WorldCAD Access

Why we love not flying

It is Cancel culture, but in the real world

 

With all my international travel over the decades, we actually got to the point we were planning shopping trips in Germany: "No point buying it here [in Canada], we'll get it next time we're in Germany." Then the WHO shut down the world, but after 2.5 years we are finally booked for Germany again. Quite frankly, as much as we love travelling overseas, we found not-flying a rather pleasant experience. But, as we have family in Europe, it was time to see them again.

When it comes to flying across oceans, I prefer Air Canada over the other airlines. But Air Canada was not yet ready to fly non-stop from Vancouver to Germany, so we are going Lufthansa, our #2 choice. Inside Germany, we travel with Deutsche Bahn, second class (which feels like an airplane's first class) with reserved seats. 

(Tip: Germany no longer requires covid testing for arriving passengers who have at least two doses of the approved vaccines.)

Everything was booked! Then came the cancellations.

 

Cancelled Train 

"Timetable change for your trip to Berlin Hbf (tief)." DB wrote that our train was cancelled, and that we needed to manually book a different one. Best as I can tell, the high-speed ICE train to Berlin (3 hours) was replaced exactly on our date by a slower locomotive, so the trip would now take 5.5 hours.

I re-booked, but never did figure out how to get back our $24 seat reservation and cancellation insurance fees for the cancelled train.

 

Cancelled Flight

"ACTION REQUIRED: Your Air Canada flight has changed." Air Canada wrote that our Lufthansa flight was cancelled, but that we had been re-booked for another one. I just needed to click the button to accept the changed reservation, or else cancel it and then choose a different flight. The button showed the name of the button's variable, and so it did not work in four brands of Web browser on three computers -- an HTML coding error. 

No button, no click

Examining the changed flights carefully, I could see no difference: same flight numbers, same departure times, same arrival times.

Spot the difference

I phoned the airline (Air Canada, through whom I had booked the flight) and was pleased that they offered a callback service. As I waited, I finally found the difference: our seating class had changed from N to E, but still in Premium Economy. The agent confirmed that that was the only change, but could not explain why it happened, or what the difference between N and E is. Neither could the Internet.

The agent kindly offered to book our seats while on the phone, but then realized she couldn't, as the flight was with Lufthansa. Lufthansa told me they would charge $364 to reserve seats early.

 

Cancelled Plane

I was puzzled why the flight from MUC to NUE would take two hours, instead of the normal one hour. Again, it took a while to figure out the difference. The "flight," LH3806, it turns out, is a bus.

Spot the bus

Other than taking twice as long, we don't mind taking long-distance buses in Europe, as they also are luxurious. Being a bus ride, I wondered if we could disembark early, so that our relatives would not have to drive to NUE to pick us up. Nope, it's non-stop, airport to airport, almost as if it were a real plane.

 

Cancelled Insurance

Our credit card had been giving us travel health insurance over the years, but I wondered if it covered us should we get covid while travelling.

(The answer seems to be: you are not covered if your government recommends against international travel.)

I made a half-dozen attempts to get through to CanAssist, the insurance firm -- email, phone calls, online chats -- and all were rebuffed. When I called the credit card company direct, the call was redirected to the wrong insurance company. Blue Cross, the agent told me, had not handled this credit card in quit a few years, and he was puzzled why he was still getting redirects.

As I perused the credit card's impregnable Web site, I found that we, in fact, had no insurance. Now that were were older, the duration of coverage was cut in half. As our trip was longer than the duration, we had no coverage at all.

Followed by a frantic search for travel health insurance from elsewhere. The one we got does cover covid.

 

Cancelled Covid Test

While I was making all the travel arrangements, the Canadian government still required a covid test in the country from which we would be returning to Canada.

(Tip: Flying into Canada, everyone needs to download the ArriveCAN app for your phone, and then fill in the information required: personal data, passport info, covid vaccinations, for you and your travelling companions. Government of Canada now carries out random covid tests upon arrival, and you do not need to quarantine while awaiting the result.)

So I booked with the official test center at BER -- $122. Then the Canadian government rescinded the requirement. I wrote the email address provided for "Further questions regarding the order or payment?" requesting the refund, but received no reply. Wrote again, no reply. I was getting tense, as refunds were provided only within 14 days.

So, time to search for solutions, again. It turns out the covid reservation site is run by ticket.io, which is like a TicketMaster for Germany, and offers their Web site in English. The testing is done by a firm in Koln, whose Web site is in German. Through the assistance of Google Translate, I found a phone number, but did not relish the idea of having to speak in bureaucratic German, which is a language all of its own. While dithering over making the phone call at a timezone-appropriate moment, I spied an unlikely email address, and was desperate enough to try it. Five minutes later, I had my refund.

The $122 refund will go towards the $624 travel insurance premium.

 

The Secret of Premium Economy

When I last flew to Europe, I discovered the secret of premium economy. Briefly, this is like flying business class at a cost that's lower than full-fare economy. Airlines dedicate only 3 or 4 rows to this class, and fit seven seats across a width that in economy is ten or 11 seats across.

The 3x7 entirety of premium economy

Here is the pricing for a flight leaving next Monday, YVR-MUC:

• $1,164 - cheapest economy
• $1,924 - most expensive economy
• $1,619 - premium economy
• $5,927 - business class

Instead of being squeezed into cattle class, you get

• Two suitcases and a carry-on free
• Early boarding
• Dedicated flight attendant
• Big wide seats with lots of knee room and leg rests
• A travel kit
• Pre-flight drink
• Offered a paper menu of meal choices
• Served on china with stainless cutlery
• Can change flights with no service fee

In general, you are treated like a human being again.

 

Not Cancelled

At least our booking for airport parking hasn't been cancelled -- yet.

 

 

 

Update 3: The Impact of CAD Vendors Leaving Russia

Cold War II

CAD vendors who are shutting down their businesses in Russia (that I know about, so far):

• Autodesk
• PTC
• Siemens
• Graphisoft
• Dassault Systemes
• Altair
• Nemetschek Group
• Hexagon
• AVEVA
• SAP

As well, these twenty 3D manufacturing firms and publications: 3dprintingindustry.com/news/the-additive-manufacturing-industry-supports-the-security-and-foreign-policy-course-of-the-german-federal-government-european-union-and-nato-205472.

For its part, Nemetschek Group is doing the following actions:

• Organizing visas for local employees
• Providing refugee housing
• Donation matching for the humanitarian crisis in the Ukraine
• Suspending new business in Russia
• Suspending existing business with sanctioned individuals and organizations for the time being

Update 3 (Apr 27/22): We had indications that CAD vendors do not get a lot of revenue from Russia.

Hexagon confirms that Russia s approximately 2% of annual revenues, and so they took a Q1 write-down of e63 million. 

SAP indicates that it lost 1% of its cloud backlog by backing out of Russia.

Russia represents around 2% of revenue in fiscal year 2022 for AVEVA.

For Dassault Systèmes, Russia represents less than 0.5% of non-IFRS revenues in 2021.

Perhaps these firms could be saving some money as they "freeze business operations" by no longer paying staff in Russia, although I do not know if this is the case.

Q&A

Which leads to questions:

Q: Why did these vendors pivot away from Russia but not, say, China?

A: Some estimates I have read suggest that Western firms make only 1%-2% of their revenues from Russia.

 

Q. Will western CAD software shut down when Russian users cannot renew their subscriptions?

A. Perhaps. It depends on how the subscription confirmation and payment systems are implemented. Permanent licenses are unaffected.

 

Q. Will these CAD vendors be allowed back into Russia after, um, peace breaks out?

A. Perhaps not. Russia has local versions of many kinds of software, which it has being trying to promote. Lowered foreign competition gives domestic firms greater opportunities for regional growth.

Russian replacements for western CAD software include

• nanoCAD (for AutoCAD)
• Renga (Revit)
• KOMPAS-3D (Inventor/Fusion, Creo, Solid Edge/NX)
• Neolant (P&ID, plant design)
• C3D Labs (Parasolid).

 

Russia Responds

From The Register, we learn that Russia plans

• Subsidies to develop software
• Offer jobs to foreign workers without having visas approved
• 0% tax rate for necessary tech companies
• Preferential mortgage rates for techies
• Exemption from military service
• Loans of 3% to firms that do not lay off staff
• Discount on insurance;
• Free TLS certificates for entities whose certs are revoked

Rumours abound that Russia will disconnect from the rest of the Internet March 11, something it actually tested a few years ago. Another rumour is that the government may nationalize Western businesses that left Russia.

 

Apple dangles Facebook

Live by the ad, die by the ad

 

Facebook was this week kneecapped for being a one-trick revenue pony in pretty much only selling ads based on skifing (local slang for taking things without permission) our personal details. Facebook's underwhelming financial report was due to Apple increasing privacy in its products, making Facebook less attractive to ad agencies. One estimate* is that 70% of the loss of ad revenue was due to Apple's hardening of privacy, which, over time, Apple will make more stringent.

And so for Facebook, this will not be a one-time drop, which the stock market noted by lowering the boom on the share price (which represents a corporation's future value) by 28% -- the $92-billion fall being largest dollar-drop in the history of stock markets.

But it's not just loss of future ad revenues. The pivot to a future VR/AR-based metaverse, which included a change of the corproate name to 'meta', kneecaps Facebook's other leg, representing a loss of $10 billion on its own. This, too, will get worse, because the future for metaverses is as bright as for 3D TVs, something I have been saying for years now.

Google doesn't suffer from the same problem, because Apple picked Google over Facebook, and Google benefits from being somewhat more diversified. Of the monster tech firms, Amazon is the most diversified. 

2021 Revenues

Amazon        $458 billion* (7% revenue from ads)

Apple         $366 billion* (not broken out; c.3% from ads)

Google        $257 billion* (81% from ads)

Facebook      $112 billion  (98% from ads)

upFront.eZine ---           (19% from ads)

 

Apple's Isolation

Not that Apple is the golden boy here. The public reason that it increased privacy in its products is to protect us from outside firms skifing our personal details. The inside reason is that it wants exclusive access to our data, which it sells to advertisers via Google to pump ad revenues. Google scratches Apple's back by returning $15 billion yearly to keep Google the default search engine in Apple's Safari Web browser.

With Apple being a $365.82 billion/year company, the need to grow revenues ever higher will lead it to ever more desperate measures at revenue-grabbing. We see desperation in moves like attempting to prevent the US government from blocking American firms doing business with the nasty areas of China and eliminating the Apple Store monopoly on apps.

As well, we see

• Apple OSes siloing users
• Safari Web browser siloing users
• New M1 hardware siloing users
• Stricter privacy measures siloing ad revenues

The drawback to siloing (locking in users) is that it blocks Apple's access to the 85% of technology users who aren't inside the Apple camp. Recall that iPods and iTunes were damp squids until Apple allowed Windows users to access them -- an instant six-fold increase in the potential user base.

So I find it fascinating that Apple has reverted to ignoring the rest of the addressable market; perhaps, from inside the Apple Park bubble, siloing makes exquisite sense. Just as it makes perfect sense to Facebook to hold an a priori assumption that all our personal details belong to it. 

As Andy Grove wrote, "Only the paranoid survive." Translated, this means that we must run our companies on the assumption that our a priori assumptions are expendable: what we do today won't be what we'll be doing tomorrow. Plan on it; I did. It's how I ran upFront.eZine Publishing for the last 30 years. (For 25 years Intel didn't follow their former CEO's advice.)

 

 

Best tweets on Zucker's recent disinvolvement

Cuomo blast radius (@benyt)

 

As the head of CNN leaves the network following a sexual relationship scandal, Twitter voiced its opinion:

 

"Breaking news from the Caligula News Network. CNN could completely solve their ratings problem by turning their studio cameras 180 degrees in the opposite direction." - @iowahawkblog

 

"Over the last year, CNN has made more news than they have reported." - @KateHydeNY

 

"Jeffery Toobin is the only person at CNN that keeps his hands to himself" - @Richard_Harambe

 

"congratulations to jeff zucker for his new show on CNN+" - @SaysSimonson

 

"CNN blames Russia for Zucker's illicit relationship" - @zerohedge

 

"Whoopi Goldberg, welcome to Substack" - @mtracey

 

"CNN - Canoodle News Network? Trying to think of something" - @Goodtweet_man

 

"And behold, God said to Tapper if you find nine other righteous at CNN I shall spare my wrath; else the network will burn" - @SethAMandel

 

"Events at CNN suggest that our institutions of Woke morality are held together by fears of mutual assured exposure. Empires of virtue are built on blackmail." - @wretchardthecat

 

 

Driver-less taxis isn't a problem needing solving

Dystopia through technology

 

We used to have two young men riding the back of the garbage truck roaring down our street once a week. They threw off the lids, grabbed the cans, hurled the contents into the back of the truck, and back onto our driveways again -- in a smooth fluid motion that was a joy to watch.

On special occasions, like Christmas or April Fools, they'd wear funny hats, and always give a cheery hello to onlookers. Sometime they'd stack the empty cans in artistic ways.

Then the city went automatic. Garbage trucks are outfitted with claw-like devices that grab a can, lift it into the air, and then shake the contents into the back of the truck. Being a wanna-be green city, we have three sets of diesel-spewing trucks roaming about, one each to take in compost, recyclables, and garbage.

What's fascinating to see is how the city eliminated the jobs of two young men for a less-capable robot. Here's what went wrong:

• Cans must be spaced at least 1m apart, blocking half my driveway each week. (Humans can handle cans that are bunched together.)
• Cans must be placed specific distances away from shrubs and overhanging trees. (Humans aren't bothered by those.)
• Extra humans must be employed to periodically cruise our streets to inspect the contents of the compost, recyclables, and garbage bins to ensure homeowners are sorting correctly. (The young men did that as part of their jobs.)
• Failure to follow strict rules can lead to loss of service.
• Minor irritant: the lids of the new bins slam back into place automatically, so we are never sure when the garbage has been collected. (Humans used to flip the lids upside down, as a signal.)
• During the autumn, under the old rules, we could have up to ten huge paper bags filled with leaves and other yard waste; now we're limited to one compost bin, because the robot arm cannot handle paper bags.

I was reminded of how going forward with technology goes backwards in human service with an article that described the problem that self-driving taxis isn't solving. In short, all they eliminate is the cost of the driver, in exchange for losing the human-based security system, the ability to optimize gas tank refilling, and so on. The cost of the robot cars is about 5x higher than a regular vehicle adapted to taxi service -- or, in the case of Uber, no extra hardware needed at all.

And it reminds me of some Silicon Valley startup wanting to eliminate jobs at recycling centers to automate through technology the sorting. I'm sorry, but I gotta call them idiots, as they don't understand what eliminating humans does. I have an adult adopted cousin with elementary-school-level of intelligence who tells me proudly of his job going down the road each day to work at the recycling center.

The inhumanity of some technological directions is discouraging. Robots aren't cheery ever, even when  they have painted faces.

 

 

Why people left the workforce

Rat race status: no longer normal

 

One of the puzzles of our era is over the large numbers of people who didn't go back to work. As someone who was laid off (during a recession in 1984) and quit a regular job (to become self-employed in 1991), I find the puzzle fascinating. Of those not returning to the workforce following the Great Coronavirus Lockdown of 2020

• Why did they not go back?
• What are they doing instead?

- - -

GCL'20 was a disrupter, an event in history so significant that it dramatically changed human behavior for good: what once was normal no longer is.

The first time I experienced this was following 9/11. Until then, trips by Canadians across the US border to communities like Sumas and Blaine were casual, normal. The village of Sumas WA had the largest number of gasoline pumps per capita in the entire USA, because we Canadians would troop down there for cheap gas, cheaper milk, and lower postage costs. Often, US and Canada border guards asked us only about the purpose of the trip. 

Following 9/11, the US clamped down on border security, and trips were casual no longer. A decade later, the Canadian dollar sky-rocketed, making US products expensive. The weekly habit of "goin' down to Sumas" ground to a halt, and the village now features vast ghost plazas of dismantled gas pumps. What was normal no longer is.

One of the closed gas stations in this town of 1,500

- - -

The Great Coronavirus Lockdown of 2020 did the same. People found that what once was normal (you're 18, now get a job!) no longer was. Commuting each day to work at deadend jobs like retail sales clerk or office paper pusher wasn't the way life was meant to be. People realized life could instead be pleasant. 

Still, in this society we need money to live on, so this is what people are doing instead:

• Taking retirement early
• Not working as long after 65
• Cutting two-income families to one
• Becoming self-employed
• Doing work that's part-time and enjoyable

These changes to employment result in lower income, but it turns out that the same disruption is also allowing people to afford to live on less. By categorizing the less-working population into two groups, let's see how.

Group A. Being paid to not work

• The massive increase in equities since March 2020 has ballooned the value of retirement funds, allowing people to retire sooner.
• Governments freely handed out wage subsidies, some of which are on-going, allowing non-retirees to be paid to not work.

Group B. Reduced cost of living

• As trips to restaurants, exercise clubs, and vacation places are repeatedly curtailed by government, people don't have as much on which to spend their wages.
• No longer commuting saves repeating expenses like gasoline or transit passes, higher car insurance, workplace-specific clothing and accessories, and $4 coffees and frequent meals out.

The lockdowns caused people to realize that they could live better by earning less combined with having less to spend on.

The Great Disrupter wasn't so much due to coronavirus as governments' reaction to it; we can credit government for creating the conditions under which large chucks of people chucked it.

- - -

Being self-employed, the Great Coronavirus Lockdown of 2020 had no effect on me workwise, except in one area: travel. Since my childhood, it was normal for our family to fly across the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans to visit Europe every couple of years. (All our relatives live there.) This normal way of living carried on with my work, where my wife and I (and sometimes my children) traveled to Europe two to five times a year.

With GCL'20, travel abruptly ended. We found it was nice to no longer endure airport security and immigration lineups, sitting ten hours on aircraft, suffering from jet lag (both ways), missing train connections, and being bitten by bedbugs in hotels (just one time). We have stopped thinking about our next trip; and by no longer travelling we've saved a tonne of money. The new normal is that I can earn less because I spend less.

For people whose worklife routine was disrupted in 2020, the new normal has become very pleasant in 2022. As the lonely gas islands in Sumas attest, sometimes there is no going back.

 

 

 

When the replacement SSD won't boot

Time to panic!

 

Over the years, I've switched all our computers and laptops to solid state drives (SSD), after discovering just how fast they are compared to regular hard disk drives (HDD). The process is simple, usually:

1. Use software or hardware to clone the content of the old drive to the new one. The cloning process makes an exact copy of everything, including the operating system. You pay for cloning software or get it free, such as Macrium Reflect Free. Cloning hardware is a device that holds two drives, and clones the content from one to the other; see figure at left.

2. Swap the drives.

3. Start up the computer with the new SSD.

But when I followed this tried and true procedure on my newish Dell laptop, the result was two days of trying to figure out why the new SSD wouldn't boot. The Dell repeatedly complained "no boot drive installed." So I put in the old drive, and to my amazement (or horror, take your pick), it made the same complaint. Now I was really worried; after all, the worst case scenario was buying a new laptop.

I won't go through all the things I tried during those tense 48 hours. In the end, what worked was burning a recovery version of Macrium Reflect to a DVD (found in the menu under Other Tasks), booting the Dell off that, and then running Reflect's option to repair the boot sector. First time, it made no difference, oddly enough; later, I tried it again, and this time it worked. 

Whew!

Inside the Dell laptop

 

Other Problems

Here are some of the other problems I had during those two nail-biting days.

Samsung. I purchase Samsung SSDs, because they come with cloning software; the memory chips are made by Samsung, so no dodgy ones; and the Magician utility software lets me easily add a trim section and setup a cache to make the drive every faster. I bought the 2TB 970 EVO Plus Series M.2 NVMe SSD at a Black Friday sale for nearly half-price.

The very first headache of the two-day endurance race was that Samsung's cloning software wouldn't work, which is why I eventually got Macrium Reflect Free.

After I got the new SSD working in the Dell, I was so disappointed to find that the Magician utility software doesn't do much with the 970 EVO Plus SSD. The software won't perform benchmarks on it, won't set up a cache in RAM -- the Dell has, after all, 32GB RAM. Maybe an update might add these functions later.

NVMe. All of the SSDs I've installed either are 2.5" SATA versions that fit in desktop computers, or M.2 SATA versions that fit inside today's laptops. This means I have both kinds of adapters for cloning drives in external drive enclosures. My newish Dell laptop, however, uses the latest NVMe drives, which are much, much faster than the older SATA-interface drives.

Also, the new ones use a different physical connection. Which mean I had to buy an M.2 NVMe external drive enclosure, about $40. This was not a wasted purchase, as I later plugged the old SSD from the Dell into it, to create a portable 512GB drive for "free."

Macrium Reflect. When I finally found that I could use Macrium Reflect to repair the boot sector of the drive, this process was not straight-forward either. Initially, I used a USB thumbdrive onto which to put the recovery files. Macrium Reflect complained it could not write to track 0. So I tried another USB drive, and another. Always the same complaint. (I couldn't get the Dell to create a Windows-based recovery disk.)

Finally, I gave in and created a recovery DVD, which is mildly annoying as booting off a DVD is so much slower than from a USB drive. But at least it worked.

Dell. I worked through all kinds of workarounds suggested by Dell forums, which included things like holding down the power key for ten seconds while unplugging the power supply, then doing this and that and the other. None of it worked.

 

 

About this 80% keyboard

Clacking is the best typing

 

The IBM Selectric typewriter was the Bugatti of typewriters. It was heavy (so it wouldn't bounce around or be stolen easily by employees), it struck the paper with a single ball (so it couldn't jam; see figure at left), and the keyboard was lux. You just felt good typing on it, it attained 75% of the office typewriter market, and it became the standard for the clacky keyboard shipped with the original IBM PC.

Most computer keyboards today, however, are mushy. And so it was with great joy that a reader a few years ago recommended I buy a keyboard with Cherry Brown switches. My love of typing returned.

Germany's Cherry invented a line of keyboard switches, the MX series, on which the patent has now expired. The switch is the mechanism that sits between the keycap and the keyboard's body. It determines how far the key travels when depressed, the sound it makes, and the force needed to press it. 

Cherry switches comes in colors, and the color determines the keystroke effect:

• Black - linear, no feedback, makes noise when bottoming out; used by gamers.
• Red - like Black, but requires less force; also used by gamers.
• Silver - like Red, but with a shorter keypress; for gamers
• Blue - makes a noise when the actuation point is reached, so no need to press all the way down; used by typists.
• Green - like Blue, but with high force required and meant for spacebars
• Brown - not as noisy as Blue; used by fast typists (like me!), and similar to Logitech Romer-G and GX Brown
• Clear - like Brown, but requires more force
• Grey - like Clear, but requires even more force

 

Keychron K8

This week I got a new keyboard, ostensibly for my new M1-based Mac Mini. It is the K8 from Keychron, which is an 80% keyboard. A slightly smaller keyboard suits me, as my fingers are not particularly long.

K8 keybaord with key puller in lower right (Image source switchandclick.com)

But this keyboard hosts a ton of functions:

• Runs with Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS, and Android
• Works corded or cordless with a 4000mAHr battery
• Supports three Bluetooth connections
• Backlit keycaps with white light all on or off, or with patterns (which I abhor)
• USB-C port for corded connection and charging
• Toggle the top row between functions keys or multimedia keys
• Gateron (not Cherry) G switches
• Includes key puller tool and a set of alternative keys for Windows and MacOS.

The only thing missing, for me, is a roller wheel for changing the volume, like on the AZIO MGK keyboard I use with my desktop computer.

The keyboard works well, and so I am pleased with it. The one flaw is the size of the printing on the side for the switches that change between Windows/Android and MacOS/iOS modes, and between Bluetooth/Off/Cable connection. The labels are illegible. I finally figured out their meaning by their length.

Illegible switch labels (image source switchandclick.com)

 

The keyboard is US$70, and is available with Red, Blue, or Brown switches.

keychron.com/products/keychron-k8-tenkeyless-wireless-mechanical-keyboard?variant=32018252267609

 

 

The reality of homelessness in cold weather

Only as grim as the media wants to portray it

 

The CBC headline "Homeless people left to fend for themselves amid extreme-cold warning, advocates say" is not warranted by the content of the article. The writer seems to confuse people who don't/can't live inside four walls year-around, with the number of cold weather beds.

I volunteer at a cold weather shelter in our downtown, and it is never full. We have room for 30 men and women, and on the coldest nights of last week (wind chill down to -26C/-15F), we had at most about 25 places filled -- even with the local help agency and police bringing us additional clients throughout the evening.

We offer them an evening supper, washing their clothes, recharging their phones, replacement clothing, hotpocket hand warmers, and a place to sleep from 8pm to 7:30am. In the morning, clients are bused to Salvation Army for breakfast, and then they are allowed to hang out there for a time afterwards. During the day, the old tourism building is a day shelter against the cold.

Hearing the head of a local homeless advocacy group speak unfiltered by the media tells me he knows the difference: There will always be those who refuse to live inside four walls. All we can do is offer them a place when the weather is bad, and even that cannot be forced on them.

But they are never left to fend for themselves. And advocates are not saying that.

 

How to make a smartwatch last a week

Don't buy Apple. Or Google.

 

My first smartwatch was the first smartwatch to look like today's, the LiveView put out by Sony in 2010 (battery life 4 days). It was appalling, and I soon gave up on it. Next was the Nike Fuelband in 2012 (battery life also 4 days), one of the first fitness trackers -- handed out by Autodesk marketing to us members of the press for free -- whose rubberized (and unswitchable) band irritated my skin.

Then came the winner, the Pebble Steel. Its claim to fame was to use digital paper for its display, so that the watch drew very little power while displaying watch faces; digital paper consumes power only when it changes the display. The watch lasted up to ten days between charges, and when I turned off Bluetooth, it eked out two weeks. But the display was coarse, and when FitBit bought Pebble it dropped support, and finally the display went bonkers, sadly.

Watches with operating systems from Google and Apple now dominate sales, unfortunately, proudly boasting that they last up to a day, if your day is 18, instead of the standard 24 hours.

Apple calls up-to-18-hours battery duration "All-Day Battery Life"

 

The fundamental flaw with watches running WearOS and iOS is that they have big operating systems shoe-horned onto very small devices hosting tiny batteries. It's that "let's get a foothold into the market" thinking that has given us technological marvels that don't last much past bedtime.

But now some watch manufacturers are doing the hard work of writing new smartwatch operating systems from scratch. The new OSes minimize use of the CPU to prolong battery life to a week or longer. Mine, for instance, uses about 15% of the battery after 2.5 days.  

I only really want a smartwatch to make it easier to change the time between time zones and light up in the dark -- for the convenience. I really don't care for all the other features. So the battery life in my watch is extended partly because I have the display on for just five seconds and turn off every function that I can -- sports, sleep, heart, stress, et al.

Here's the thing, tho: all the manufacturers writing efficient OSes for watches are in China: Motorola, Huawei, and a third one whose name I forget. 

So as watches run out of new functions to add, the next battlefield will be longevity, and here China has the lead.

Update: Garmin also uses its own operating system in its watches to make them last a week or longer.

 

 

When your Logitech mouse won't connect

Press real hard

 

So in an earlier post I waxed eloquent about mice from Logitech that handle two (such as the M585) or three computers (the M720). In  my case, these mice are ideal as I have a Mac Mini that shares an ultrawide monitor with my Dell laptop. One mouse for two computers.

However, in the last week, I've not been able to get the mice to work with either computer -- neither with the transmitter or by Bluetooth. Lots of generic advice out there that is really unhelpful ("Try turning on Bluetooth") or downright dangerous ("Erase this file...").

TIP  You can have more than one mouse connected to your computer at a time. This is useful when debugging wireless mouse problems. Plug a wired mouse into a USB port to help you manipulate the user interface of Windows or MacOS.

 

Unifying Receiver Don't Connect

Logitech's Unifying Receiver is supposed to handle up to six devices -- mice and keyboards. But they aren't just plug'n-play nilly-willey. I have several laying around, and found that when I plugged in one, it might not be the right one.

So if your computer can't connect to your Logitech mouse through the Unifying receiver, try this steps:

• Check if your mouse's battery compartment to see if it still has its Unifying receiver embedded; take it out and use that one.
• If you have more than one receiver laying around, try the others.
• Use the Unifying program from Logitech to link a receiver to the mouse. Download it from https://download01.logi.com/web/ftp/pub/controldevices/unifying/unifying250.exe

 

Bluetooth Don't Connect

I spent two days trying to figure out why the two mice would not connect to my computers through Bluetooth. MacOS saw the mice in the Bluetooth connection panel, but would not connect. Windows just plain called them "Unknown devices." I tried a lot of things suggested by others on the great intertubes, but finally found this one cool trick that makes them work -- one that Logitech does not tell you about.

• Hold down the switching button until the LED flashes very quickly. This action forces the mouse into pairing mode, and the computer finally recognizes it.

The figure below shows the location of the switching button on each mouse. The switching button switches between linked computers. On both mice, #1 connects to the Unifying receiver; #2 and #3 connect through Bluetooth.

 

 

Working with a multi-computer mouse

One, two, and three

 

Logitech has several mice that work with more than one computer. To use the two-computer mouse, you plug the transmitter dongle into one computer, and set up the second computer with Bluetooth. Then, you press the 1-2 button on the mouse to switch between them. Button 1 relates to the dongle, button 2 to the computer with the Bluetooth connection. The Logitech M585 is a mouse like that. I was able to set it up for a Windows laptop and an M1 Mac Mini. 

Logitech M585 mouse for use with two computers

 

Another mouse handles three computers, the Logitech M720: attach the receiver to one computer, and connect the mouse with Bluetooth to two other computers. Press a button on the side of the mouse to switch between computers 1, 2 and 3. Computer 1 is the one with the dongle, computers 2 and 3 connect through Bluetooth.

Logitech M720 mouse for use with three computers

 

I recommend using the two-computer mouse if you are working with two computers, because pressing the button an extra time to skip past the unused connection gets annoying.

Logitech says these mice do not work with ChromeOS and Linux. I tested the claim and found it to be partially true. My Chromebook's Bluetooth could not find the mouse, but plugging the dongle into the Chromebook worked. So I could use the mouse with two computers -- Windows and Chromebook -- by connecting via Bluetooth on the Windows side and plugging the dongle into the Chromebook. 

TIP   Here's another reason to use a two-computer mouse: when I need all of the USB ports (both of them) on my laptop for other things, then I can connect the mouse through Bluetooth.

But Bluetooth connections are inherently slow, so when I want speedy response from the mouse, I use the dongle. Just remember to press the 1-2 button after you switch from Bluetooth to dongle mode!

You should download the Logitech Options software, which replaces the old Setpoint software. It lets you assign different functions to the buttons and set the cursor speed. Curiously, the MacOS version does not allow you to assign double-click to any mouse button through Options. There is no version of Options for Chromebook or Linux.

Logitech's Options software for customizing the buttons of their mice

 

Flowing Between Computers

Both of these mice offer Flow, which lets you copy and paste between two computers. Both must be on the same WiFi network. Make the connection with the Flow tab in the Options software. I tried several combinations of computers, but could not get it to work:

• Windows 10 laptop with M1 Mac Mini -- no flow connection. Could the problem lay with the incompatibilities inherent in Apple's new M1 CPU?
• Windows 10 laptop with Chromebook -- no flow connection, because the Options software is not available for ChromeOS
• Windows 10 laptop with Windows 7 desktop -- no flow connection. In this case, the problem lies with the desktop computer, which connects to the network with an ethernet cable; it has no WiFi, over which Flow communicates.
• Windows 10 laptop with Windows 10 laptop -- also did not work.

That Flow did not work was disappointing , as I would have interested in testing it out. One solution suggested by Logitech tech support is to disable the Hyper-X Virtual Adapter from networking in Control Panel's Device Manager. I did that but it did not cause Flow to work. 

 

Using your iPad as a portable second monitor for Windows

Luna does it

 

The folks at AstroPad figured out how to make an iPad a second monitor for Macs, wirelessly, with the Luna dongle. Then Apple did a nasty by integrating the tech into MacOS, leaving AstroPad scrambling. What Apple taketh away, Microsoft giveth.

Luna still works with Macs and iPads (such as a display for a Mac Mini), and now works with Windows computers and iPads. I bought one of the magenta-colored dongles at the launch sale price of $100 -- the USB-C model. Probably expensive, but I figured I was supporting a scrappy developer done bad by Apple. The Luna page is here: astropad.com/product/lunadisplay.

Now, I have been disappointed before by wireless, second device connections, but that was quite a few years ago. Would Luna work?

I am pleased to say it does, following the kind of setup you would expect:

1. Download the Luna software for the Windows computer
2. On the iPad, download the Luna app.
3. Run both, and follow the steps to get them to connect.
4. Then select the options. In my case, I position the iPad to the left of the laptop. I tried Retina Resolution mode, but it just seemed to make things slower.
   
   
   
   
5. With the connection in place, you can drag programs from the Windows screen to the iPad screen. As well, the iPad's touch screen works.

TIP  In my case, the two did not find each other initially. The problem is that my place has four WiFi SSIDs. Both computers have to be on the same one, ie, the SSID with the same name. 

If that still does not work, you can connect the iPad to the Windows computer with a USB cable.

There are drawbacks to the system. The iPads operates at a low screen resolution, 1024x768, in my case. Retina mode would run an iPad at a higher resolution. Perhaps Android tablets -- and even Chromebooks -- could be supported next. The next new thing Luna is working on is making the iPad a drawing tablet. 

When you go to buy Luna, you are faced with the difficulty of having three dongles to choose between: USB-C (works on Windows, and the one I bought), HDMI (for Windows only), or miniDisplayPort (for Mac only). Luna cautions that the dongle does not work through adapters, like port replicators. I wonder how it would work with the M1 Mac Mini, which has a full-size DisplayPort connector, and so would need an adapter.

I tried the USB-C dongle on my new M1 Mac Mini, but while the Luna software tried hard, it could  not connect to the iPad. The detailed details are here: help.astropad.com/article/223-luna-and-adapters.

By the way, Windows is fully cognizant of the "display," as you can see in the screen grab below.

And of course I can add a third display to my Dell, which isn't possible with the M1-based Mac Mini.

 

 

How much does a mouse cost?

$40, or $487 (with free shipping)

 

Of all the hardware I use in my job as a freelance writer, it's the mouse that gets worn out the most often. I thought I'd stock up on some spare ones, and came across an intriguing model from Logitech on the Best Buy Canada Web site.

The M720 is both wireless (using the Logitech dongle) and Bluetooth. I liked that, because I prefer using the dongle for speed, and Bluetooth is there for when the laptop runs out of available USB ports (happens to me sometimes).

In addition, it works with up to three computers in turn, handy for one of my workstations where I have the Windows laptop and the Mac Mini that share a large monitor.

As a triple bonus, the mouse was on sale for $90 (all prices in Canadian dollars, rounded to the nearest dollar), instead of $130. Cool! I was saving $40! Here I want to note that it was not sold by Best Buy Canada, but listed by a third-party vendor. 

Before clicking Add to Cart, I wanted to know the purpose of that button below the roller wheel. I checked out the Logitech Canada site, and -- to my chagrin -- learned that the suggested retail price of this mouse is $70. Quelle supris. Saved another $10.

Curiously, Logitech's official documentation does not explain the purpose of the mystery button, located between 5 and 6 in the image below. I suspect the button toggles the roller wheel between clicking and smooth scrolling, a function I appreciate on the Logitech Performance MX mouse I use with my desktop computer.

Well, if Logitech says the mouse is only $70, then what price does Amazon attach to it? There, I found it for $40. Be still my beating heart: I saved another $30! I clicked Add to Cart. 

Since then, the price from this particular vendor has risen to $60.

Now I was intrigued. Using Bing to search out other prices for this mouse, I see that we can pay whatever we want for it. At time of writing, NewEgg lists the M720 for the following prices from itself and 18 third-party vendors:

• $66
• $60 + $10 shipping
• $70
• $72
• $74
• $82
• $90
• $103 + $15 shipping
• $129
• $132
• $140
• $144
• $116 + $30 shipping
• $154
• $174
• $187
• $191
• $193
• $487

There is a lot of talk about monster retailers like Amazon undercutting smaller sellers by monitoring prices. (I wonder if that's why I was presented by the $40 price.) But what about the opposite end of the sales tunnel: smaller sellers overcutting customers by listing prices higher than the one suggested by the manufacturer, then representing them as a savings on the "regular price," as I found at the start of my hunt.

Well, I suppose the lesson here is to not trust a red "on sale" price tag, and to take advantage of the Internet to do price checking. In Best Buy Canada's defense, I have purchased a bunch of electronic gear in the past few months from them precisely because they were significantly cheaper than Amazon.

 

Why you might want to make that next CD an MP3

LP CDs

 

These days I purchase most of my music from iTunes. I don't like rewarding Apple with 30% of the musician's pay, but... When we here in Canada want to be legit in our music acquisition and reward musicians for their hard work, we have little choice when it comes to downloading tunes.

After downloading a new album, I burn it to a CD. To do this in iTunes, you need to make a playlist of the downloaded music, right-click the playlist name, and then choose Burn to CD.

I burn new albums to CDs because of the visceral interaction missing from files. Music files on computers and our phones are hidden from view. I want to see and hold the musician's handiwork in my hands, insert it into the player, and then sit back in a darkened room to enjoy the aural experience that is the album.

While I adore the 12" magnificence of vinyl records, the 20-minute playing time is annoying. To get around this short duration during the vinyl era, I always recorded newly purchased records to TDK SA C-90 cassette tapes.

Recently, I bought a DVD player from a local thrift store. It was $12. It even included the remote control. (I could've saved 10% had I shopped a day earlier during Senior's Day.) The Onkyo DVD player, around $50 on eBay, looks handsome, but more importantly, plays back regular CDs and CDs burned as data CDs with MP3 files.

DVD players often do not explicitly state that they handle CDs, so I took a semi-gamble here. This particularly thrift store allows returns of electronic goods within two days.

 

(image source elektroonika24)

 

Here's why this is great: a CD burned with MP3 files holds about 10 regular music CDs (which tend to be about an hour long) and about 15 records (which tend to be about 40 minutes long). The exact duration depends on the bitrate of the songs: higher quality, fewer songs.

The problem is this: how to burn a CD of MP3s from songs downloaded from  iTunes. The short answer: you can't, because Apple adds anti-copying code to its music AAC files (which are in M4P format.). iTunes won't let you. 

The good news: there is a workaround. 

TIP   Check the manual that came with your DVD/CD player. You might be surprised at the formats it supports.

In the case of this Onkyo unit, it plays back AAC-format M4A files, which is the format that iTunes uses. I can have iTunes burn long playlists to a CD or a DVD disc, and then play the music without going thru the steps I list below.

Android devices play AAC/M4A files directly.

 

How to MP3-ize iTunes Tunes

1. Use iTunes to burn a playlist of the music to a CD. This action strips away the copy protection, and gives you a CD you can play in any CD player.

2. Use AnyBurn (or another utility) to convert the music on the CD to MP3 files on your computer.

3. Use Microsoft Media Player to burn the MP3 files to a new CD as a data disc.

Enjoy up to ten hours of music with your new long-playing CD or 24 hours with the DVD disc!

Many DVD and CD player support MP3 on data CDs, but not all. My 2009 car CD player does; my more recent Denon mini stereo system does not; my $12 Onkyo DVD player does. You'll just need to test out your music systems, for the cost of a CD.

 

 

 

Sandboxing: How to test unfamiliar software securely

Sandboxing Windows

 

Sometimes I need to test new software or I am looking for a utility program to handle a task, say, converting the formats of audio  files. Reviews are no longer reliable, so it is a matter of downloading a bunch and try them out.

How unreliable are reviews? On Amazon, reviews can appear from customers who were paid $10 by the seller to write a positive one. Software companies buy up review sites to maintain a facade of neutrality, or else write blogs that mention no negatives of their own products. Product descriptions themselves can be misleading, such as stating they are free to use when (surprise!) they are time- or duration-limited.

The good thing today is that we can effortlessly download 3 or 4 or 5 products to test out free. The bad thing today is that we can effortlessly download 3 or 4 or 5 products to test out. 

Of the ones I download, I might end up keeping one -- or none. The others now clutter up my computer's hard drive with files and folders, or might have stealth-installed nag software, or might have added stuff to my Web browser, or just generally act like a bad flu.

The good news is that the solution is to test software a sandbox. The bad news is that sandboxing is available only in the Professional version of Windows. For me, it was worthwhile paying $130 (Canadian) to get that peace of mind.

A sandbox runs a second copy of Windows in isolation. When you close the sandbox window, everything you've done disappears. In my case, the utilities I installed to try out disappear from my computer. This is secure, because Intel CPUs have long had the ability to run processes independently of each other. 

Otherwise, the sandbox acts like normal Windows. It uses your computer's display, network connection, mouse and keyboard, and you can even copy and paste between regular Windows and sandbox Windows.

TIP  Windows Sandbox includes the Edge browser, which you can use to visit dodgy Web sites. 

 

How To Install Software in Isolation

In this tutorial, I am trying out a utility for converting WAV files to MP3 files. By using it as an example, I am not disparaging the software vendor.

1. Purchase and install Windows Professional.

2. Download the software you want to try out.

3. Start Sandbox. (Click the Windows taskbar logo and start typing s a n d...). Notice that the Windows Sandbox windows opens.

4.    In the download folder, right-click the downloaded software, and choose Copy.

5. In the Sandbox window, right-click and choose Paste. (You cannot drag and drop the file.)

6. To install the downloaded software, double-click its icon and then follow the steps of the setup program.

7. Run the software.

8. When done testing it, just close the Sandbox window. Click OK in the warning dialog box.

In this particular case, I found that this audio converter program did not read CDs, and so I could eliminate it from consideration. Later, I found that software I already had on my computer, AnyBurn, does the job exactly as I wanted.

 

 

 

How to get Eudora running on Windows 10 real quick

Copy'n paste

 

I had been hanging onto my 11-year-old Windows 7 desktop, because I couldn't get one of my most important programs -- Eudora -- running on Windows 8 and so assumed it wouldn't work on Windows 10. But then I heard from people that Eudora does work on Windows 10.

Yesterday, I made it work, and it was laughably easy. But keep in mind, it involves this prep work:

• Make sure that Eurdora is running on your older computer with the latest patches, as I describe in How to make Eudora 7 work with Gmail servers at https://www.worldcadaccess.com/blog/2020/12/making-eudora-7-work-with-gmail-servers.html
  
  

Here are the two steps to install Eudora on Windows 10:

1. Install Eudora 7 on your Windows 10 computer. Here is the crucial part: when the setup program asks where to install the program and where to install the data, specify a new folder for them, such as \Qualcomm\Eudora. 
   
   (I show the step-by-step procedure for changing folders below, for those who need the details.)
   
   The key to disaster, I have learned, occurs when you accept the default folders, such as  \Program Files (x86). The grief is caused by a change Microsoft made between Windows 7 and 8 (and so 10) in the way that Program Files folders are handled.
   
   
2. Back on your old computer, close Eudora, and then copy the entire Eudora folder to a USB drive. (For me, that was 4GB of data.)
   Then, on your Windows 10 computer, copy the folder from the USB drive into the one you created during setup.
   
   This works, because Eudora is old enough that it uses .ini files to store settings, instead of the Windows Registry. By using .ini files, Eudora is portable.

When you now launch Eudora on Windows 10, you'll find (a) it works correctly and (b) everything is in place, including your preferred settings, mailbox structure and content, and email account info.

The only catch is that Windows 10 will complain that a registry entry is missing each time you launch Eudora.

You can ignore the warning by clicking OK, and if you keep Eudora running all the time, as I do, then you only encounter the dialog box after a reboot.

 

Step by Step Folder Renaming

When Eudora's Setup program asks where to install Eudora, click Browse.

Enter the name of a different folder, such as \Qualcomm\Eudora, and then click OK.

Confirm the name of the new folder by clicking Yes. 

Choose Custom Data Folder, and then click Next.

Notice the summary of folder names in which Eudora and its data will be installed. If you made a typo, this is the time to click Back. Otherwise, click Next and finish the installation.

 

 

 

Online Conference Burnout

The more we get the less we want

 

Attending CAD conferences in-person is a costly affair. There is the $$$-cost, which can amount to thousands of dollars for something lasting just a couple of days; and there is the time-cost of being away from productive work. Never mind the cost to the body from jet lag (twice, once each way!), food poisoning (happened to me at a hotel in Disney World), trudging for miles from hotel room to conference center, whether within a Las Vegas monster hotel or in new city, losing a laptop (in Stockholm), waiting days on lost luggage (by Lufthansa and twice by Air Canada), or ending up with a bad cold partway through (in Rome).

I do love the travel, so don’t get me wrong. I’ve been so excited arriving at places I never would have  gotten to in my life, ever!, from Novosibirsk in the far east, Beijing to the furthest west (just a multi-hour airport stopover), and to Christchurch to the farthest south -- never mind going multiple times to city favorites like Ghent, Prague, Boston, and Leiden. Free travel is, for me as a free-lance writer, the only benefit I get with the job. 

So it was with some relief that conferences went online due to coronavirus. I could attend in the comfort of my housecoat, replay parts, and take in conferences that I would otherwise never have been invited to. All for free.

Solidworks ceo Gian Paolo Bassi on the virtual stage

 

Too Much Cake

But some weeks, there can be four online conferences in three days. Others end up being utter wastes of time; I am, after all, looking for new information, not being told how awesome the now-old software is. It’s unhelpful when online conferences make signing up unusually difficult, and when finding specific events is even more difficult.

On the plus side, production quality has improved since last year, as CAD vendors move from setting up temporary quarters to thinking that perhaps this is the new new. The best ones spend a bit extra to add captioning. In any case, getting away from the physical saves CAD firms a heck of a lot of money, as most in-person conferences (as I understand it) are big-time money losers.

It’s been long two years since I last flew to an in-person conference in a faraway city (Graebert's in Berlin, as it happens). And now I am getting online conference burnout.

I haven’t gotten around to watching the keynotes from Autodesk University 2021, and I still want to make time for the AllPlan launch from last week, but so far no go.

Users might be agreeing with me, judging from this snippet I found at CIMdata:

"...with free registration to AU’s virtual live content and streaming sessions they expected over 100,000 global participants. According to Autodesk, the first three days attendees watched more than 51,000 hours of content."

That expected hundred thousand-plus is a number Autodesk also used for last year’s event. But this year only 51,000 hours were watched during the conference’s three days; the switch in statistic is in itself interesting. The key is the average number of hours an attendee watches:

• If it’s 1 hour a day, then 17,000 were online
• If Autodesk had the full 100,000, then each watched just 10.2 minutes each conference day

In some ways, having tutorial sessions during an online conference are, in my mind, an artifact, a relic, really, from the in-person events where users sat at computers in a conference banquet room and got in-person help. There is nothing in online conference tutorials that can’t be duplicated by uploads to YouTube. 

Open Design Alliance recording its online conference

 

What We Want and What You Can Skip

So here is in my mind what an online conference needs:

1. Keynote address during which the CEO talks a bit (please, only a bit!) about the last year, and then introduces plans for the future
2. Demos of the newest software release(s)
3. Reports from customers who solved actual problems with the software
4. L-o-n-g Q and A from the audience
5. It runs for just an hour or two hour, or an hour a day over a couple of days

What online conferences don’t need:

• Long speeches extolling the company; we are already watching, we don’t need to be convinced
• Virtue signaling. For instance, just the fact you are holding a conference shows you don’t care about the environment, no matter how many green lasers light up your virtual stage
• Tutorials. They continue to take place only at online conferences with "we've always done it this way" thinking
• Lasting all day for several days. If you can't say all of it in a couple of hours, you need to hire new script writers

Live or canned? Half and half, I suggest: pre-recorded presentations with live Q&A. One vendor went too far, with a prerecorded Q&A worded to sound like it was live.

 

What CAD Editors Think

When I expressed my burnout to other CAD editors, they responded like this.

- - -

Editor 1: I sign up for them, but only for the access to replay, if I find out they said something I actually need to know about.

- - -

Editor 2: I find myself accessing the replay most of the time, because I can skip the self-congratulatory talks and irrelevant parts.

The reality is, I only have so many hours in a day to write, interview people, and produce articles so I can't endure hour-long virtual meetings to find 10 to 15 mins of newsworthy bits.

- - -

Editor 3: There’s lots of verbiage. The skill is finding people with something interesting to say. AU this year was quite bad for finding anything of interest.

- - -

Editor 4: IMHO, online conferences are pointless. It was something companies needed to do to stay in the news, and for people to tell their bosses that they were doing something worthwhile when working from home. Not anymore.

The quality of leads you get is pathetic. Anyone can show up. People don’t need to take the trouble of actually setting their work aside, travel to a place, and spend the time productively so as to make the trouble worth it.

- - -

Editor 5: I agree with the consensus, I much prefer to catch the replay so I can start, stop, return, etc. I'm often embarrassed at how long it takes me to get to it, though.

I wouldn't say that I'm burned out on virtual conferences. Companies had to cut to the meat, and I have the choice to choose which sessions I attend, with no pressure or guilt.

I honestly can't imagine companies used to ask us to give up days of our time for what information could be delivered in a few hour-long meetings (1 hour-long meeting is often the case).

I do miss the additional insight that comes from meeting colleagues, talking to different people than those who may have been scheduled, etc. And, of course, finding companies on the show floor. I plan to accept fewer in-person meeting invitations in the future.

- - -

In conclusion, let me emphasize: My favorites are always the small conferences, whether in-person or online.

 

Updated: Solved: Why the new Mac Mini Won't Work With an Ultrawide Monitor

...and how to fix the problem

This article has been updated with corrections and new information, thanks to readers ZinZ and infeeee.

Second update: An article in The Register explains the reason these computers have resolution problems is because of a shortcut Apple took to rush out its new hardware: "ARM-based Macs use graphics driver code based on iOS and iPad OS, which do not need to support that many displays." Read the full article here: theregister.com/2021/12/03/apple_m1_drivers/

A few weeks ago, I got the CB3 ultrawide monitor from Acer. It is gloriously 32" wide and makes my video tutorials (of CAD software) easier to edit. The resolution is 3440 x 1440, which in shorthand is 5K 3.5K. 

My newish Dell laptop runs with the new monitor, no problem: just connect any HDMI cable between the two. Here's a pic of the Dell running Camtasia video editing software on the ultrawide.

Last week I got the new X-based Mac Mini. I need it mostly only when I write about CAD software that runs on MacOS.

The computer had a problem right out of the box, when it didn't really understand it was connected to an ordinary 1920x1080 monitor. The image was too big, so that I could not access the menu bar. After a while, I was able to reach the menu bar blindly, and after a few reboots the Mac finally displayed correctly. Not a pleasant out-of-the-box experience

Next, I hooked it up to the Acer ultrawide monitor, but no joy. The monitor stayed blank, sometimes complaining "No cable attached." You might be able to imagine the time I wasted trying to get it to work. I have an ultrawide monitor and that Mac would work with it, darn it!

1. I tried Apple tech support where two techies tackled my trouble. In the end, the final advice from Apple was, "Ask Acer tech support."
2. I tried Acer tech support, and in the end the final advice from Acer was, "Ask Apple tech support."

I did some more mucking about, and on the second day finally got the ultrawide to work, but at the wrong resolution. Here are the resolutions listed by the Mac for the Acer monitor: none match the monitor's native resolution of 3440 x 1440 (click image for larger image).

Update 2: Reader infeeee suggested holding down the Option key while clicking Scaled. (Hold down the Alt key, when you have a Windows keyboard hooked up to a Mac.) It worked! The action forces MacOS to list all resolutions available, including the native resolution of 3440x1440:

And here is the the Mac Mini's output correctly displayed on the Acer ultrawide monitor:

As Management Speak (@managerspeak) so eloquently put it this morning, "The problem is that you are running the latest technology."

---

In my efforts to fix this problem, I came across important details at Apple's Mac Mini tech specs page, written confusingly. (Note that my Dell laptop supports three displays at once.)

• The HDMI port on the newest Mac Mini handles only 4K resolution. This is why the ultrawide monitor worked, but at lower resolution.
• The Thunderbolt port handles 8K. But I had no cable for this spec.

The Mac considers the HDMI port to be the primary display; one Thunderbolt port is used to provide the secondary display.

So, the new Mac with its X processor cannot handle what my year-old Dell laptop can: outputting more than 4K resolution out of its HDMI port the correct resolution for the monitor automatically. This makes me appreciate my Windows- and AMD-based Dell laptop even more.  A reader suggested that a higher quality cable might help, which I have ordered.

Then I found that 8K cables are rare. I finally found an 8K cable that handles Thunderport at one end with DisplayPort at the other. (The monitor has two HDMI and one DisplayPort ports.) I ordered it and await its arrival. 

In Which I Explain Media’s Confusion Re: Facebook

Not vis a vis

 

The tech media is salivating over Facebook's latest public relations disaster, and has much to say on the matter. Some are, however, puzzled by Facebook's machinations, and so to them I offer explanations.

- - -

Matthew Yglesias asks, “It is a little odd that Facebook would bother to research whether or not their product is harmful given that the answer obviously isn't going to alter their decision-making. What was the point?”

Me: It is a tactic to get ahead of the critics. If Facebook knows the flaws of in its product (as tobacco companies did), it can have answers ready when critics uncover the flaws.

In this case, however, its usual “We Are Facebook! Who Are You?” response has not worked as well as during earlier pr scandals.

- - -

Kara Swisher wonders, “These verbal gymnastics illuminate nothing, which is why I would love to have @nickclegg on for a substantive full hour discussion on Sway at this important moment. Unfortunately, we get persistent declines from FB, even as they book on press with less experience in this arena.”

Me:  It is a tactic to spar with media who are not expert in the subject at hand. A Brian Stelter and his staff aren’t going to know where to direct the dissection knife. Experienced tech journalists are to be avoided, at least until after Facebook has made sure that its messaging has suffocated competing narratives. Facebook will then use narrative-suffocation as proof there is no longer a scandal.

We see the same problem committed when country governments call on Facebook to explain itself.  In most case, neither the politicians nor their staff have much of an understanding of the world of technology.

- - -

Allow me to close with a commentator who gets it -- that most of the media doesn’t get it. Yael Eisenstat writes,

A plea before the whistleblower speaks tonight: don't fall for Facebook's playbook of changing the conversation to be about her, instead of about the documents she exposed. Any journalist/commentator who allows this to happen is doing a disservice. Speaking out is hard. Full stop.

Remember: Tobacco companies used endorsements from doctors to sell cigarettes as a solution to solve throat problems (a.k.a. the T-zone) caused by smoking. Facebook is no different.

Using Asynchronous Communication in CAD

Guest editorial by Cedric Desbordes

 

More than any other DWG vendor, Graebert of Germany has done more to connect the primary design platforms with one another -- desktop/laptop on Linux/Mac/Windows; tablet/phone on Android/iOS; and Web browsers. The name of the company may not be familiar to you, as they tend to sell white label CAD. Companies like Corel, Dassault Systems, and Onshape use Graebert's "ARES" code for their DWG editors.

Here, business development manager Cedric Desbordes describes how this trifecta of CAD platforms is useful for today's WFH environment. Asynchronous communication means that all parties don't have to be online at the same time -- this like sending an email, instead of placing a phone call, which is synchronous communication. 

- - -

With so many professionals forced out of office environments by the pandemic, even the most hesitant companies have had to reorganize their workflows to accommodate remote workers. During the first lockdowns, I was surprised to see large organizations using older and very expensive techniques like virtualization or VPNs [virtual private networks]. I remember too how the press was skeptical about our offer to make ARES Kudo [Graebert's browser-based CAD viewer and editor] free of charge for a period of time.
 
When this all started, people thought the virus would be a problem for only a couple of months, so the priority was to keep all systems in place and avoid stressing users, even if this meant a very slow AutoCAD streamed to your computer from virtual machines. So, during the first wave, IT teams acted more like firefighters: they weren't trying to implement new products or substantially reshape workflows.
 
Today, organizations understand that the virus-induced crisis is not acute, but chronic. It will continue to affect us for a long time. New waves or variants may come, resulting in further lockdowns. More importantly, working with remote team members has became the new normal. Previously, your co-workers sat next to you and worked the same office hours as you. Now you see them reorganizing their work hours, and working from different places, at different times, and even from other countries.

Recently, I watched a Webinar from Onshape. The guest speaker was a customer we have in common, Kichler Lighting in the USA. They use our ARES Trinity together with Onshape. Kichler has suppliers in China and adds new ones frequently. In the lighting industry, trends change rapidly, and so they need to react quickly with new products. Reducing time-to-market with suppliers in China that they have potentially never met is a challenge. Part of the challenge is to secure remote access and to synchronize drawings; another aspect is collaboration by sharing ideas, commenting on issues, and getting design changes validated.
 
One key takeaway from the Kichler story is that communication was significantly improved through online collaboration. No one was afraid to interrupt other users with questions or comments. It was a smooth, asynchronous flow of communication. As a consequence, time-to-market was reduced.
 
This is where communication tools like online meetings or email or chat fall short. Users need to be able to collaborate in-place (inside drawings and documents) and do so asynchronously.
 
One clear example of asynchronous communication is how people use Google Docs:

• Manage and revoke user rights by determining who can only view, and who can comment and/or edit
• Comments help to organize the work and extend the collaboration to more people, without altering the document
• Document history that goes back in time to show what has changed, and who changed it
•  People working together as a team, but without needing to work at the same time
• Notifications to stay updated (without needing to open documents) and to react faster when help is needed.

What we are achieving with our Trinity workflow is very similar for DWG drawings (files in the cloud, user rights, view-only links, markups and comments, email notifications), but with additional advantages:

Do it your way. For each project, users can decide whether to keep working with local files or to access files from the cloud. Also, it is not required to switch to cloud-based ARES Kudo to benefit from collaboration features, as they are also found in desktop ARES Commander. Users in organizations can go at their pace — there is no abrupt/disruptive transition to new tools or workflows.
 
Your cloud. In contrast to Google Docs, ARES does not force users to place files on our servers. We recognize that many companies have already made the decision on which cloud storage provider(s) to use. There is no reason to isolate DWG files from other files, so it is just common sense to for ARES to connect to a large number of existing cloud services, as well as provide the WebDAV protocol to connect easily to any other service.

In addition, we partner with AWS for those customers asking for a dedicated infrastructure, as well as to offer some storage with ARES Kudo Drive for users who have nothing in place and so want first to experiment with a few projects on our servers.
 
Highly secure. Files stay on the servers customers are already using, and ARES is used only to edit them. Our infrastructure is reviewed by the AWS team for security.

I think another key difference with Google Docs is that our industry has a strong need to improve the workflow between the users who are producing drawings at the office (or in home offices) with others in the field needing that technical information while working at a construction site, who are on customer visits, or work at a facility or factory.

Efficient interaction between the two groups requires software with the following capabilities for workers in the field:

• Access any drawing without planning ahead of time which files to take with them
• Always view the latest version of the drawing to avoid mistakes, which cost
• Enrich the project with useful feedback collected in the field to help the users editing drawings to reduce time-to-market
• Email notifications to that allow every user to follow the project updates, and jump into the file promptly when needed

From my perspective, view-only links are the most appealing feature to get new users started with cloud-based workflows. As we offer some free storage with the ARES Kudo Drive, it becomes possible for ARES Commander users to upload one of their files, create a view-only link, and send it to a colleague or customer who can view — and comment or markup — for free.

The best reactions to Facebook's new surveillance sunglasses

All Your Face Are Belong to Facebook

 

I once met the head of a design firm for lunch. As we headed out, he showed me what had just arrived in the mail for him. He was pretty excited about the pen with its built-in camera. He took it with us as we walked to the restaurant, looking around for what to photograph. I think he began to realize that pointing a pen repeatedly at people was a bit weird-looking. During lunch, the pen rested awkwardly between us.

Google Glasses failed. Snapshat Spectacles failed. And now Facebook has its surveillance technology built into Ray-Ban brand sunglasses. "Miniaturization is so crazy. These glasses have two cameras, a battery, three microphones, two speakers and bluetooth, and weigh *five grams* more than a regular pair of Ray-Bans," reports Tom Gara (@tomgara).

Here are the best reactions to the new product, which, it seems to me, is destined to become as popular as 3D TV.

- - -

Steve Kovach (@stevekovach): Facebook loves to copy everything Snapchat does. This time it's glasses, 5 years after Snap did it.

Katie Notopoulos (BuzzFeed News): Facebook Is Making Camera Glasses, Ha Ha Oh No.

They have an LED warning light so that bystanders know you are taking a video. I taped it over. A FB exec told me this is a violation of the terms of service of the glasses (oops).

Sebastiaan de With (@sdw): I am shocked, absolutely shocked that such a privacy-respecting company culture like Facebook's would produce a wearable camera product that feels like an almost dystopian-creepy invasion of privacy.

Joshua Benton (@jbenton): I don't get why Facebook wouldn't brand these as either Instagram or Oculus glasses, both brands that lack most of FB's brand baggage around privacy and everything icky.

@rmac18: So the privacy expert that Facebook is having defend its new Wearable Glasses works for an organization that is funded by Facebook.

Facebook sent reporters covering their glasses launch a list of supposed “third-party” privacy and consumer groups that it consulted for the product. So I did some digging. FB funds at least 4 of the 5 groups. Future of Privacy Forum is one. It also shows the breadth of Facebook's influence over nonprofits that rely on donations.

Yves Adele Fartlow (@vogon): It's very silly to me that people think that the audience for the facebook ray-bans is going to be the same as the audience for google glass, like nah it's going to be an entirely different group of people with no respect for other people's boundaries

Andrew Losowsky (@losowsky): Remember that whole thing where Google Street View cars were passively scraping everyone's wifi information? Imagine that but Facebook with all of our faces and locations.

@pinboard: I'm guessing they've got Scoble duct taped to the floor of a Facebook van somewhere, so you can't say this product is 100% bad.

James Vincent (@jjvincent): There's been some comment on how basic the functionality of Facebook's glasses are — no AR, no assistant, etc. But that's on purpose, because the main feature of these things is getting the public used to the idea of everyone constantly wearing cameras.

Alex Kantrowitz (@kantrowitz): My review of the Facebook Glasses: Nope

 

 

My 137 ebooks & 233 training videos

The List, part ii

 

These are the 137 ebooks I worked on beginning in 2002 and going through to 2020, an average of seven per year. Many of these can be purchased from https://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/ebooksonline/. When added to my 108 print books, that represents 245 books in 31 years. 

The advantage of ebooks over print books is that I eliminate the publisher and make 97% of the cover price of a book. The publisher typically handles editing, printing, distribution, and marketing -- in exchange for paying me an average of 7% of the cover price. 

 

How I Began in eBooks

I had written a series of customizing tutorials (Tailoring AutoCAD) for a tabloid AutoCAD magazine, whose editor permitted me to republish my work after three months. I posted the series to my Web site, and a reader wondered if I could collect them into a single PDF file for ease of downloading. That became my first ebook -- Tailoring AutoCAD for AutoCAD 2000, released in December 2002.

Each year, I added more to the ebook, until by the AutoCAD 2006 edition it had tripled in size. I realized it suffered from two problems: parts of the book never needed updating (like LISP and linetypes), and at 420 pages the ebook was getting fat.

At this point, I spun off parts of the book so that I needed to update only the parts that changed. And so we have titles like Tailoring Dynamic Blocks 2009 and Tailoring Dynamic Blocks 2010 -- and no new editions afterwards, as Autodesk no longer updated dynamic blocks with new functions. By AutoCAD 2015, I stopped writing about AutoCAD entirely, as Autodesk fell to adding only a few new functions each year.

I put together a few ebooks for CAD running on Macintosh computers, but sales were dismal enough for me to give up on them.

 

Tutorial Videos

Since 2014 I've produced 233 training videos, typically 4-5 minutes long:

• Bricsys: 161 videos
• C3D Labs: 2 videos
• Nanosoft: 70 videos

 

History of Training

My time in writing about CAD shows the changes in technology prevalent for training:

1. 1990-2014: print books
2. 2002-2020: ebooks
3. 2014-date: videos

 

Other Writing

In addition to books, ebooks, and videos, I've participated in the following:

• Co-launched new magazines for Microstation, Visio, and AutoCAD
• Launched these newsletters: The CAD Market, CAD++, upFront.eZine, and Visions.eZine
• Wrote magazine articles for CADalyst, Cadence, Architecture, InfoWorld, Design Engineering, Jon Peddie Associates, CAD lab, CAD infinitum, CADinfo.net, Federal Government News, MicroStation Manager, Visio Smartpages, Technical Design Solutions, IMAGINiT Technologies, Vancouver AutoCAD User Society, and PC Magazine.
• Whitepapers for various clients.

 

The eBook List

* Book titles with an asterisk are ebook versions made from materials first produced for a print edition

All CAD Systems

1.   CAD Manager's Guidebook* - Apr 01

2.   The Russian MCAD Market - Jan 10

3.   CAD & BIM: Is There a Free Pass? - Nov 10

4.   MobileCAD is Reaching Maturity - Oct 15

5.   Best CAD Practices - Nov 17

 

AutoCAD

6.   AutoCAD 2013 Reference Guide Rough Edition* - Apr 13

7.   Inside AutoCAD’s Multilines and Splines* - Aug 2008

 

8.   Tailoring AutoCAD 2000 - Dec 02 (my first ebook)

9.   Tailoring AutoCAD 2004 - Apr 03

10. Tailoring AutoCAD 2004, Workbook Edition - Nov 03

11. Tailoring AutoCAD 2005 - Mar 04

12. Tailoring AutoCAD 2006 - Jun 05

13. Tailoring AutoCAD 2007 - Dec 05

14. Tailoring AutoCAD 2008 - March 07

15. Tailoring AutoCAD 2009 - Sept 08

16. Tailoring AutoCAD 2010 - Aug 09

17. Tailoring AutoCAD 2011/12 - Jun 11

18. Tailoring AutoCAD 2012 for Mac & Windows - Sep 11

19. Tailoring AutoCAD 2013 - Jun 12

20. Tailoring Animation - Jan 07

21. Tailoring Animation 2012 - Jul 12

22. Tailoring AutoLisp Diesel & DCL - Dec 06

23. Tailoring CUI - Sep 05

24. Tailoring CUI 2009 - Dec 08

25. Tailoring CUI 2010 - Jul 09

26. Tailoring CUI 2011-12 - Junl 11

27. Tailoring CUI 2013 - May 12

28. Tailoring Dynamic Blocks - Aug 05

29. Tailoring Dynamic Blocks 2009 - Dec 08

30. Tailoring Dynamic Blocks 2010 - Oct 09 (my best selling ebook)

31. Tailoring QuickCalc - Sep 05

32. Tailoring Render - Oct 06

33. Tailoring Render 2012 - May 11

34. Tailoring Visual Styles - Apr 06

 

35. What's Inside? AutoCAD 2005 - Jan 04

36. What's Inside? AutoCAD 2006 - Jan 05

37. What's Inside? AutoCAD LT 2006 - Jan 05

38. What's Inside? AutoCAD 2007 - Mar 06

39. What's Inside? AutoCAD 2008 - Feb 07

40. What's Inside? AutoCAD 2009 - Feb 08

41. What's Inside? AutoCAD 2010 - Jan 09

42. What's Inside? AutoCAD for Mac - Aug 10

43. What's Inside? AutoCAD 2011 - Jan 10

44. What's Inside? AutoCAD 2012 - Feb 11

45. What's Inside? AutoCAD 2013 - Feb 12

46. What's Inside? AutoCAD 2014 - Mar 13

 

AutoCAD LT

47. Inside AutoCAD LT Volume 1: 2D Drafting* - Nov 07

48. Inside AutoCAD LT Volume 2: Management and Customization* - Nov 07

 

BricsCAD

Bricsys originally based BricsCAD on IntelliCAD, and then with version 8 switched to its own code

49. BricsCAD 9 for AutoCAD Users

50. BricsCAD 10 for AutoCAD Users - Sep 09

51. BricsCAD 11 for AutoCAD Users - Dec 10

52. BricsCAD 12 for AutoCAD Users - Nov 11

53. BricsCAD 13 for AutoCAD Users - Nov 12

54. BricsCAD 14 for AutoCAD Users - Dec 13

55. BricsCAD 15 for AutoCAD Users - Dec 14

56. BricsCAD 16 for AutoCAD Users - Dec 15

57. BricsCAD 17 for AutoCAD Users - Nov 16

58. BricsCAD 18 for AutoCAD Users - Nov 17

59. BricsCAD 19 for AutoCAD Users - Nov 18

60. BricsCAD 20 for AutoCAD Users - Oct 19

 

61. Customizing BricsCAD 4 - Apr 03

62. Customizing BricsCAD 5 - Oct 04

63. Customizing BricsCAD 8 - Sept 07

64. Customizing BricsCAD 9 - Mar 09

65. Customizing BricsCAD 10 - Jan 10

66. Customizing BricsCAD 11 - Dec 10

67. Customizing BricsCAD 12 - Dec 11

68. Customizing BricsCAD 13 - Feb 13

69. Customizing BricsCAD 15 - Mar 15

70. Customizing BricsCAD 16 - May 16

71. Customizing BricsCAD 17 - Nov 16

72. Customizing BricsCAD 18 - Dec 17

73. Customizing BricsCAD 19 - Jan 19

74. Customizing BricsCAD 20 - Dec 19

 

75. Learn BricsCAD 8 In a Day - Dec 07

76. Learn BricsCAD 9 In a Day - Mar 09

77. Learn BricsCAD 10 In a Day - Dec 09

78. Learn BricsCAD 11 In a Day - Jan 11

79. Learn BricsCAD 12 In a Day - Oct 12

80. Learn BricsCAD 13 In a Day - Feb 13

81. Inside BricsCAD 14 - Mar 14 (the title changed from “Learn in a Day” to “Inside”)

82. Inside BricsCAD 15 - Feb 15

83. Inside BricsCAD 16 - Apr 16

84. Inside BricsCAD 17 - Dec 16

85. Inside BricsCAD 18 - Dec 18

86. Inside BricsCAD 19 - Nov 18

87. Inside BricsCAD 20 - Nov 19

 

A+ CAD, CADopia, DWG Editor, IntelliCAD, progeCAD 

IntelliCAD Technical Consortium programs IntelliCAD, which is distributed by other companies

88. Customizing CADopia 4 - Apr 03

89. Customizing CADopia 5 - Oct 04

90. Customizing CADopia 6 - Sep 05

91. Inside CADopia 5

92. Inside CADopia 6 - Sep 05

 

93. Inside A+CAD 6 - Jul 07

94. Inside A+CAD 2010 - Sept 09

 

95. Inside IntelliCAD 5 - Nov 04

96. Inside IntelliCAD 6 - Oct 05

97. Tailoring IntelliCAD - Jan 03

98. Tailoring IntelliCAD 4 - Apr 03

99. Tailoring IntelliCAD 5 - Oct 04

100.           Tailoring IntelliCAD 6 - Oct 05

 

101.           IntelliCAD, The Un-AutoCAD - Nov 05

 

102.           SolidProfessor DWGEditor - Jul 07

 

103.           Inside progeCAD 2009 - Dec 08

104.           Inside progeCAD 2017 - May 16

105.           Tailoring progeCAD 2009 - Feb 09

 

ARES, DraftSight, CorelCAD

Graebert GmbH programs ARES for itself, DraftSight for Dassault Systemes, and CorelCAD for Corel

106.           Ares for AutoCAD Users

107.           Ares 2 for AutoCAD Users

108.           Ares 2014 for AutoCAD Users

109.           Ares 2015 for AutoCAD Users

 

110.           Inside Ares

111.           Inside Ares for Linux

112.           Inside Ares for Mac

113.           Inside Ares 2013

114.           Inside Ares 2014

115.           Inside Ares 2015

116.           Inside Ares 2016

117.           Inside Ares 2017

118.           Inside Ares 2018

119.           Inside Ares 2019 (at 650 pages, my largest ebook)

Inside Ares 2020 was split into three titles with a combined length of 770 pages:

120.           Book i: Starting Computer-Aided Design With Ares Commander 2020

121.           Book ii: Modern Editing and Collaboration On Mobile and Cloud

122.           Book iii: Advanced CAD With Ares Commander

 

123.           Inside CorelCAD

124.           Inside CorelCAD 2013

125.           Inside CorelCAD 2014

126.           Inside CorelCAD 2015

127.           Inside CorelCAD 2016

128.           Inside CorelCAD for Mac

 

129.           Inside DraftSight

130.           Inside DraftSight 2

131.           Inside DraftSight 3

132.           Inside DraftSight 2015

133.           Inside DraftSight 2016

 

Generic CADD, General CADD

After Autodesk bought and shut down DOS-based Generic CADD, General CADD Products resurrected it as a Windows program

134.           Inside Generic CADD 6* - Dec 02

135.           Inside General CADD Pro - Nov 02

 

Visio

136.           Inside Visio 2002* - Dec 03

137.           Tailoring Visio 2002* - Nov 03

 

 

 

My 108 Books in Print

The List, part i

 

These are the 108 print books I worked on, beginning in the summer 1990. I worked on most of these between the years 1991 and 2014, an average of five books a year. Many thanks to Colleen McColghlin, who as my agent found contacts publishers and encouraged me in my desire to become a book author. Then in 2003. I started producing ebooks and in 2015 began producing training videos. These are lists for another day.

 

Author *

*) I wrote these books from scratch, or else updated the book for new versions of software.

1.          The AutoCAD Technical Reference (my first book!)

2.          AutoCAD for Windows

3.          AutoCAD 2004 Family of Products

4.          AutoCAD 2010: Update Guide

5.          Successful CAD Managers Handbook

6.          CAD Manager's Guidebook

7.          Illustrated AutoCAD R12 Quick Reference

8.          Illustrated AutoCAD R13 for DOS Quick Reference

9.          Illustrated AutoCAD R13 for Windows Quick Reference

10.        Illustrated AutoCAD R14 Quick Reference

11.        Illustrated AutoCAD 2000 Quick Reference

12.        Illustrated AutoCAD 2002 Quick Reference

13.        Illustrated AutoCAD 2004 Quick Reference

14.        Illustrated AutoCAD 2005 Quick Reference

15.        Illustrated AutoCAD 2006 Quick Reference

16.        Illustrated AutoCAD 2007 Quick Reference

17.        Illustrated AutoCAD 2008 Quick Reference

18.        Illustrated AutoCAD 2009 Quick Reference

19.        Illustrated AutoCAD 2010 Quick Reference

20.        Illustrated AutoCAD 2011 Quick Reference

21.        Illustrated AutoCAD 2012 Quick Reference

22.        Illustrated AutoCAD 2013 Quick Reference

23.        Illustrated AutoCAD 2014 Quick Reference Update

24.        Illustrated AutoCAD LT2 Quick Reference

25.        Illustrated AutoCAD R13 Programming Quick Reference

26.        ArchiCAD for AutoCAD Users

27.        FelixCAD for AutoCAD Users (incomplete)

28.        IntelliCAD 98 for AutoCAD Users

29.        TurboCAD 5 for AutoCAD Users

30.        TurboCAD 12 for AutoCAD Users

31.        VDraft for AutoCAD Users

32.        Learn AutoCAD LT in a Day

33.        Learn AutoCAD LT 2 in a Day

34.        Learn AutoCAD LT 3 in a Day

35.        Learn AutoCAD LT 97 in a Day

36.        Learn AutoCAD LT 98

37.        Learn AutoCAD LT 2000

38.        Learn AutoCAD LT 2000i

39.        Learn AutoCAD LT 2002

40.        AutoCAD LT 2006: The Definitive Guide

41.        Learn GeneriCADD in a Day

42.        Learning Autodesk Inventor 2008

43.        Reviewer’s Guide to IntelliCAD 98

44.        Using AutoCAD 2004 Basics

45.        Using AutoCAD 2004 Basics - Instructor Guide

46.        Using AutoCAD 2004 Advanced

47.        Using AutoCAD 2004 Advanced - Instructor Guide

48.        Using AutoCAD 2005 Basics

49.        Using AutoCAD 2005 Basics - Instructor Guide

50.        Using AutoCAD 2005 Advanced

51.        Using AutoCAD 2005 Advanced - Instructor Guide

52.        Using AutoCAD 2006 Basics

53.        Using AutoCAD 2006 Basics - Instructor Guide

54.        Using AutoCAD 2006 Advanced

55.        Using AutoCAD 2006 Advanced - Instructor Guide

56.        Using AutoCAD 2007

57.        Using AutoCAD 2007 - Instructor Guide

58.        Using AutoCAD 2008

59.        Using AutoCAD 2008 - Instructor Guide

60.        Using AutoCAD 2009

61.        Using AutoCAD 2009 - Instructor Guide

62.        Using AutoCAD 2010

63.        Using AutoCAD 2010 - Instructor Guide

64.        Using AutoCAD 2011

65.        Using AutoCAD 2011- Instructor Guide

66.        Visio 4 for Everyone

67.        Learn Visio 5

68.        Learn Visio 2000

69.        Learn Visio 2002

70.        Learn to Diagram Visio 2000

71.        Learn to Diagram with Visio 2002

72.        Advanced Visio 5

73.        Advanced Visio 2000

74.        Advanced Visio 2002

75.        Web Developer's Quick Reference

 

Re-author *

*) I took over writing these books, which originally were written by another author

76.        AutoCAD 2023 for Dummies

77.        Basics of A+CAD

78.        Fundamentals of Modern Drafting Workbook

79.        LTI Instructor Guide

80.        LTI Workbook

81.        OLCAD 106 - Civil

82.        OLCAD 103 - Arch

83.        OLCAD 208 - GDT

84.        Using AutoCAD, 3rd Edition (Que)

85.        Using AutoCAD R13 for DOS (Delmar)

86.        Using AutoCAD R13 for Windows

87.        Using AutoCAD R13 for Windows - Instructor Guide

88.        Using AutoCAD R14 for DOS

89.        Using AutoCAD R14 - Instructor Guide

90.        Using AutoCAD R14 for Windows

91.        Using AutoCAD 2000

92.        Using AutoCAD 2002

93.        VisualSeries - Basic AutoCAD 2D

94.        VisualSeries - Advanced AutoCAD 2D

 

Co-author*

*) Another author and I worked on these books at the same time

95.        MicroStation 4 for AutoCAD R11 Users, first edition

96.        MicroStation for AutoCAD Users, never published

97.        MicroStation 95 for AutoCAD R13 Users

98.        MicroStation for AutoCAD Users, never published

99.        MicroStation SE for AutoCAD R14 Users (Delmar)

 

Contributor*

*) I contributed material to these books

 100.      Architectural - Chapter 7

101.      AutoCAD: A Problem Solving Approach R14

102.      Harnessing AutoCAD R12 for Windows

 

Technical Editor*

*) I edited these books for technical accuracy

103.      3D Printing with Autodesk

104.      3D Modern Printing with TinkerCAD

105.      AutoCAD 2013 for Dummies

106.      AutoCAD 2014 for Dummies

107.      AutoCAD 2017 for Dummies

108.      AutoCAD 2020 for Dummies

 

Copy Editor*

*) I edited the text of this book

109.      Devil Bush by David Waynes (never published)

 

Envisioned

In addition to the books listed here, there were writing projects that publishers proposed to me, but that never got off the ground. These include books about Corel Draw and Front Page.

 

 

 

Bands at the 9th Annual Musical Walkalong

Galiano Island, Canada

 

Each year the Galiano Conservancy Association puts on an afternoon of hiking, music, and art. The fundraiser subsidizes 1,500 children to come to Galiano Island to live in nature, which they might otherwise not experience. The last number I heard was $23,ooo raised at this year's event, which did yet not include the amount made from the silent auction.

The walk goes through the forested trails and rocky cliffs of Galiano Island, on the Pacific coast side of Canada. Here are photos I took of some of the performers at this year's event.

 

Kurt Ward-Theiss playing Irish tunes on the mandola

---

Catriona Day on cello, with Saltspring Island in the background

---

Emma, Dustin, Greg, and Connor folk ensemble at Trincomali lookout

---

Dan Gaucher on drums, James Merger on upright bass playing freeform jazz

---

Orla Scott on accordion (at left) along Appleby trail

---

 

Stefan Brunoff painting with water colors by Chrystal Cove

---

 

www.galianoconservancy.ca

 

 

When Windows Update Stalls at 35%... or 100%

Replug

 

Despite the tech media having shrieked confidently and loudly about the death of Windows 7, Microsoft continues to update it and I continue to use it.

Last week, an update alert appeared in the operating system's taskbar, and so I installed it. I think the update had to do with that 20-year-old hole in the print spooler software that could let a malicious actor (bad guy) wreck your computing experience.

I installed it, and after rebooting the computing, Windows Update stalled at 35%. I let it sit there for a long time before manually restarting the computer. I won't describe all the details of my attempts to fix the problem, but it took four hours to get my computer running again. 

I was the cause of the problem.

My desktop computer's CD drive no longer works, but the computer dutifully checks for it during boot-ups. That slows the booting process, as the near-broken drive grinds away for a half-minute of so. I figured I'd be smart and disable the CD drive through the BIOS.

Solving that problem mixed up Windows, causing it to not complete the update. When I clued into what the problem was, I re-enabled the CD drive, and Windows gratefully completed its appointed task.

During the Windows update process, make no changes to the hardware!

 

 

 

Best tweet reactions to new BSOD

Black screen of death

 

As most of the tech media are Apple-maniacs, they don't really don't care about Windows 11's hottest new feature -- running Android apps -- and tend to be really, really clueless about the technique of side-loading.

A fact none of the tech media mentioned is that running Android apps on Windows is not new: it's been possible for many years (going back to 2009), as there are Intel CPU-versions of Android. See pcmag.com/how-to/3-free-ways-to-run-android-apps-on-your-pc for some examples.

As a result of Apple Devotion, we were fed a lot of misinformed Android Development articles.

- - -

What the tech media instantly understood, however, was the change to BSOD. The blue screen, reminiscent of MS-DOS days, covers over your not-yet-saved work when Windows crashes. Today, it was announced, Microsoft is changing the color to black in Windows 11.

In some of headlines reporting on the change (all re-reported from the original article in Verge), you can sense the writers' relief at an easy-to-understand change, like this headline: "Microsoft made a huge change to the Blue Screen of Death in Windows 11."

- - -

Here are the best tweets that I collected from Tech-meme:

Black is the new blue. Microsoft's notorious Blue Screen of Death, that's been around in one form or another since Windows 1.0, is going black. One proud employee, Raymond Chen, claimed authorship of the original #BSOD.
     - Ami (@switchshot)

At least we get to keep using BSOD. Microsoft once again delivers on backward compatibility.
     - Sriram Karra (@skarra)

Finally true innovation.
     - Patrick Beja (@notpatrick)

The real Windows 11 story.
     - James Randall (@jamesdrandall)

The sheer vision. They have brown, burgundy, beige, bronze, brass screens of death to go. With a new Windows every five years, they have the next three decades of failures covered.
     - Rahul Gaitonde (@RahulGaitonde)

It's like losing an old friend. A really shitty friend.
     - @datnofact

Looks like Apple will need to update its snarky Windows PC icon in macOS.
     - Tim Hardwick (@waxeditorial)

It's more appropriate, really.
     - Varad Mehta (@varadmehta)

 

 

 

 

Best Tweets: Facebook Ad-ifies Oculus

Facebook destroys what's left of VR

 

It's all a game. Advertisers lie to themselves that we can't get enough of their ads, while we bob and weave to avoid them like a goalie at the World Cup. (Of hockey. Which game did were you thinking of?)

The goal always has been to figure out how to best force us to view ads. With radio, we switch to another station. On tv, we go to the bathroom. In magazines, we flip to the next page. On Web sites, we install ad blockers. 

But what if there were a technology that could put our heads in vises, clamp pairs of rather tiny tvs to our foreheads, point each one directly at an eyeball, and then to force us to watch ads, A Clockwork Orange-style? Now that would be technology worth paying $2 billion for.

With Facebook's announcement that it will start feeding ads to people who had paid already $500 for Oculus VR headsets and had already paid for the games they were playing in it, the virtual reality industry began mourning its now-inevitable death.

Image from Slashgear of what ads in Oculus will look like -- like the boards in a hockey game

I, for one, had long predicted the collapse of VR, as surely as the collapse of 3D tv. Technology cannot be mass-marketed for technology's sake, and after 30 years of VR being prophesized as inevitable and now today as popular as Linux on the desktop, Facebook deserves our gratitude for nailing that particular coffin shut.

But before the hammering starts, Facebook is acknowledging its oncoming failure with this hedging statement (my emphasis): "You can manage what ads you want to see and we're including controls to hide specific ads or hide ads from an advertiser completely. Ads in VR will be different from ads elsewhere and this is a space that will take time and people's feedback to get right."

(I seem to recall a certain fruit-themed computer company promising the same about its upcoming ads, which turned out exactly the same as every other ad. Adz iz adz. There is no different way.)

PS: My wife's reaction, after I told her about what's happening with VR goggles: "People still use those?"

- - -

Meanwhile, the people's feedback has been right, even priceless, worth more than that $2 billion Facebook paid for Oculus:

"Hell yes ads in my eyeballs grim meathook future let's go."
     - Matt Weinberger (@gamoid)

"I told everyone FB RealityLabs would put ads in the headset, they were already planning it. Meanwhile @thedextriarchy reported in January @boztank [Andrew Bosworth, vp Facebook Reality Labs, and former vp of ads] lying, 'We're not really focused on business model.' We are all getting slowly boiled in a pot by Facebook."
     - Cix (@cixliv)

"Oh look, the reason people jumped ship on Oculus years ago."
     - Geoffrey (@t3hero_)

"Oculus says in a blog post they 'have no plans to use movement data to target ads,' but yet nothing in their privacy policy prevents them from doing so."
     - Kent Bye (@kentbye)

"Aaaand that's why I sold my Quest when they got acquired. Yay, delayed gratification."
     - Glytch (@glytchtech)

"This is definitely what VR was missing for mass adoption."
    - Aaron Levie (@levie)

"You can escape reality. But you can't escape ads. That's the reality."
     - Subrahmanyam Kvj (@sub8u)

"They also 'have no plans to build a facial recognition database.' These statements are as hollow as their so-called 'responsible innovation principles' that deliberately ignore to 'protect identity of minorities (humans).' Blabber blabber blabber..."
     - Kavya Pearlman (@kavyapearlman)

"Gross. Seriously, super gross."
    - @thelinuxexp

 

 

Siemens PLM Media Q&A

CAD? We've heard of it

 

Siemens Digital Industries Software last month held a user group meeting online, and then invited the media to a Q&A with execs the following day. The few times I have interacted with ceo Tony Hemmelgarn, I found him to be a realistic leader who doesn't do the painful-to-hear isn't-everything-amazing?, we're-really-excited! marketing schtick. 

There was, however, one embarrassing moment when during the keynote he referenced Lordstown Motors using Siemens software to design their electric pickup truck -- the day after Lordstown announced it was cutting this year's production from 2,500 to 1,000 pickups. Research had earlier shown that most of its 100,000 pre-orders were unlikely to materialize. Subsequently, the company announced it would produce 0 trucks for the rest of the year, and its CEO left. 

Here are some of the notes I took during the Q&A held with us in the CAD media:

- - -

Since 2007, Siemens has spent e10 billion on 30+ acquisitions. Reaching all the way  back to 2007 is the year Siemens acquired UGS for its NX, Solid Edge, and TeamCenter software. The total does not not include spending on R&D. 

While Siemens is one of the sensible CAD firms knowing that MCAD belongs primarily on the desktop, they are nevertheless pushing their Xcelerator Cloud Platform so hard that MCAD got no mention, to my disappointment. Nevertheless, Siemens could use the tagline, "Cloud Your Way," as it runs on public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise. 

Electrical and electronic CAD is now 1/3 of the biz and over the last 18 months as been the fastest growing part of Siemens PLM. This due partly to acquisitions; indeed, most of the press releases I get  these days from Siemens have to do with ECAD, which I don't cover.

We can’t have digital twins today without electronics, and Siemens has three of the pieces:

• IC integrated circuits
• Electrical systems, like harnesses
• PCB design

"There is a great need for it, as we see in the chip shortages and number of car companies wanting to design their own electronics, rather than using off the shelf parts," said Mr Hemmelgarn. He said he wants his company to make the digital twin the most comprehensive it can be. He has, of course, internal incentive, given that the rest of Siemens is a giant industrial firm that eats its own dog food.

Q&A

Q: TeamCenter X was announced a year ago, how it is going?

A: Going better than I expected. TeamCenter X lets Siemens target small organizations. We replaced some Teamcenter components to make X more agile and flexible. TeamCenter is #1 PLM solution on the market today, with customers such as SAP, IBM, and US Air Force globally. Fujitsu has its own PLM, but decided to offer TeamCenter in Japan. 

Mendix is for customers to personalize services without having to be a software developer. We have 200,000 third-party developers around the world.

 

Q: How does Xcellerator fit in?

A: Xcellerator is one common architecture, packaged business components to build applications. It puts all services in the cloud. Customers want the cloud for collaboration, sharing, and integration -- on-prem, public (Amazon), or private cloud.

 

Q: Do you expect all customers to move to SaaS?

A: We will have more info on SaaS [software as a service] for you in the future. We are not going to force our customers, one way or another, onto business models that don’t make sense to them. However, there is value in SaaS to our customers, such as us taking care of things for them, or high-performance computing. I think that the worry about IP [intellectual property] on the cloud is going away. I think the transition to SaaS will happen faster than we expect.

Just because you put something on the cloud doesn’t mean it is more integrated than anything else. What do we mean by integration? Data flowing from application to application, to make decisions faster -- that is true integration, that’s not the cloud. Integration is work, and we work at it. BTW, we are never finished with it and so we keep making acquisitions to keep building out integration modules.

 

Q: Which manufacturing techs are generating hype, which are actually valuable?

A: Additive manufacturing was overhyped five, six years ago. "Everyone" is going to have a 3D printer at home: if your coffee cup breaks, you don’t run to Wal-Mart, but you print your own. That was the hype. The reality is that additive manufacturing is a new business model, in the the flexibility it brings to businesses.

Low-code, like our Mendix, had a lot of hype early on, but now is experiencing rapid growth due to the demand for applications without needing to involve the IT department. We can call it “citizens’ development.” We went from “Mendix can build the perfect application if we all contribute to it,” to me copying someone else’s low-code, adding a couple of buttons, and having something that works for me.

IoT [Internet of things] had a lot of hype, it still does, but slowly it is being integrated. It was initially a lot like AM.

 

Q: Why do you continue to sell Parasolid to competitors?

A: Open is one of our three strategies, as I don’t think closed works. Much of the success about Teamcenter is its openness. There are over four million users of Parasolid, with the same math behind them. We add three or four new customers a month who license Parasolid: I think of the value behind that. There is no data loss for our customers in the geometry; there is, of course, some data loss in the intelligence attached to geometry.

 

Q: How is your business doing?

A: We can’t say much about our financial results. Last quarter we had double-digit growth in our software business, although PLM is not growing as fast as our EDA business.

Our toughest customers are inside Siemens. We get beat up by the: "Why can’t it do this, do that?" We use our software to design our products, to design our plants.

https://www.sw.siemens.com/en-US/

 

 

 

Best (and funniest) headlines from Android Police

www.androidpolice.com

 

Android 12 Beta 1 has colorful new charging animations: I'm too tired now to come up with a funny subtitle. Please laugh.

The overpriced Pixel Stand is 50% off its retail price, today only: Maybe even cheap enough to justify buying it!

Android 12 Beta 1 changes the way you'll set your alarms for the next day: All 30 of them, to make sure you get out of bed on time.

App hibernation is live in Android 12 Beta 1: You can try it out now, and by 'now', we mean in a few months.

Android 12's dynamic theming will still let you choose your own awful colors if you insist: For optimal Demon Chocobo vibes.

There are now three times more Android devices than Windows PCs: Still way more ants than both, tho.

Google Phone will announce callers like you've got a fancy secretary: But you ain't fancy. Stop playing.

Netflix teases N-Plus: A new way to get attached to your favorite Netflix shows before they're cancelled.

Google Assistant continues to mean well with socially relevant, utterly cringeworthy songs: I'll take it, if you promise never to never sing again, Google

Twitter is killing Nuzzel and it's ok if you have no idea what that means.

Box finally has a dark theme, but not without one annoying limitation: 2 years of user demands have come to this.

Amazon Echo Frames review: About as useful as an Echo Dot taped to your forehead.

 

 

Two core weaknesses of Onshape

Kernel and browser

I've come across a couple of Achilles' heels for PTC regarding Onshape. The two weaknesses are inherent to what makes Onshape Onshape.


Kernel Incompatibility. At the kernel level, Onshape is incompatible with PTC's CAD software. Onshape runs Parasolid (licensed from an arch-competitor to PTC, Siemens), while PTC has its own Granite geometric modeling kernel.  I wonder how well Onshape and Creo work together; I have not heard PTC address this problem.

The drawback to any translation is, of course, that data can be lost or, worse, mangled, and so it helps when two CAD programs share at least the same kernel.

Onshape uses the same Parasolid kernel as Solidworks, one reason being that Onshape was designed pre-PTC to take customers from Solidworks. Even so, sharing kernels is not nirvana: importing Solidworks models into Onshape can be a surprisingly difficult process, as was demonstrated at Onshape's user conference last month.

Onshape and Creo do have import-export capabilities, ones that even preexisted PTC's acquisition of Onshape. Pro/E-Creo 2000i thru v7 files are the list for Onshape imports, while a neutral file format like STEP is available to copy models from Onshape to Creo. 

The problem becomes significant now that PTC wants Creo run on the same Atlas-cloud platform as Onshape. Users will expect transparent data exchange between all apps on Atlas. How to fix the problem:

• One solution may be that PTC stores cloudCreo data in the same MongoDB database format as Onshape, and then cloudCreo acts as the translator for desktop Creo.
• Another solution could be that PTC replaces Parasolid with Granite; CAD companies have done that kind of kernel swapping before.
• A third solution is for PTC to eliminate Onshape. A second CAD program that's incompatible makes little sense.

Browser Incompatibility. During the Onshape user conference, PTC execs revealed that staying abreast of changes to Web browsers is key to Onshape's future survival. A new release of a significant Web browser could introduce incompatibilities that prevent Onshape from running properly, at least for a time. To avoid surprises, PTC runs Onshape on betas of browsers.

Onshape is, nevertheless, at the mercy of directions in browser development. For instance, Apple is not keen on making its homegrown Safari Web browser work particularly well, as that would allow third-party developers to avoid Apple's App Store by instead running Webapps in Safari.

This article on Apple details how the problem could affect Onshape: "In almost every area, Apple's low-quality implementation of features from [Apple's own] WebKit [browser engine] already requires workarounds." A Google researcher notes that "Safari is now something like 1,000 APIs behind Chrome, double the gap measured in 2016...".

Worse, Apple requires that all third-party Web browsers be built on top of Safari, even Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox. While some argue that Google is, with this research, slamming Apple because it wants to run its Chrome engine as spyware on Apple hardware, the point is still valid: Apple is fearful of apps that could run well in Safari; so it makes its browser lackluster.

(Onshape runs as native apps on Android and iOS.)

 

PTC Describes Its Plans for Generative Design

Upselling

 

Gal Munda (financial analyst): I just had a question around the generative design -- and the exciting news that you basically announced a couple of years after you first acquired [Frustum] -- you launched it as part of a Creo [desktop MCAD] extension now. What I'm thinking about is, how did these modules effectively increase your addressable market in terms of the pricing, maybe how you're thinking about what proportion of your customers are realistically potential customers of it?

Image from a PTC video of GDX (generative design extension) 

 

And do you think that there would ever be a cross-sell into competitive CAD environments as well? Or do you think that's more of a view into kind of potentially getting replacements into, say, existing Solidworks customers?

 

James Heppelmann (ceo PTC): There's a couple of different things happening with generative design.

Just to be clear, we first released it as part of the desktop application and for compute horsepower used the graphics card. That gets you quite a bit of compute horsepower for certain types of compute-intensive codes like generative design.

But what we've done now, in the second iteration, is put it on Atlas [cloud platform], where there's elastic compute. You can have the biggest computer in the world running your generative analyses for you [You might not afford the computing bill. - Editor]. 

Let me also say, one of the next steps will be to pipe that generative design capability into Onshape [cloud MCAD], because it's actually running on the same platform as Onshape now. We just got to build it out into the UI [user interface] and the functionality of Onshape.

So what we'll do with generative design is, for sure, will go back to the Creo base. And we will upsell this new module. It's a purchase you add on. And then we'll go into the Onshape base, and we'll do the same thing. I think that generative design is a brand-new idea [Generative design has been around in one form or another since the 1980s. - Editor].

It's a transformational idea, but some of these ideas started a little slow and then really take off once people understand what they can do. So I expect we'll see that pattern. I do think it will give us more competitive alternatives, because I think what we have is unique and special. [Several BIM, MCAD, and independent vendors also provide generative design, also usually in the cloud. - Editor].

I think that if somebody is thinking about switching off Solidworks, if they want to go to a high-end product, they'll be impressed by Creo. If they want to go to a simpler product that's simpler to own and so forth, they'll look at Onshape and say, Wow!

- - -

Source: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4422268-ptc-inc-ptc-ceo-james-heppelmann-on-q2-2021-results-earnings-call-transcript

The SaaS-ification of PTC's Software

Moving from dark green to light green

 

Saket Kalia (financial analyst): I'd love to zoom in on slide 20 a bit [see figure below], very useful slide. Understanding that diagram is a vision and not guidance per se, I'd love to hear how you  envision PTC's move to SaaS [software as a service].

Chart showing some aspects of some programs starting to run on Atlas; the lighter the shade of green, the more of the software is on the cloud

 

It looks like you'll have all your products available in a SaaS form -- well, the major products available in a SaaS form factor by fiscal '22.

And so the question is, is this something you perhaps drive your customer base to or encourage them to adopt? Or is this something that you're going to let happen naturally?

James Heppelmann (ceo PTC): There's a lot you can read into this slide. But if you notice that the logos, other than Onshape [Web-based CAD] and Atlas [Web-based platform], start a darker greener color and as they move to the right become more or less the same color as Atlas. That's because we call this strategy "an insidious SaaSification strategy," which means it happens step-by-step.

And it's already started. Vuforia [augmented reality software] already has the first offerings on Atlas, like expert capture. Which is one of the biggest ones. We're about to ship the second Vuforia product on Atlas, which will be called Vuforia Instruct coming out later this quarter.

We mentioned that Creo [MCAD] is shipping a capability on Atlas now for generative design called Creo GDX [based on Frustum]. And you'll start to see [capabilities] coming from Windchill [PLM] and coming from Thingworx [Internet of things].

So what we're going to do is begin to offer incremental or, in some cases, replacement modules on SaaS. And then over time, the whole suite of each product line will become available on SaaS. A customer could begin adopting a part of it, get comfortable with the idea, start to generate some incremental revenue for us. And then in year 2 or 3 or 4, [the customer could] even flip the switch and go 100% to SaaS.

So that's what that diagram intends to show you: that these products are all climbing on board, but it's not an all-or-nothing. It's step-by-step moving toward that all-state where they're fully based on Atlas, and we have really a dream, a unified SaaS portfolio.

I'm so excited about that, because a lot of these products have divergent heritages and they're on different architectures today, integrated together but still on different architectures. And we have like a spring cleaning opportunity here, thanks to the power of Atlas to unify on a single platform.

Everybody at PTC is aligned behind this. So we're making great progress. And if you think in a year or two, Windchill and Creo will have $1 billion of ARR [annual recurring revenue], if we can get some even modest degree of penetration on a 2-for-1 ARR uplift [making twice as much from subscriptions], it's a lot of growth in those businesses.

Our original thinking on SaaSification was more all-or-nothing, and then we decided that this so-called "insidious strategy" is much more interesting for everybody -- customers and PTC. The real big impact is farther to the right even in years yet to come on this chart.

Source: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4422268-ptc-inc-ptc-ceo-james-heppelmann-on-q2-2021-results-earnings-call-transcript

 

Fixed: Denon Tonearm's Failure to Lift

Mechanical error

 

When I finally bought a turntable, it was September 1980 and it was last stereo component I bought while still a university student. I decided on Denon's direct-drive semi-automatic DP-30L model, which cost me $400 -- about $1,000 in today's inflated dollars. Forty years later, this model today sells for $200-$300 on eBay.

 Names of parts and functions from the original owner's manual

For the model name, I am guessing that 'D' is short for direct-drive, 'P' for phonograph, and 'L' for lifter.

• Direct-drive means that the motor is attached directly to the spindle. The controversy at the time was that direct drive could introduce rumble noises from the electric motor turning; the alternative was the belt drive, which eliminated the rumble, but could cause imprecise speeds due to stretching of the belt. I never heard any extraneous rumble, and given that belts deteriorate over time, I am today glad I went the route I did.
  
  
• Semi-automatic means that I have to land the stylus (needle) on the record manually, but that the tonearm lifted off the record at the end of play automatically.
  
  Fully-automatic turntables place the needle on the record for you; this was considered gauche.
  Fully-manual means you have to lift the tonearm yourself when the record comes to an end; this was considered seriously-audiophile.
  Semi-automatic was a compromise, as it minimized the time the needle spent on the vinyl.

(Back then, there were even disagreements whether tonearms should be curved, like on my Denon, or straight.)

 

Lifter Stops Lifting

A couple of decades ago, the automatic lifter stopped lifting. At the time, it was no big deal to me as CDs and MP3 players were replacing turntables and cassettes. I stopped using the turntable, leaving it on display to show off next to the rest of my stereo system, which I still used.

As records came back in vogue, I wanted the Denon to be fully working again. I checked with a couple of local repair shops, who wanted to charge me $65 to $85 just to have a look at it. I decided to try on my own.

I found the www.vinylengine.com Web site (free registration required), which hosts repair and user manuals for vintage audio equipment. But, as I found with other repair manuals of the era, the instructions are so curt as to be ultimately useless.

Badly written repair instructions

So I decided to have a look myself. As Denon boasted that the turntable featured a "Non-Contact Record-End Sensor" I assumed that perhaps a light bulb had burned out. I did not, however, relish the thought of desoldering/resoldering in possibly tight quarters, let alone finding the correct replacement bulb.

 

Easy Fix

So I flipped it over, and removed seven screws (four are in the feet). The picture below shows what I found inside, compliments of liquidaudio.com.au/denon-dp-30l-direct-drive-turntable-service-repair (my annotations):

Inside the Denon turntable (front is at the bottom)

Once I oriented myself, I recognized the tonearm mechanicals in the upper-left corner. As I looked around, I noticed that the flat metal arm attached to a white plastic thingy was swinging free (outlined in orange below).

The copper coil is the tonearm lifter motor

The white plastic thingy had an axle (circled in green) sticking below it, so it was obvious to me that it belonged in a hole. But which hole was not obvious to me -- there are seven in the immediate area. Fortunately, most holes were too small for the axle, and so I found the right one in which to plug it. I reassembled the turntable.

It worked!

The puzzle to me is, of course, how the heck did it get disengaged in the first place? Never mind, I was so pleased to have saved the $65 repair bill that I played several records just for the pleasure of watching the tonearm lifting itself as it reached the end of each LP.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ITC vs Gstarsoft Ends in Settlement

No one lost

 

IntelliCAD Technical Consortium had launched its lawsuit against Gstarsoft about a year ago, claiming that the Chinese software vendor was misusing code from ITC's IntelliCAD. The issue was that Gstarsoft was no longer a member of the ITC, yet is appeared that some items unique to IntelliCAD were in the GStarCAD software. 

Today the results of the suit were announced; I'll run the English portion of the bi-lingual press release as it is concise:

“The IntelliCAD Technology Consortium” (the “ITC”) and Suzhou Gstarsoft Co. Ltd. (“Gstar”) are pleased to announce that they have reached a full and final global settlement resolving all disputes stemming from the parties’ prior business relationship, including a lawsuit filed by the ITC against Gstar pending in United States District Courts for the District of Oregon, and a lawsuit filed by Gstar against the ITC pending in the Intermediate People’s Court of Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province, People’s Republic of China.

In the United States lawsuit, the ITC had alleged that Gstar misappropriated and improperly used the ITC’s intellectual properties. Gstar denied the allegations, and maintained that it independently developed its products and has independent intellectual property rights. In the Suzhou lawsuit, Gstar sought a declaratory judgment of non-infringement.

The parties’ global settlement fully and conclusively resolves their disputes. No party has admitted any wrongdoing or liability, and there has not been any court finding as to the merits of the parties’ lawsuits. However, in order to resolve the disputes completely and avoid any future misunderstandings, the parties entered into a confidential settlement agreement.

The parties appreciate each other’s efforts in resolving this matter amicably.

https://www.intellicad.org/articles-and-press-releases/joint-press-release-of-the-intellicad-technology-consortium-and-suzhou-gstarsoft-co-ltd

Optimizing the news for a "we want it free" culture

The legacy fails

 

Newspapers remind me of stores that used to carry music CDs. As customers bought fewer CDs, stores carried fewer CDs, and so customers had fewer reasons to come to the store. The only stores today that still sell CDs in my hometown are Walmart and the independent Christian bookstore. The  CDs that remain are not to my taste, so iTunes is my A&B Sound (western Canadian version of Tower Records). 

Our local newspapers went the same route. We had two, each with two issues a week. One publishing chain bought the other, shut it down, and cut the pay to newspaper carriers to 9 cents per house. Last year, it used the coronavirus pandemic to reduce to one issue weekly, fat with advertising flyers.

Prior to the pandemic, it had eliminated the Letters to the Editor section; with the pandemic, it begged for donations to keep going, calling itself "your community paper," which it no longer was. With woke youngsters at the helm, the front page splashed one too many hit pieces on prominent local men and women, whose primary crime appeared to be their Christian faith. So, even though it is delivered free to my front door, I no longer read it, although I do use it to line the compost bucket.

- - -

In an important article on the future of news, Martin Gurri talks about Andrey Mir's new book, “Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers” at discoursemagazine.com/ideas/2021/04/13/post-journalism-and-the-death-of-news.

In short, the news used to be distributed by the elite, whether as newspapers, magazines, tv, and even state-run radio. Then in the 1990s, the big shift occurred as the Internet allowed us with small voices to speak up. Now four billion people compete with the mainstream media over what is news, through forums like Facebook, blogs (like this one), email newsletters, Twitter, YouTube, and so on.

What Gurri and Mir say will help you understand the news business today and why it is so awful. For instance, they note that all news is a form of fiction, because it is presented from one person's point of view.

- - -

What these sorts of discussions seem to be unaware of are specialty publications, like the ones I produce. I think specialty publishers aren't suffering the problems of mainstream newspapers because we got certain things right:

• Adapted to new publishing technologies
• Targeted niche audiences
• Operated on sustainable budgets

We understand the new publishing technologies, and so we made use of the Internet early. I abandoned my print newsletter for an email one in 1996.  I published by first ebook in 2000 and abandoned print books by 2013. This blog has been operating since 2003. 

We target niche audiences, and so have a product that readers want. Being small, we cater to our readers and can afford to interact with them one-on-one. This ties in to an important point that the Internet revolution enabled: people want to know they are being heard -- whether Arab Spring or the bad state of BIM. 

We operate on a sustainable budget, and so we survive when large publications with huge staff, and expensive printing and distribution models flounder. As I am fond of saying, it was the computer (and then the Internet) that allowed me in 1991 to become a one-man publishing company and handle every task this job involves: subscriptions and advertising; research, writing, and editing; design, publishing, distribution, and marketing; and feedback. As I don't have a lot of expenses, I don't need a big budget.

While I agree that digital-everything is annoying, it is the primary way to survive in this the-Internet-makes-everything-free culture.

- - -

I must add my appreciation for those who gave me advice along the way, just as I was able to help others to get on their way.

 

 

 

Laptop wars! Dell vs HP

 

I've been arguing for a decade now that CPU speeds slammed to a stop around 2010, and as proof my primary desktop computer, on which I get most of my paid-work done, is indeed from 2010.

That just might make me a hypocrite after buying a new laptop last month, to replace one I got five years earlier. As I explained to my wife, there are three reasons to buy a new computer:

• Specs - there are sufficiently improved specs; the subject of this article
• Pricing - the laptop is on sale and so is reasonably priced; I look for machines in the $1,500 price range (cheap laptops just aren't worth it)
• Timing - as the laptop is a business expense, it has to fit in with my company's tax planning

My five-year-old laptop was (at the time) the top-of-the-line HP Spectre 2-in-1 (hinges fold all the way back), which still works well. Well, one of the 360-degree hinges is getting wobbly and it concerned me that a Windows 10 update was delayed for a year due to Microsoft having problems with the computer's audio driver. Also, the silver-colored keys drove me nuts, as they were hard to read, whether or not the back-lighting was on. Imagine lit-up letters on a light background; HP still sells laptops with that dreadful combination.

 

Ordering a New Laptop: Not So Easy

I initially ordered a new HP Spectre from Best Buy, but Best Buy had only two pix of the device, so then to my horror I later found it had silver keys. I cancelled the order. I found one on the HP Canada site with black keys, and ordered it ($1,550). 

Then I recalled that my son-in-law had bought a Dell over an HP. Dells tend to be invisible, as they are sold only through Dell's Web site and so make no appearance on regular outlets. I took a look at the Dell Canada Web site, and I found an equivalent model to the HP for $1,250 (incl. tax), and -- even better! -- I could pay with PayPal. I bought the Inspiron 2-in-1, sat back, and waited for it to arrive. 

A phone call from Dell told me I needed to re-order it, as they could not process my payment through PayPal. Odd, given that PayPal from my end had no problem with me. Maybe Dell didn't want to pay the PayPal fees for a laptop that was on sale ($200 off). So I reordered it.

PayPal still waiting on Dell to complete my order, six weeks later

 

With that done, I got back to HP the very same day to cancel my order for the Spectre. The nice lady on the phone reassured me the order was cancelled. A few days later, I received an email from HP telling that the laptop was... on its way to me. Back on the phone to HP: even though I had been told the order was cancelled, it nevertheless shipped the next day. No worries: HP has free return shipping, complete with paperwork that the UPS shipping office signs as proof I had dropped it off. Once HP gets back the laptop, they take "20 bank days" to refund the credit card.

The laptop arrived from HP, I checked with friends in case any wanted to buy it off me (none did), and by week's end returned the unit, unopened. In the subsequent weeks, HP sent me four more emails letting me know the exciting news that the laptop had shipped and was on its way to me! All fake news, of course.  The refund, eventually, showed up.

The Dell Inspiron 14 7405 2-in-1 that I ended up with

 

New Dell vs. New HP

So, by paying $200 less, what did I get for my money? All of the main specs were similar, such as 14" touch screen, black backlit keys, 16GB RAM, 512GB solid state drive, and Webcam shutter. Here are the primary differences: 

CPU

• Dell: 8-core AMD CPU with AMD discrete graphics
• HP: 4-core Intel CPU with Intel integrated graphics

Dell wins: The eight cores are useless for CAD and word processing, but double the speed of processing video files over four cores.

 

SD Slot

• Dell: full-size SD memory card slot
• HP: microSD slot

Dell wins: It can take both sizes of cards, with an adapter.

 

Metal Body and Color

• Dell: plastic bottom, rest of the body is metal; color is different, a dark brown called "Sandstorm"
• HP: the entire body is metal; color is the standard silver

Dell wins: no more freezing cold laptop on my lap! And the brown body is a nice change from corporate conformity.

 

Stylus

• Dell: stylus is an optional extra
• HP: stylus included

Tie: I find I don't use a stylus, so its presence or lack thereof is irrelevant.

 

Microphone Icon

The Dell shows a microphone icon in the taskbar anytime a program runs that can record, such as Zoom. This acts as a nice warning and lets me toggle off the mic easily. Not having opened the new HP, I don't know if it does the same. 

- - -

Overall, the trade-off was, for me, worthwhile. Also, I found the styling of the new HP r-e-a-l-l-y ugly. I don't know how long I could have stayed with that black and gold scheme.

The grarish styling of the HP Spectre that I ended up not buying

 

New Dell vs Old HP

So, Ralph, if you claim there is no need to get new hardware, why did you get new hardware? Well, Ralph, allow me to explain.

The biggest bugaboo of the five-year-old HP Spectre was its (lack of) battery life. I only ever got four hours out of it. Normally, not a problem, but when I was at a conference where conference organizers forgot to provide power outlets, the frustration level reached ten zillion percent.

The latest CPUs double the battery life and laptops now sport the oval-shaped USB-C ports, which I found from my Acer Chromebook to be very useful.

Here is what the new Dell does that the old HP doesn't:

• Battery lasts twice as long (about eight hours)
• Twice the RAM: 16GB vs 8GB
• USB ports charge devices really fast, unlike the old HP whose frustrating charge rate was more like a trickle
• Keyboard has black keys, so I see them now in any lighting situation
• The USB-C port takes a universal dongle (purchased earlier for the Chromebook) that lets me attach ethernet, additional USB devices, and yet another monitor.
• The old HP made it very difficult to turn off the mic; the new Dell shows a mic icon for easy access.
• Plastic bottom!

So that's what my $1,250 gets me. The old HP is stored away as a backup laptop.

There is one drawback to the new Dell compared to the old HP. The old HP had both full-size HDMI and mini-DisplayPort outputs, so I could attach two monitors easily. The Dell has the full-size HDMI for one external monitor, but I would need to use a dongle to attach a second one (thru the USB-C port). In reality, this is not a drawback, as I never use two external monitors, except to prove that I can.

- - -

A Final Oddity: I cannot find my laptop at the Dell Web site searching through the Dell Website's Search function. I can find it only by using Bing search externally to Dell.ca.

- -

Final Oddity II, to quote Final Fantasy: I never knew Dell gives out Dell Bucks (well, they call it Dell Advantage), which is 3% towards your next purchase. What could I do with $33? I perused the site and found the Dell twist mouse: $25 off on sale, plus $33 off from my Dell Bucks. You twist it one way to flatten it out for travel, twist it 180 degrees the other way for use, and to turn it on. 

 

  

 

Understanding the Divide

Centers vs Borders

---

What the Center was telling the Border, one year ago

---

 

Martin Gurri's The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (2018 edition) is the textbook for explaining the discombobulation that we peoples of the world feel today. We want discord to go away; he says it can't. Here's why.

Gurri divides the world into two: a Center made of elites (gov’t, media, academia, corporations) directing their decrees and products at the Border, which is made up of all others. In the past, Border people tended to accept what was pushed at them -- limited policy options, limited news, limited job possibilities -- so much so that they became to be known as the Silent Generation. Then technology came along.

Technology allows the Border to think and act and produce independently of the Center. The Center is furious at its diminished power, and so we hear it lashing out, accusing us of being fascists, bitter clingers, deniers, and deplorables. In turn, the Border sees the Center as inept, thieving, self-obsessed, unaccountable, and hypocritical.

A second key to understanding the split is that it is not between left and right; we see the Border and the Center on all sides of political thought. In the USA, for instance, we have seen Socialists fighting their Democratic party and Tea Partiers fighting their Republican party. My wife notes that Trump may well have came to power by taking advantage of the Center-Border divide: he is a Center person who made his appeal to people living on the Border. It explains Brexit, which was not so much a desire to leave the ultra-Center EU but a revolt against the Center in England.

 

No Winners

Gurri’s further point is that even though the Border now has power, it is unable to replace the Center, because only the Center is organized enough to run things, no matter how ineptly. As for the Border, it is too diffuse to develop and implement policy with sufficiently broad appeal. Both need each other, even as they despise each other.

The lack of cohesion is due also the the inability of the Center to receive feedback from the Border. Even when it does, the near-unlimited variety of demands made by the Border overwhelms the ability of the Center to respond.

Closer to home, this explains why large CAD vendors are tone-deaf to the concerns of users, whether the Revit-Autodesk conflict or the Solidworks-Dassault disconnect. 

The solution? There is none. Gurri thinks the current discontent is unresolvable, and may well carry on for decades. There is no unity to be had. He hopes that a new form of democracy will eventually emerge, but he (like me) says we can never predict the future, not even tomorrow.

 

Women vs. Government

An excellent Border vs. Center example took place this week. The political and medical elite of the Center in Canada's province of British Columbia announced that 55-65 year-olds could get the AstraZenica vaccine from local pharmacies. My wife and her friends in the age range were conflicted, because other elites at the Center (primarily from Europe) has been declaring AZ ineffective, dangerous, age-restricted, and the cause of blood clots. 

It was the death-by-blood-clot that concerned the women the most, as women are affected by them more often than men. Their conflicted choice was between suffering from coronavirus or from a blood clot. So these people on the Border used technology to confer through their smartphones and texting apps to make a consensus decision, independent of the Center.

(In the end, they decided that it was more likely for them to catch the virus than a clot. With the decision made, they then learned that just 13,000 doses were available for the 490,000 persons who are in their age group.)

 

 

Our Cloud Development for 3D BIM

by Alexey Ershov

 

Viewing 3D models in Web browsers became popular in the mid-2010s with the introduction of WebGL that allowed the display of sophisticated graphics. New Web protocols and JavaScript then made it possible to build 3D Web applications with advanced logic and interactive user interfaces. 

Cloud-based BIM (building information modeling) became a primary target for development, thanks to the big data volumes that are typically generated by BIM projects. Big data requires big storage. As well, BIM involves collaboration between designers working on specific areas and layers of buildings, bridges, civil, and industrial projects. These requirements correspond well with the capabilities of the cloud from established large-scale platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS),  Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Added to this, there are only a small number of competitors in the BIM software market (as compared to the MCAD market). All this propelled interest from established companies and startups to develop brand-new BIM-in-cloud software services and platforms.

LEDAS immediately became involved in complex 3D Web projects. Our first client asked us to develop a BIM cloud product that combined architecture, structures, mechanical, engineering design, and related modules. The product focused on providing wide support for BIM entities typically found in Autodesk Revit and Solibri Model Checker, an IFC-based quality control solution. By using a 3D modeling kernel, we made it possible for the BIM product to have all the capabilities needed for users to create and edit sophisticated shapes. 

To meet additional requirements, such as fire prevention, ventilation, and accessibility, we developed a dedicated BIM verification module for the 3D BIM application. The verification module also took care of collision detection. Thanks to integrated 3D scanning and point cloud data management, we covered the later stages in a BIM lifecycle, including dynamic construction control and maintenance of buildings and constructions. 

The solution we developed was a fully functioning 6D BIM application, with detailed planning for costs, resources, tasks, workers, and dates.

 

Our Platform for 3D Web Projects

Following this, we decided to meet the need of the contemporary CAD market by developing our own 3D browser platform, with BIM and MCAD as the primary targets. So we created LEDAS Cloud Platform (LCP), a multi-user 3D-on-Web system that includes collaboration and supports many files formats. You can get more details about LCP on its dedicated page.

Since then, several companies have licensed LCP to speed up their Web BIM product development. Some of them are focused on civil BIM projects in the cloud, while others were more interested in using the 3D Web for industrial systems and applications. 

LCP is just a good start for the licensees. As most of them want to provide a richer set of functions to their customers, they ordered additional 3D Web development services from LEDAS. The goal for them is, by adding new functions and features, to shape the BIM products according to their vision. We fulfilled their requests by writing code in Javascript on the client side, and in C++ and Python code on the server side. 

For example, one of the products is focused on large industrial models that are hard to visualize in 3D Web environments due to memory limitations. To solve this problem, we at LEDAS added LOD (levels of detail) technology to our 3D Web offering. 

 

Alexey Ershov is CEO of Ledas Group

 

 

2 men who influenced my professional life

Kneiling and Hirsch

 

Each of us have our ways by which we navigate the world. Sometimes, someone comes along who influences us in a better way. For me, there were two men who I appreciated in my teen years, whose thoughts went on to influence my work in engineering and technical publishing. 

Neither of them knew me, as I lived in northern Canada and they were columnists in American magazines. Over time, as I read their work, part of their worldview become part of mine.

 

Trains Magazine

I was a model railroader during my teen years, and I say that model railroading kept me sane during those years that are tumultuous to many. I faithfully read Model Railroader and Trains magazines, both published by the very fine people at Kalmbach Publishing. 

Among the regular columnists in Trains magazine was The Professional Iconoclast, John Kneiling (d. 2000). Little did I know that the word meant "icon smasher," nor, as a young teenager, did his columns made any sense to me. I ignored them. I couldn't, however, ignore the letters of outrage that appeared every so often.

People were having their oxen gored and I eventually forced myself to learn why. It was tough going, but in my later teen years I finally comprehended what he was saying. Mr Kneiling advocated new ways of doing things that went against the popular grain of thinking.

 

Those were terrible times for railroads in the early 1970s. They were going bankrupt, being bought up, and in the USA! were even nationalized (Conrail and Amtrak). For the first time in my life, I vicariously experienced in real time a fast-moving shift from an assumed monopoly to weak wannabe.

Naturally, the railroading community was trying to stay optimistic, but he punctured their wishful thinking. "Wow!" I thought as I finally caught on to what he was saying. For instance, he advocated that railroads adopt a new concept he called "unit trains." They would have just one kind of car (oil or coal or grain cars) and travel only between A and B. Standard methodology today, but in 1975 it was an iconoclastic idea.

From him, I learned that it's okay to be right when everyone else is wrong.

 

Stereo Review Magazine

In my university years, I wanted to know all there was to know about stereos, and eventually became a no-charge consultant helping fellow students buy the best stereo for the money they budgeted -- typically $400 to $800, or about $1,200 in today's money. (Met one of my girlfriends that way.) In the late 1970s, this meant a receiver (pre-amp, amp, tuner), record player, perhaps a cassette deck, headphones, and a pair of large speakers.

I read Stereo Review magazine religiously, absorbing all there was to know. The technical reviewer, Julian Hirsch (d. 2004), impressed me. He had created a standard set of tests for equipment, and then dispassionately reported the results. Mr Hirsch took no guff from furious advertisers.

He was anti-subjective. I remember Bob Carver's outrage at Mr Hirsch's statement there was no effect to be detected from Carver's new holographic amplifier -- an early attempt to create surround sound. (Later, in 1980, I nevertheless bought the Carver M-400 amp, just because its cube shape was so cool.) 

Mr Hirsch's dedication to reporting on the results from consistent equipment testing impressed me no end, and that a single man could stand up to the combined forces of an entire industry. For him, the user came first.

When I became technical editor of CADalyst magazine, I adopted his methods, and even managed to get a couple of advertisers angry when my results contradicted claims in their full-page color ads. For me, the user came first.

- - -

There are, of course, others who influenced me in good ways and, sadly, sometimes in bad. But these two men are two of my early heroes, whose writings influenced me to this day.

 

 

3 amazing functions in Opera Web browser

Nifty 

 

I've been using the Opera Web browser since v4, back when its boasts was that it could fit on a 1.44MB floppy disc. In addition to being not-Internet Explorer and not-Firefox (the two browsers with the largest market share back then), it had a developer mode that displayed all the text of a Web site. This was especially useful for reading sites that otherwise required one to sign up.

After v12, Opera had a split inside the company, with the founder going off to start up the Vivaldi browser, saying he wanted to return the browser to its Opera roots. Vivaldi is still around but I find it sluggish compared with Opera, and so use it only when I need a not-Opera browser.

Following the split, the Opera company needed new engine for displaying Web sites, and settled on Blink, the Web rendering engine developed by Google for Chrome; later, Microsoft did the same with its Edge browser. Blink is kind of like Parasolid or C3D: it is the kernel that does the basic work, with developers adding features on top.

Which gets me to the the point of this post: Opera has developed some pretty nifty stuff on top of Blink, most of which I don't care about. It does, however, have three functions that I find invaluable. Here they are:

 

Copy and Insert

Back when travel was common, I would blog CAD conferences live. One onerous task is inserting photos and other images into the blog commentary. Opera makes this easier by recognizing the most-recent image I've copied to the Clipboard during the Insert Image operation.

Here is how it works:

1. Copy an image to the Clipboard. I use Windows Snapshot Maker v3.5, an old version, because the newer ones are overladen with features. (Do you know how hard it is to make a screen grab of screengrab software?)

 

2. In the blogging software running on Opera, click the Insert Image button (or equivalent in your software).

 

3. In the Insert Images dialog box, click the Choose Files button. Notice that Opera displays the image in the Clipboard, as well as the three files that it downloaded most recently. (To choose any file on your computer, click Show All Files to access the File Manager.)

 

4. Chose the Clipboard image, then click Insert Image(s) (or equivalent in your software) to place the image in the blog posting.

What this means is that I no longer have to save an image as a PNG file to disc before inserting it into the blog. Saving steps means faster blogging.

 

Editing Speed Dial Images

This feature is really obscure, but if you are as heavy user of Speed Dial, then it can be handy. Speed Dial displays large icons on the "desktop" of Opera. Think of it as a visual bookmark. Here is part of mine:

 

Notice that some bookmarks show as words, some as images. Images are really handy, such as in the third row, to identify the highway cam locations. For most others, though, I prefer the name of the site, as too many images become conflicting.

I was setting up a new laptop with Opera and found that every Speed Dial image came up as an image from the associated Web site. Some of them were pretty annoying to look at  day after day. It turns out that Opera lets you customize the image for each Speed Dial entry. (I just learned this last week.) Here's how:

1. You add a site to Speed Dial by clicking the heart icon.

2. Notice the tiny arrows on either side of the image, the Wikipedia logo in this figure. Click the arrows to walk through the images Opera found on the Web page. Opera lets you use any of them as the Speed Dial icon.

3. Click the left arrow to go immediately to the text version.4. Click Done.

 

Revealing Passwords

Okay, this last one is somewhat controversial. We all know what a pain passwords are, and given the controversies surrounding password software that keeps track of them for you, I use the tried and tested method of maintaining passwords in an old-style address booklet.

 

It works pretty good, except for the times a Web site demands that I change my password and then I forget to update the address booklet. Or I sign up at a new site and forget to update the address booklet. Taking the Web site's offer to reset the password is a pain, because then I need to invent yet another  new one. Et cetera.

Like all other browsers, Opera records passwords (if you allow it to), but then also permits you to see them. Here's how:

1. Click the big-red O, and then from the menu choose Settings.

 

2. In the Settings dialog box, look for the Search Settings field on the upper right, and then enter 'password'. This is a speedy way to get to the settings that involve passwords.

 

3. Click on Passwords. Notice the Saved Passwords section. All of your saved passwords are listed, and are all blanked out with a row of dots. Notice that each password has an eye icon next to it.

 

4. To reveal a password, click on the eye icon.

 

5. Click the ... overflow menu button to reveal several options, such as Copy Password, which copies the word to the Clipboard.

 

6. Final trick: click the ... overflow menu across from Saved Passwords. The Export passwords option saves all passwords as a CSV file (short for 'comma-separated values'). 

 

7. You can open the CSV file in a spreadsheet program like Libre Calc. 

 

There is, unfortunately, no option to import this file into Opera running on another computer.

 

People tracking is so insidious

Enuff already

 

It was bad enough to see how many corporations track us by doing something as innocuous reading just the headlines at a government-funded Web site like Deutsche Welle (the German international broadcaster). The list I show below (found at dw.com/en/european-union-general-data-protection-regulationgdpr-valid-may-25-2018/a-18265246) is about 2/3 of the data skimmers DW employs.

It got worse when at a trial last week we learned that Google still tracks us when we run its browser in incognito mode -- never mind what it states: 

It's what Google doesn't say in its incognito statement that's alarming.

- - -

It is the nice things that hit me the most. Here are some of them.

Web sites switched from asking us to provide a username to our email addresses as the login. Great innovation, as it was one less thing for us to remember. Except: by using our email address, data skimmers can match which sites we visit.

Facebook was thrilled to announce it has now scraped one billion images uploaded by us to Instagram to feed the hungry maw of its AI image recognition code -- automatically, with no human intervention needed or wanted. 

When  Google and others helpfully suggest that we sync our data between browsers, it's so that they can continue skimming our data as we move from one device to another. They want to match who we are on our home computer with what we do on our mobile devices, and back again.

When Google and Apple suggest we go onto their family plans for sharing Android apps and iTunes music, it's so that they can tie together members of families in their data skimming code.

Google's latest is to make cookies more private by placing each of us into similar-interest groupings. It will still feed our data to advertising agencies. Privacy groups are still working out what the scam is, as Google is focused only how to increase the data it collects from us to sell on to others.

 

CAD for ChromeOS is Possible in 2021

More popular than MacOS

 

There are no native CAD applications for ChromeOS. 

This need not be the case, as proven by Krita, a native Android program meant for tablets that runs as well as a native program on Chromebooks. Here's the point I want to make: Krita for Android is not a reduced-function version of the one that runs on Windows and MacOS. It is full-function.

CAD software written for Android, iOS, and Web browsers are all reduced-function versions, even from leaders in this field like Graebert and Autodesk. 

ChromeOS was originally envisioned as a browser-based operating system, and I found the original Chromebook (from Samsung) pretty lame. I gave up on it, and so did major software vendors.

More recently, Google make the big breakthrough by allowing non-browser-based and Android apps to run like native programs on Chromebooks. it has become a viable operating system for professionals.

- - -

Android tablets have suffered in the market, as manufacturers churn out lame, under-powered models. The high-end models are over-priced for what you get. This problem does not exist among Chromebooks and Chromeboxes.

Here, you get hardware with strong CPUs (think Intel i5 and i7) and large amounts of RAM (think 8GB) all for under $1,000 -- complete with 14" high-resolution touch screen (think 2256x1504); full-size, backlit keyboard; and interactive stylus. I paid $700 last year for such a model. This kind of high-end device is not available from Apple, at any price.

The best part is that these Chromebooks/boxes run Android flawlessly, despite the naysaying from the Applephilia tech media.

- - -

So my suggestion is that we could run full versions of ARES Commander or BricsCAD Pro on Chromebooks by porting the Linux version to Android. This works, because Android is based on Linux. Autodesk, on the other hand, lacks a Linux version of AutoCAD, and so cannot be part of the party. But it has the resources to make one, should it so be inclined. 

In theory, the Linux versions of BricsCAD and ARES can run on recent Chromebook models, but in practice I have found that it is a dog to get Linux running (hello command-line!) and then programs run too slowly to be useful.

The primary problem, it turns out, is 3D, which tends to be supported weakly by the hardware and software in portable devices. Tasks like rendering and ACIS solids modeling are usually farmed out to the cloud.

On the other hand, Google has committed to upgrading ChromeOS monthly, and new CPUs from new foundries are arriving on the market to dramatically strengthen the software. Perhaps 3D graphics in portable CAD will follow the transition cameras made on smartphones, where the processing of images has moved from hardware to software. 

The year 2020 was the year ChomeOS outsold MacOS. But Chromebooks suffer from the Android-customer problem: the laptops tend to be cheap and, as a result, so are the customers. Apple sells less product but charges more, resulting in a customer base that spends even more to accessorize their iBling.

CAD vendors are keen to make customers-for-life out of school children. With classrooms and school-from-homes filling with Chromebooks, 2021 is the year for CAD software vendors to review their product lineup and see how ChromeCAD fits in.

Now take a look at Krita.

I never bought the ZX81

$99 proved too expensive

 

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Sinclair ZX81, the second generation of the earliest affordable home computer -- and a distance cousin of our smartphones.

The computer I never bought (image credit oldcomputer.info)

 

Inventor Clive Sinclair specialized in small devices. I recall picking up a brochure of his diminutive calculator while in England in 1974. He also designed a tiny, unsuccessful automobile.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I watched the personal computer scene with its confusing array of standards -- S-100, CP/M -- making me hesitant to take the plunge. Part of the problem was that the prices were not personal; a typical desktop computer (as we call them now) fitted out with all the kit came to over $10,000 in today's dollars.

Timex brought the British-made ZX81 to North America, the idea being that the maker of low-cost quality-made watches would be just as successful with low-cost home computers. The problem ended up being that the ZX81 was not quality-made.

Nevertheless, I was desperate for my own computer. For a couple of years I had been programming my HP 41CV calculator (even got the overpriced card reader for it!), but was bumping up against its limitations.

For a time, I considered the ZX81, as it was just $99 in Canada. But then I added up all the stuff I would need to add to actually make it work, such as the 16KB RAM module. For instance, I did not own a tv, so I'd have to buy one. The final tally came to $500 for a computer that only displayed monochrome uppercase text and used a membrane keyboard. I decided against it.

Six months after the ZX81 was released, IBM shook the industry with the release of its PC for $1,500. It de facto established the technical standards still in use today. But that price tag also got you just the box and motherboard: no floppy or disk drives (you were expected to supply your portable cassette recorder, no monitor (you were expected to supply your home tv set), and only 64KB RAM. Fully kitted out, it came to $6,000 at time when a starting engineer's wage was around $10/hr -- so, four months salary. (Last week I bought a new high-end laptop for four days wages.)

Then in early 1983 a local computer dealer put their Victor 9000 kind-of-compatible-with-IBM personal computers on sale, and I took a loan from my parent to acquire it. Buying the Victor helped get me the job at CADalyst magazine and launch my lifetime writing career in CAD.

- - -

The link to our cell phones?

The success of the ZX8x-series in England caused the BBC to commission a company called Acorn to produce the BBC Micro home computer for viewers to purchase and follow along how-to-use-a-computer series broadcast at the time. Acorn was the company that later produced the ARM CPU design, used today in every single smartphone, except for some older ones that used CPUs from Intel and nVidia's unsuccessful forays into handheld computing.

 

Why Apple is taking on Facebook

Paid vs. free

 

Apple and Facebook are in battle with each other. As Techmeme editorialized a Wall Street Journal headline this morning:

Sources shed light on the increasingly personal battle between Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg, who in private reportedly said “we need to inflict pain” on Apple.

There are the overt reasons:

• Apple is increasing the privacy of its customers, blocking Facebook from harvesting data
• And so conversely Facebook is increasingly being blocked from profiting from Apple customer data

There are the covert reasons:

• Apple doesn't need advertising revenues, as its BMW-priced products and service bring in more revenue than it needs
• Facebook needs advertising revenues, as it is an otherwise free service

Reasons Facebook gives are nonsense, that Apple users won't "benefit" from targeted ads, and that small business will suffer.

Left unsaid is that Apple continues to harvest data on users. We don't know what it does with it, as its ad system is not widely lauded.

We can understand Facebook's desperation. While Apple has less than 10% worldwide marketshare in smartphones (50% in USA), its user base is wealthier than the Android user base and so Apple customers spend more. 

Even as Apple cuts off Facebook, Google could do the same to Facebook (and Apple to Google), never mind the secret Facebook-Google agreement to favor each other. Basing your business model on free is precarious.

So why is Apple taking on Facebook? Being pro-privacy looks good in today's surveillance society. As Matt Mireles (@mattmireles) put it, "Tim Cook might be the biggest weapon we have in trying to save our democracy."

 

 

PTC to start charging for free Onshape ent-edu version

There's profits to be made from them there million(s)

 

CAD vendors often give free licenses to educational institutions in an attempt to hook young people on the software early. I've never felt that this is a valid tactic, for when young people enter the workforce, they use the CAD program the boss tells them to use.

Still, boasting about the number of educational users is a pretty good way to goose user numbers. Solidworks, for instance, could at one time be heard boasting of six million users, but five million of those were educational. (Today, the company says it has 3,246,750 users, a number that appears to me to include the low-cost DraftSight DWG editor.) Keep in mind that 6:1 ratio for the next time you hear a CAD vendor lauding its total user number: dividing the number by six gets us a good guess at the number of commercial users -- a.k.a. actual paying users.

During last week's quarterly conference call with financial analysts, PTC boasted of exceeding one million educational users of Onshape:

As the COVID pandemic unfolded, we saw a real opportunity to help schools and universities, because we have the only true school-from-home CAD solution that works on any device with no installed footprint.

PTC's academic team decided to pivot their focus to Onshape and set an aggressive goal to try to reach one million total education users by the end of fiscal [September] 2021. (To put that in perspective, it's double the number of users that were participating in our education program across all PTC products at that time.)

I am happy to report that already in January, we've exceeded the goal of one million total Onshape education users -- nine months ahead of schedule.

Onshape's Web site, however, boasts of  "millions of students and educators worldwide use Onshape’s online CAD platform." It leaves me wondering where the difference lies between "one million total educational users" and "millions of students and educators."

 

How Many Commercial Users Today?

Our rule-of-thumb implies that Onshape should have 167 thousand commercial users. In this case, however, the rule-of-thumb needs to be tossed out, because we know that Onshape had only five thousand commercial users when it was acquired by PTC in 2019.

To figure out the number of paying users of Onshape PTC has now (well, at the end of December, 2020), the company makes us do some math: 

Onshape had record bookings, up more than 150% from its initial quarter at PTC one year ago, including a nice balance of new logo activity and expansion.

So, 5,000 x 2.5 (which is what 150% means) = 12,500 commercial users. This number is minuscule compared to the couple of million Solidworks users that Onshape at its launch five years ago had targeted.

When corporate executives talk with financial analysts, they use special insider language. Here is what that sentence means, translated from PTC-ese into everyday English:

• from its initial quarter at PTC = PTC acquired Onshape on November 1, 2019, which fell into PTC's financial quarter that spans October to December. 
• nice balance = roughly 50% of new seats to new customers, and half to existing ones
• new logo activity = new customers
• expansion = increased sales to existing customers

So, about 3,500 additional licenses to existing customers and 3,500 to new ones.

Having 80x more educational than commercial users does makes sense. An online CAD program like Onshape looks attractive to schools and universities as an quick solution for remote CAD learning. Schools and teachers are desperate for easy technology solutions to the sudden (and unexpected) demand for teaching remotely -- something for which before now most were never prepared. 

Quite frankly, once you learn the basics of one MCAD system, you've learned the basics of all of them; they all pretty much work the same. Most non-technical schools usually teach just the basics of CAD anyhow. So, sure, get students to run Onshape: it's hassle-free, it's got on-line assistance for learning MCAD, and it's free. But not for long.

 

Less Free Ride for Education

Still, having one million copies of Onshape accessing servers owned by Amazon Web Services costs PTC a lot of cloud-rental funds. That is the fundamental flaw to the otherwise-lauded move to the cloud: it's become oh-so-expensive for software vendors to offer free versions. This is a big change from when it cost software firms nothing in having free software running on people's desktop computers. 

PTC told financial analysts that schools need to start paying:

We've not been charging educational institutions for the software. We had a program that you can use it for free for the first year.

So we do anticipate that, as this school year ramps up and we move into next year, we're going to get a pretty decent conversion rate to pay.

If this is news to you, it is not surprising. Onshape's home page does not make plain the temporary nature of free-use plan:

Turns out it's not all educational users that will have to start paying. It's just those who want the assistance in running Onshape thru PTC's Education Enterprise plan. Another page on the Web site explains:

On the one hand, we have Onshape being presented as the no-hassle solution to easily using and learning MCAD remotely; on the other, there is the suggestion that Onshape is so complex that schools need to pay to have it administered for them.

 

To Goose Sales

With commercials sales lackluster, it comes perhaps as no surprise that PTC has put some pressure on the Onshape team by having created a new division at the company. It comes with the rather generic name of SaaS Business Unit, and it looks like this:

(Arena is being called Onshape's Windchill.) 

"It's a business unit that's quite complete," explains PTC. Here is what the new division is responsible for:

• Research and development
• Marketing
• Profit and loss
• Growth targets

The only thing that PTC will handle for the new division is acquisitions. As the ceo of PTC summed up:

That's a business, and the way I look at it they are paving the path for a future PTC.

 

Summing Up

PTC seems to be counting on converting most of those Onshape enterprise educational users this fall. It will be interesting to see how many schools pay up. To avoid paying, teachers can have students run the free version, and conductt their teaching through Google Meet and the like.

When 30-year-old PTC acquired Onshape, it enthused that this was the future of PTC. At the time, I warned that PTC's eye would wander in short order, as it has a history of enthusing over a new technology before being beguiled by the next. With the acquisition of Arena, Onshape's CAD segment already looks to be relegated to third place in the hierarchy, next to Vuforia AR software and partner tools.

 

 

The wave predicted by no one

They're occupying Wall Street all over again

 

When I first became self-employed, I read widely to understand what I was doing. The most reassuring book I read was Alvin Tofler's PowerShift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century. Mr Tofler (d. 2016) was a futurist, who with his wife wrote thick books on what the future could bring, his best known title being FutureShock.

In PowerShift, he told me that what I was doing -- a newly self-employed one-man technical writer, editor, typesetter, publisher -- was the right thing to be doing, because I represented the future. Cheap technology would allow the self-employed to react nimbly to changes in market conditions in ways corporations cannot.

In that, he was right, at least for me. My business took off, and I survived, while over the years established technical book publishing companies shut down around me.

On the 20th anniversary (2011) of me being self-employed, I thought I could celebrate by rereading the book that gave me that initial boost of confidence. It was terrible. The book's most spectacular failure was not predicting the impact of the Internet, even though it was already around, albeit not yet easily available to the general public. I stopped reading the book, but still have it on my bookshelf as a tribute to what it did for me.

 

The Rise of Micro-wars

Humans, not being machines, err. This is how we learn. When we fail, we figure out ways to not fail the next time around -- usually. PowerShift showed me that a confident, lauded writer like Tofler could rationally explain future developments that sounded right, yet be proven wrong as history unveiled itself in ways unexpected by us. History is independent of our forecasts. Which brings us to today.

Mr Tofler was correct in some predictions, such as forecasting that technology would allow the advent of the micro-war, which we today call terrorism in some cases. The great truth he uncovered is that technology leverages individuals, like me, to have as much impact as corporations and governments.

In light of this, the havoc wrecked by the guy running r/WallStreetBets should not surprise us. He is just one more manifestation of technology being leveraged by individuals into yet another wave that we can call "populist," which has been crashing against the walls of globalism for a decade now. 

Until now, populism has been regional, allowing globalists to sniffily condemn it as just-like-nazi nationalism. Brexit, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, Thai anti-royal protests, Occupy Wall Street, Front National, Donald Trump, French and Dutch voters rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, and so on. It should not perhaps be unexpected that populism finds itself most popular in the haughty less-than-democratic European Union, and as a result the list of European countries that aren't home to populism is approximately zero.

These movements took on government. Corporations had to be next.

 

Populism Goes International

When we techno-ists smugly predicted that software would come to eat everything, we had not an inkling as to how far its acidic effect would spread. As we were in-the-know, we felt immune from its effects. It is, however, now eating at our most precious procession, our retirement funds.

This year the wave grew two-fold as populism went international, and took on corporations.

The initial wave of international populism was quite unintentional. As resentment grew against corporations abusing us thru their obsessive data collection, it became a question of how, not when, the revolt would launch. Facebook, in its arrogance, made the "mistake" of openly telling its two billion WhatsApp users that yet more data would be siphoned from them and sold to bidders (Google, mostly). Facebook gave users two choices: agree, or be cut-off from family and friends (except in Europe, which has an aggressive data protection law).

Given the dilemma between submission or isolation, users choose escape. My family and I switched to Threema. The good thing about the Internet is that most services are replaceable; WhatsApp with Signal, Google Search with Bing, and so on. With tens of millions of users switching in mere days, Facebook put its plan on hold for a few months while it scrambled to figure out how to stem the international populist revolt.

The wave has not yet crashed on its beach. The government of India demanded Facebook take on European-style data protection for Indians. Other governments, seeing an opening to be popular in the eyes of voters, are also tut-tutting over Facebook breaking its four-year-old promise to never access the data generated unknowingly by WhatsApp users.

 

Occupy Wall Street Reawakens

Occupy Wall Street was a 2011 attempt to protest against the protection given by governments to financial corporations that were labeled "too big too fail." It was colorful, due to the many tents pitched and so the media loved it. Underneath, however, it was a paled effort which collapsed quickly once infrared sensors revealed that nearly all tents stood empty overnight: there was, in fact, no occupation.

The tents of Occupy Wall Street (image source myamericanodyssey.com)

 

(Canada, by contrast, took the opposite approach. The conservative government applied a rather socialist solution by protecting the small investor, instead of banks, by guaranteeing deposits. The guarantees gave individuals the confidence to keep their funds in the banks, saving Canada from the ravages of an otherwise-worldwide recession. Being a conservative government, it receives no credit for the action.)

Just as rage simmers over unwanted data collection by Internet giants, so too rage simmers over gains by billionaires and financial firms seen as unjustified during the pandemic, a.k.a. China's Chernobyl. The Facebook brouhaha was barely down to a simmer when Occupy Wall Street II emerged from the keyboard of a single person.

 

Killing the Shorts

To take down Wall Street, the Reddit writer r/WallStreetBets engaged his 3.5 million (or maybe 2.0 million) followers to take advantage of free share trading services offered by the likes of RobinHood. He was angry at the favoritism shown by government in protecting financial giants while amateur investors can go bankrupt.

Shares in lame companies like GameStop and Nokia rose as much as tenfold in a few days. As millions of amateur investors bought ever more shares, share prices were forced up, killing the shorts.

Shorting a stock is where an investor bets a share will fall to a specific price by a certain day. If the guessed-at price is higher than the actual price on that day, the investor profits. If not, then the investor loses. If the investor leveraged the purchase (borrowed money against the share purchase, and so only paid 10% in cash, say), then they really lose: they have to pay the higher price for the shares and pay back the loan, resulting in bankruptcy, possibly.

GameStop was seen as the Blockbuster of the 2020s, a chain of five thousand retail stores in multiple countries still selling games in outmoded physical format. A few months ago, its share price was around $3 and some investors borrowed money to short the stock, confidently assuming that they would profit handsomely when the company eventually pulled a Blockbuster to send the share price into the pennies, perhaps.

$GME share price over the last year

 

r/WallStreetBets wanted to crush short sellers who profit on suffering firms. He and his followers drove the price of  $GME (GameStop) from $30 to $300 in just a few days. A firm, whose contract required it to pay the current share price that very week, was in danger of utter collapse. Angering r/WallStreetBets further, a couple friends loaned the firm several billion dollars to stay afloat.

Just as Silicon Valley moved quickly -- in just one day! -- to quell discussion of problems that may have occurred during the November USA federal election, Wall Street moved quickly to quell the mass share purchases. Reddit and RobinHood shut down the action -- or, according to some theories, were pressured to shut down by their investors from Wall Street.

RobinHood then borrowed $1 billion to not run afoul of US law, which requires stock trading firms to maintain a float to cover buys, sells, and changes in price during the two days it takes for stock trades to settle.

To retaliate against RobinHood blockage of share trading, the international populists posted negative reviews for RobinHood's app on Google Play Store, driving its star rating down to 1. The next day Google retaliated against its users by removing 95,000 reviews and so bringing bring the apps' star rating back up to 3.5/5. ("Why would Google care?" asked my wife. "I dunno," I replied.)

Yesterday, and...

...today. 

Wall Street suffers far more than Silicon Valley in being unpopular with the general media and politicians, and so the backlash came from conservative and far-left media and politicians alike. Tech writers, of whom too many are beholden to Silicon Valley firms, this time dug eagerly into reasons for the financial blockages.

An hour later, Robin Hood opened up again. During that hour, GameStop yo-yoed between $300 and $200. In the meantime, r/WallStreetBets targeted further firms -- revving up more stocks that had been shorted. Visible financial populists, such as Barstool Sports' Dave Portney, joined in. He came up with this analogy:

 Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest stole from the rich to give to the poor. RobinHood of Silicon Valley resembles more his nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham, who protects the rich from the poor.

 

What's Next?

We don't know what's next, because we cannot predict the future; only fools do so, for short-term profit. Twenty-twenty and 2021 are the proof.

Human nature, on the other hand, is predictable, as it never changes. The greedy will continue to be greedy; the desperate continue to be desperate; the clashes will continue.

The drawback to an interconnected world is that it is interconnected. Technology developed by governments and corporations are the tools with which populism finds it can attack corporations and governments.

International populism is not the kind of globalism that globalists envisioned for enriching themselves, and so they now face the annoying task of scrambling for badly-thought-through preventatives, such as mocking us "The Deplorables" or offering us "The Great Reset."

Based on nature of humans, we can predict that international populism will spread. As it does, we will see the desperate become the greedy that they seek to displace, because that's the way we are. Or as my wife put it, "As the desperate become greedy, the greedy become desperate."

 

Best tweets on today's $GME stock pump

Oh noes!

 

Amateur traders on sites like RobinHood and Reddit are driving up the value of GameStop, best known as a retail computer game seller. As I write this, $GME is up nearly 10x in one week. And as TechCrunch headlined it, "Gamestop, memestocks, and the revenge of the retail trader." The downside: normally-legit fund firms are loosing billions on shorts and are needing support from other firms to avoid collapsing.

Here are some of the best tweets on the topic:

"oh no the wrong people are manipulating the stock market"
     - Brandy Jensen (@brandyljensen)

 

"People looking for an explainer of the Gamestop thing: The Gamestop thing is like Bitcoin, in that they are both just gambling. At least the Gamestop people aren't pretending they're saving the world when they're recruiting more people on Reddit to get addicted to gambling."
     - Ben Collins (@oneunderscor)

 

"Blockbuster watching Reddit drive GameStop stock through the roof"
     - Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson)

 

"[Redit thread] r/WallStreetBets literally could have stopped the 2008 financial crisis"
     - meg yar bitchell (@MeganBitchell)

 

"This GameStock trader with an elegant definition of behavioral economics: 'I just figured that the market is completely irrational and that everything I learned in college means nothing'."
     - Miriam Elder (@miriamelder)

 

"Downloaded Robinhood a few years ago and got a free stock (either via a link my brother sent me or just the beginners free stock). Free stock was gamestop. Well..."
     -@blindside233

 

"Maybe the hedge fund can learn to code"
     - Otto Von Biz Markie (@passionweiss)

 

I'll leave the last word to Ryan Broderick (@broderick): "If our economy is hooked up to an Internet dominated by corporate-owned social platforms that incentivize viral-ity, then, at certain point, commerce and viral-ity just become the same thing. But now online communities are big enough and self-aware enough to move the market how they see fit."

Worst hardware design ever

Oopsie hardware design

 

While I was technical editor of CADalyst (1985-1991), I reviewed an awful lot of hardware -- graphics boards, monitors, display-list software, pen and electrostatic plotters, dot-matrix plotters, laser printers, hardware and software plot cachers, hardware and software scanners -- because at the time CADalyst was at first the only game in town.

Those were remarkable years, in that I could have hands-on experience with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment related to CAD. (The most expensive was a $70,000 E-size super-fast Vidar scanner, that in today's dollars would be closer to $200,000.)

I developed testing methodologies to ensure every product in a class was tested identically, and established a rating system that ran from Not Recommended (almost never awarded) to Highly Recommended (rarely awarded); most products were Recommended, because they worked. I had been influenced by the technical editor at Stereo Review magazine, who was hard-core about consistent and repeatable testing that could be validated. This made some vendors unhappy at him, and at me.

The DraftMaster-line of pen plotters from Hewlett-Packard, for instance, usually received the High Recommended rating from me, because they were very, very good.

HP DraftMaster E-size plotters were the fastest, most accurate, most expensive pen plotters in the late 1980s

 

One of the hardware products to which I gave the dreaded Not Recommended label was a pen plotter from Houston Instruments. This company also produced contact lenses.  Their plotters were considered mid-range, doing a reasonable job at a reasonable price. HI plotters I had tested in the past did a decent job.

Then a new model arrived with a bizarre design flaw. First, though, let me explain how rollerbed pen plotters worked. You manually afixed a sheet of paper (D- or E-size) on the plotter's full-width roller with roller clamps that typically were covered with soft rubber or grit for better gripping power. Remember the word "grit." This model boasted a full-width grid wheel.

When plotting the drawing, the pen head moved side to side, while the large roller pulled the paper back and forth. Diagonal lines were made by moving both at the same time, at varying speeds. The figure shows a typical HI rollerbed plotter of the late 1980s:

Typical Houston Instrument rollerbed plotter from the late 1980s

 

Sometimes, a roller would accidentally spit out the paper, due to an error in the movement codes sent by the CAD software to the plotter, or for some other reason.

As I tested the new arrival, it spat out the paper and continued plotting. Here I discovered the horrific design flaw: the pens were located over the grit wheel, so as the plotter continued its work, it methodically wore down the pen tips on the coarse grit wheel.

Other plotters, including those from HI, located the grit wheel elsewhere in the design. So I had to give this model a Not Recommended rating.

 

 

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.