desktop+ Siemens has been loud and proud in declaring that CAD has no place on the cloud. Unlike its smaller MCAD competitors -- Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, PTC -- Siemens keeps its Solid Edge and NX software firmly on the desktop, because that’s what makes sense to users. Nevertheless, some kind of cloud connection is today necessary, even if it’s just Dropbox for sending files. And so since 2007 Europe’s largest industrial manufacturer has spent ten billion dollars acquiring software, with most of the more recent acquisitions being software that runs on remote servers (cloud). It is necessary. You can’t have... Read more →

Using a second PC as a second display

Luna not Last year I kicked in $99 towards Luna when it launched. It is a dongle that let a Windows or MacOS computer use an iPad tablet as a second display. It works, but is $99 and does not support Android or Windows tablets as second displays, even a year later. This would be handy for me on road trips, as I usually take a Windows laptop and an Android tablet with me, anyhow. So I looked around at other possible linkages. I normally ignore "Watch My Youtube Video!" solutions, but thought I'd give one a try, as it... Read more →

PTC Lifts the Curtain on Its Plus Replacement for Atlas

The cloud goes + It wasn't so long ago that the future of PTC was Atlas, the cloud system based on Onshape technology. This made sense, as Onshape itself was based on a multi-user multi-database system. The mythical Greek character held the entire world on his shoulders, and so Atlas would do the same for all PTC software -- in five to ten years. Programs like the Creo mechanical CAD software would strictly become SaaS (Software as a Service, the fancy term for subscription paid and running off remote servers, aka cloud). But then PTC went all quiet on Atlas;... Read more →

Swapping SSDs in HP’s 1/4-inch-thick X2

Easier done than said The HP X2 G3 tablet computer I bought came with just a 128GB SSD (solid state drive), as described in I'm Addicted to HP's X2. The benefit of buying a used computer with a small drive is that it is cheaper to acquire, and upgrading it is cheaper than buying a higher capacity model from the vendor. Apple is especially insidious about this. My plan all along was to swap out the small-capacity drive with a 1TB drive. But the job involves using a giant suction cup. Read on. The stages of this job are: Buy... Read more →

I'm Addicted to HP's X2

No keyboard leads to better keyboard I wrote about my experience with HP's Elite X2 G2 "laptop" computer in Using a Used HP Elite X2. It is an older model, whose primary problem is that it has just two USB ports -- one USB-A and one USB-C. Since we have to plug the power supply into the USB-C, that leaves just one port. As well, there is no HDMI port for connecting a second monitor easily, something I do a lot of. The X2 series is a Windows tablet with the full guts of a laptop, but weighs nearly half... Read more →

Zigzagging to Cloud Nivana

Finding a pot of gold, any pot of gold, at the end of the rainbow-colored cloud Autodesk ceo introducing Fusion Industry Cloud I recall when a large CAD vendor first enthusiastically announced it was going to embrace the cloud. Well, it was going to get us to embrace the cloud. This was at a user conference at which we were told that the cloud represented “infinite computing.” The ceo even used the phrase a few more times over the following years in interviews, adding that the only way to get all of his company’s software would be online, by 2014-5.... Read more →

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 →