WorldCAD Access

The Fallout from Autodesk’s Financial Misadventure

Opinion The problem with subscriptions is that they generate a lot of money that companies cannot immediately report as income. Think of it: you pay Autodesk $2,000 to use AutoCAD for one year. Autodesk earns $2,000, but then can report only one-quarter of it ($500) in its next quarterly report. The other $1,500 sit in a bank account and cannot be used. Then, in the next quarter, it can report another $500 and start spending it. And so on. What if there were clever ways to report more of it sooner? Autodesk “incentivized customers” to Accept multi-year upfront billing, typically... Read more →

The CAD Behind Physics

Opinion We take reality for granted. Philosophers, however, wonder what reality really is. The movie The Matrix did a wonderful job of expressing the question: “Is the reality I experience actually real?” The question famously led Descartes to examine the problem and, upon finding a solution, exclaimed, “I think, therefore I am.” Some jokers added, “I think, therefore I am -- I think.” Physics concerns itself with the nature of reality, which seemed straightforward, following the works of Newton, who came up with a brilliant set of formulas that could be used to predict all kinds of motions, such as... Read more →

Software vendors DeSpArAtE for your data

Opinion When Adobe announced this week that it would access user content via “automated and manual methods” to improve its software, Twitter went nutso. Specifically about section 2.2 [source] of the new license: "Our automated systems may analyze your Content... using techniques such as machine learning in order to improve our Services and Software and the user experience." The new ToS [terms of service] were lobbed at users, who, of course, have no choice but to accept the one-sided licensing: "By closing this window [announcing the new ToS], you’ll be unable to continue using Adobe apps and services." Well, users... Read more →

Dassault Unveils 15-year Plan

Opinion Bernard Charlès proposing waste be designed into new products (All images sourced from Dassault Systemes) Dassault Systems has a master plan to take them through to 2040. The plan: integrate modeling, simulation, and AI to create virtual twins on virtual universes, through data-mining of design data that’s stored on the cloud. During his keynote at the 3dExperience 2024 conference, Bernard Charlès, executive chairman of Dassault Systemes, called AI “the big elephant,” because it reinvents the way design is done. Charlès calls AI “the magic of design”; indeed, he referred repeatedly to “magic Solidworks.” To be clear, when CAD vendors... Read more →

The Germany That Can Never Go Car-Free

Opinion I'm someone who has lived in Germany for much of my life, in a manner of speaking. With all of my relatives living there, and me visiting sometimes as often as three times a year, I live the real German life during my visits -- in my relatives' guest bedrooms, at their dinner table, going about in their neighbourhoods. Until this year, the visits were almost always in the bigger and biggest cities: Berlin, Hamburg, and others where walking to the local bakery and taking transit to the nearby train station was the way of life. This is the... Read more →

This new kind of clothes dryer is... worse.

Opinion Europeans tend not to have clothes dryers, which, for us North Americans travelling for a few weeks from relative to relative makes for a frustrating wash day. We get our stuff washed, but then it can take a couple of days for the now-clean clothes to dry, depending on the location of the clothes line, often in a damp basement room -- or a hotel room. TIP: To have clothes dry more quickly, buy quick-drying shirts and pants, which are not that easy to find. Try sports clothing stores. So we were pretty excited when one of the relatives... Read more →

Autodesk Wants To Save You From Uncertainty

Opinion Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost presenting keynote address at Autodesk University 2023 (source of all images: Autodesk) Autodesk University’s themes of the last several years seems to be that the future is uncertain, but Autodesk will save you from the uncertainty -- if you allow it to. "Though the uncertainty we are facing is increasing, so is the technology available to us... Ignore this disruption and you risk getting left behind," warned Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost during his keynote address at AU 2023 [source]. The year before, during AU 2022, Autodesk wanted manufacturers to replace their existing systems with a... Read more →

Fraud Via Car Sales Sites

Opinion I won't mention the name of the sites on which we can sell our cars, because fraud can happen on any of them. The sites warn about various types of fraud, such as paying to a PayPal account, or handing over the car in an unsafe location. Here is the fraud I encountered while selling my previous car. Three times! The first time I thought the buyer was serious, but as our conversation continued, I became suspicious. This was later followed by two more fraudsters using the exact same lines. A person texted me his interest in my car... Read more →

ITC Takes Two Members to Arbitration

Opinion The IntelliCAD Technical Consortium is no stranger to law suits, having launched ones in the past against members not following its Commercial Membership Agreement, such as for not paying fees. ITC is unlike regular software companies; the “customers” the ITC has are software companies that deploy IntelliCAD DWG editor, either in-house or for resale under their own brand names. This week ITC launched arbitration cases against two members, JyaCAD Solutions Private Limited of India and Shanghai Erow Information Technology Co of China. In both cases, ITC is asking the arbitrator to find that the companies breached the ITC membership... Read more →

David Levin Passes On the Torch

Opinion The primary source of CAD information in Russia had been Isicad, which published a magazine (see cover below), hosted a Web site with news and articles, ran conferences, and operated a Telegram chat group. Last year, owner David Levin relocated to Tel Aviv -- from one war zone to another. Now he's looking to hand the content of the Web site's 2,126 articles to a Russian entity free of charge, provided it promises to maintain it. Sample Web page of online PLM database More info at https://isicad-ru.translate.goog/ru/articles.php?article_num=22951&_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp (translated from Russian to English). Isicad was a offshoot of CAD software... Read more →

The Clock Is Ticktocking on TikTok

Opinion The government of the USA brought in legislation over TikTok, and today president Biden signed it. TikTok USA now has nine months to divest itself from its Chinese Communist Party-controlled parent company ByteDance -- by January 19, the day before inauguration day. In reaction, @tiktokpolicy complained, "This unconstitutional law is a TikTok ban, and we will challenge it in court. We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and we will ultimately prevail." Twitter quickly went into truth-check mode: @michaelsobolik: The one word missing from this statement: 'divestment'. Because the legislation doesn't ban TikTok. And... Read more →

Graebert's neXt 2024 Online Conference

Opinion During neXt 2024's brief keynote, company CEO Wilfried Graebert told us that his ARES DWG editor has the second largest installed base, after AutoCAD. As well, the company last year opened a new Graebert Brazil office. A new Graebert Academy offers free training in English and German at https://www.graebert.academy/. Next up: A user case study of Toa of Japan, which replaced an unknown (to me) number of AutoCAD licenses with 170 licenses of ARES to help reduce the expensive cost of licenses. Two-thirds of Toa’s civil engineering department use ARES, because it handles 2D and 3D. AI in ARES... Read more →

AI doesn't solve the mature-CAD problem

Opinion I read the maxi-tweet by Aaron Levie at https://twitter.com/levie/status/1776673128573284523. He's ceo at Box, a Dropbox competitor. He notes this point in the discussion of the impact AI might (or might not, my words) have on workers becoming more efficient: In his example, 10 programmers, using AI, output the result of 15, so the company can now ship more features requested by customers. This makes the software more desirable, leading to greater sales, which means the company has to hire more people (not fewer) to handle customer service, documentation, HR, and so on. The effect then spirals upwards, Levie figures,... Read more →

The Ancients Feared Eclipses; We Chuckle at Them

Opinion The ancients feared eclipses, or so we are told. We weren’t there to see for ourselves, so who knows. Me, I don’t really understand the obsession with people paying lots of money to see one as I find astronomical events slightly dull ever since we were promised the return of Halley’s Comet in 1986 would be super-spectacular and it ended up being an especially non-event event. Halley’s Comet in 1920; in 1986 it was invisible to those of us with naked eyes So, we instead turned to Twitter to entertain us with reactions to this week’s solar event starring... Read more →

NY Has an Earthquake; Twitter Feelz It

Opinion New York experienced a 4.8 earthquake today, and Californians are bemused. Here are reactions recorded not by seismometers, but by Twitter. - - - John Dietrich: 4.8 Things I Learned Working Through the Earthquake Corey Koberg: We just had to cancel the rest of a mtg b/c NY'er were shaken (sorry). West Coast types were like: "anything under 6 is just a temporary massage." George Walters: Top tips to keep working through earthquakes from a thought leader. Mark Le Dain: Professionals in 1960: “Just calling to make sure you and the family are okay, even though it was small.”... Read more →

Reimagining the Desktop with Deta

Opinion I took in the "secret," invite-only Webinar for the spring release of Deta from Luma yesterday. I’ve been beta testing Deta for a couple of months now, and I don't particularly get it -- how would it be useful to me? I hoped that by watching the Webinar I would get more of a clue. Webinar hosted by Luma The Holy Grail Computing has a decades-long long history of user interfaces, starting with PARC’s Star system in 1981 -- released a full three months before IBM announced its first PC. PARC's desktop design, which we all use now (graphical... Read more →

Facebook Failed. Twitter Thrilled.

Opinion Joan Donovan: With the tech crash upon us, what would be the worst thing that could happen if we just did not log back in to Meta products, like Facebook, Whatsapp, Instaagram, or Threads? Jane Manchun Wong: Woke up and can't login to work. Am I getting fired? Elon Musk: If you're reading this post, it's because our servers are working. Tim Pool: Using X [Twitter] to tell people your social networks are down kinda wild. Boz: This was a particularly unusual issue where the server was erroneously telling the headset it had been logged out. Nikita Bier: Last... Read more →

Twitteratti who jeered self-serious letter on AI

Opinion Investment firm Silicon Angle got AI firms to sign onto a letter promising to make AI as important as gas-guzzling cars and industry-destroying Internet. You can read the full letter and the list of signatories at https://openletter.svangel.com. Twitter reacted with cheers and jeers. Here are some of the best jeers. Source: https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1764659720642818414. Text of open letter promising to make the world better thru great AI Neoluddite: I wonder if you will break this pledge quicker than the last pledge you made to Elon Musk in the Founding Agreement of OpenAI. Martin Shkreli: never ever ever Logos & Aesthes: We... Read more →

Best Tweets About Apple Abandoning Autonomous Automobiles

Opinion Interior of a Lucid Air electric automobile Mark Gurman broke the news that Apple this week canceled its Project Titan [which staff apparently called "Project Titanic"] to come up with an Apple Car, after spending a decade and a guestimated $10 billion dollars worked on by two thousand engineers. Some speculate that Apple wanted an L5 car, which means so self-driving that you could be having sex in the back seat during downtown Beijing rush hour traffic: no driver, no problem. Here are some of the best tweets to come out of the announcement: - - - Apple doesn't... Read more →

Using an Android tablet as a second Windows display

Opinion Android tablet's screen connected to Windows laptop with SpaceDesk When I travel, I usually take a Windows laptop and an Android tablet, and it has long seemed to me that sensible that the tablet ought to be able to work as a second screen for the laptop. Having two screens is one serious productivity boost. (Some years ago, I had bought an external screen for the laptop, and it proved to be a life saver during a business trip to Europe when I was also on a tight book deadline. The main screen was running InDesign, while the secondary... Read more →

Dress design with CAD

Opinion Clothing designers often use vector software like Illustrator from Adobe, because it is easy to get started with. The drawback to Illustrator is when it comes to modify the design, or even to adapt the design to multiple sizes of person. This is where software specific to clothing design comes into play, and I got to try one out. One of my relatives received her diploma in dress design, even winning the top technical award at the year-end fashion show. It's been a few years, and now she is getting back into it. She tried one program, which even... Read more →

Reliving WordPerfect v5.1's glory days, today

Opinion The peak of word processing occurred in late 1989 with the release of WordPefect v5.1. It already was the world's most popular writing tool, because of free telephone tech support and programmers who reacted positively to writers' wishlists. With v5.1, it gained drop-down menus; until then, we memorized something like 40 function key combinations to carry out commands like boldface and save. I recall it took me nearly half a year to become comfortable using a mouse with the menus. Here is what WordPerfect looked like after starting a new document: By default, WordPerfect v5.1 kept its new menu... Read more →

Why do we despise Zoom?

Opinion I recall, back in the 1960s, seeing AT&T's new videophone being demonstrated at a World's Fair (see figure at left). We were assured that this technology would invade our homes quickly. Even today, marketing tells us that one new tech or another will be part of our lives very soon. A 3D printer in every child's bedroom, anyone? The videophone didn't catch on, because the infrastructure couldn't support it. And because it was expensive (about $5,000 in today's dollars). And because people didn't want to have to get all dolled up before letting strangers -- strangers! -- look inside... Read more →

Sharge Disk: World's cutest SSD case

Opinion Whenever I get another laptop computer, I swap out the SSD (solid state disk) it came with, for a larger one. (If it's a desktop computer with a HDD [hard disk drive], then I swap it out for an SSD for speed.) I deliberately buy the laptop with a small SSD, because that saves money. Hardware vendors overcharge for larger capacities. I then put in a 1TB or even 2TB drive. That means I have these other, smaller-capacity spare SSDs laying around -- typically 256GB or 512GB. What to do with them? One thing is to reuse them in... Read more →

The Future of AI Ain’t What It Used To Be

Opinion Artificial intelligence is 65 years old. It began as a 1950s computer programming exercise, resulting in the LISP programming language, among others. Since then, AI endured decadal cycles of summers and winters. Back in 1970, for instance, AI pioneer Marvin Minsky proclaimed, “From three to eight years, we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being” [source]. We didn’t. With AI’s 2023 resurgence through ChatGPT, the tech industry hopes AI will give it the sales boost denied by earlier debacles like gorilla-themed NFTs, crypto exchange failures, and the lackluster adoption of mixed-reality goggles. The... Read more →

Working with a 16-year-old computer

Opinion Ford's Sync brochure boasting the latest in modern gadgetry -- from 2008 Sixteen-year-old computers might seem old, but not really: I bought my desktop in 2010, and it's still purring along. Tech doesn't have to be self-obsoleting, and the tech industry needs to understand that it's now as mature as the automotive industry. The 16-year-old computer I'm taking about is, in fact, a car. Or rather, in a car. Last week, I bought my latest car, a 2009 Ford Escape hybrid -- in the very rare color ice blue metallic --, which was built in the summer of 2008.... Read more →

Icedrive is my 6th cloud storage provider

Opinion My scanned slides archived on pCloud, which operates like P: drive on computers; Icedrive operates similarly, as I: Remember when Dropbox dropped on us? Although it was extolled for being new and therefore cool, it really was just FTP with a prettier face. (FTP, file transfer protocol, was the way we moved big files around before Dropbox; using FTP was not pretty.) (1) Dropbox was even better by giving away boatloads of storage for free for all kinds of reasons. I took advantage of many of them, and so today I still have 26GB of storage free with it,... Read more →

Trying out free CAD programs

Opinion Now that I no longer am a beta tester for the four CAD programs I used to beta-test -- AutoCAD, ARES Commander, BricsCAD, and nanoCAD -- I no longer have access to free CAD. Once in a while I still need to sketch something up in CAD. There are a few CAD programs out there that are free, and so I thought I'd try some of them out. Rayon 2D CAD program running a Web browser, with my drawing of a bathroom being remodeled nanoCAD from NanoSoft nanoCAD v5 is free from NanoSoft. It is a well-functioning CAD package... Read more →

A second cell phone number from Hushed

Opinion I heard about Hushed through a PC World promotion, which offered a lifetime subscription for US$26. I was intrigued enough to buy it. (If you buy it through PC World, then be sure to follow the instructions on the purchase page that has your redemption code; you can't redeem it thru the Hushed Web site.) Phone Numbers In short, Hushed gives your cell phone a second phone number, without your phone company knowing about it. You can choose your number from three countries (UK, Canada, USA), and then an area code of your choosing. I selected Canada, area code... Read more →

Three New Companies Producing AI-based CAD

Opinion It was pretty exciting when, 11 years ago, a new kind of CAD company emerged, several seemingly at the same time. They were pure cloud-CAD plays, taking advantage of new capabilities in Web browsers that allowed us to select and edit entities. The companies had names like sunglass.io, TinkerCAD, To3D, and Onshape. All ended up being acquired by larger firms. After the Open Design Alliance cracked the RVT and RFA file formats of Revit, a second wave of CAD companies emerged two years ago, with names like Infurnia, Snaptrude, and Qonic. All three handle some aspect of architectural design... Read more →

This Sharge Power Bank is a Geek's Power Bank

Opinion I came across the cleverly named Sharge after clicking on an Internet ad. Yah, I know. I do it, like, once or twice a year, much to the relief of Google, the ad agency, the advertiser, the Web site owner. The company sells truly cool looking power banks and other computer peripherals. The ad I clicked on was for a new triangular model that still is not for sale, as it is still in Kickstarter mode (see image at left). So I settled for a rectangular model (see image below). The Shargeek 100 (I paid US$159; previously called the... Read more →

Accessing Someone Else's Windows Libraries

Opinion Sometimes, a computer breaks down, and the the hard drive -- with all its precious data -- becomes inaccessible. When specific components of a desktop computer break down, they can be replaced easily. For a laptop, however, regaining access is a bit trickier: When the keyboard fails, attach an external keyboard; I recommend a corded keyboard attached to a USB port, as Bluetooth keyboards are not as quick to set up in an emergency. When the screen fails, attach an external monitor to the laptop's HDMI, VGA, or USB-C port. When other components fail, such as the hinges break... Read more →

What's New in Solid Edge 2024

Opinion Solid Edge 2024 (all images sourced from Siemens) Turns out, for many MCAD vendors, PLM is not enough. For nearly 20 years now, they’ve known that by selling software that documents all stages of the lives of products – from conceptual design through to disassembly at end of life – they would make lot more money. Now CAD vendors are transmogrifying PLM into digital transformation. “It’s the integration of digital technologies into all aspects of your engineering business,” explains Siemens, which calls their digital transformation software Xcelerator. It’s a collection of software, hardware, third-party vendors, and a marketplace. Forgive... Read more →

Revolt at OpenAI: The Fallout

Opinion I think what happened at OpenAI was that the board, which has the responsibility of ensuring AI is developed responsibly (see corporate structure below), became worried about the commercial direction in which ChatGPT seemed to be heading, and so fired the man leading the charge. Microsoft, which hopes that commercializing AI will help them win the race against other mega-tech-giants, naturally wants to hire him. Structure of OpenAI In my opinion, the potential importance of AI is a scam, and Microsoft might end up looking as foolish as following its desperate purchase of Nokia. Opinion-ators on Twitter -- and... Read more →

Humour Leaves OpenAI: The Aftermath

Opinion With the fired OpenAI ceo now an employee of Microsoft, along with about 100 of his mates, I'll be interested to watch how long the serial entrepreneur lasts inside the corporate behemoth. Meanwhile on Twitter, staff and commentators have some bitterness to float: @bradlightcap (COO OpenAI): "OpenAI is nothing without its people." @miramurati (CTO OpenAI): "OpenAI is nothing without its people." @danbarker: "OpenAI's board gave themselves the prime duty to 'protect humanity' from AI, but seem to have ended up inadvertently handing much control of that to Microsoft." @joe_darko: "By the way, [OpenAI ex-ceo] Sam and [OpenAI ex-co-founder] Greg... Read more →

Twitter Outdoes Itself on OpenAI's Uncoup

Opinion The twitteratti had their bags of popcorn out upon the news that the board of OpenAI asked the former ceo to be the reinstated ceo. Here are some of the best ones: "Sam Altman returning to OpenAI after a day is like Steve Jobs returning to Apple after 12 years, but for the TikTok generation." - @mattturck "reinforcement learning from human feedback" - @ryxcommar "'Hey Ilya, it's Satya. If you want those Azure credits to work on Monday, we're going to need Sam back'." - kantrowitz "Anyway, he's gonna be INSUFFERABLE if they bring him back. He already has... Read more →

Best Tweets on OpenAI's Coup

Opinion Following Friday late afternoon's ouster of OpenAI's ceo Sam Altman, followed by co-founder Greg Brockman quitting, the twitterverse offered up its own version of advice: "Quitting as president of a company as massive as OpenAI with a lower-case only email is so insanely based I can hardly believe it's real." - @functi0nzer0 "pretty wild that the first job openai took was sam's" - @blader "BREAKING: Convoy of black vehicles fill SF streets as ousted Open AI leader attempts coup to reseize power." - @antoniogm "If Biden wasn't a million years old, he would issue an executive order to preserve... Read more →

Fixing Uninstall Problems with Revo

Opinion User interface of the free version of Revo Uninstaller One of the weaknesses of Windows is how much debris is left behind following an uninstall. There are registry entries, folders, and files that remain and that will never again be used, cluttering up our storage drives. CCleaner takes care of unused registry entries, but not leftover folders. I finally got really fed up after uninstalling a very recent version of AutoCAD. It left behind a new horror: a bunch of files and folders controlled by SYSTEM, which meant I could not remove them manually. Tech support didn't respond to... Read more →

How I record LP records to my computer

Opinion As a teenager, recording LP (long-play) records onto cassette tape for my portable player was definitely a lo-fi experience. To record, I set up a microphone in front of the our family's record player/radio console (and its lone speaker). Sometimes, house sounds were also recorded. Lo-fi was fine, because my portable cassette player was no different -- and I was desperate to hear music. Where I lived in Northern Canada, decent music was in short supply, whether on the sole radio station or the lone stereo store. Three decades later, technology advanced, and I recorded (almost) all my LPs... Read more →

When HP Said, Get in Line, I said No

Opinion I've always used inkjet printers from HP, but I was getting concerned about the creeping-upward cost of inkjet cartridges. The last time I bought a set (a black one and a tri-color one), it came to just over $100. That was painful. Last week my wife wanted me to print out some photographs, and the usual headache reared its head: the cartridges were partially dry. So I ran the head cleaning exercise several times but to no avail. I had earlier purchased a set of cheaper third-party cartridges and so installed them. The printer refused to recognize them. The... Read more →

MCAD in the Second Cold War

Opinion Abandoned tank in the forests of Ukraine [Image source https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.adi3412/card-type11/_20230421nid_ukraineforest.jpg] Russia’s invasion of the sovereign country of Ukraine is despicable, but the subsequent Western embargoes, designed to hobble the Russian war economy, instead had the unintended side effect of accelerating Russia’s self-sufficiency. Its official "import substitution" (zamena importa) program replaced Western products with homegrown ones, whether no-longer-Mcdonalds hamburgers, IKEA-like furniture, or geometric kernels in CAD software [source]. Even before the embargoes began, Russia already had a strong subset of CAD programs, mostly AutoCAD-workalikes for general CAD and parametric history-based CAD systems for mechanical designs. This is due to the... Read more →

Book Review: Number Go Up

Opinion Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall Book written by Zeke Faux Book reviewed by Ralph Grabowski The tech industry has a fever, and it's one that can only be cured by another iPhone-like hit. As smartphone and computer sales droop, the industry is desperate for a something-anything to explode its sales, revenues, profits. 3D TV flopped. Smartglasses flopped. VR flopped, other than in some games. 3D printing in every child's bedroom flopped. NFTs flopped. AI is flopping for the fourth time since it was conceived in the 1950s. Scooters flopped. Crypto exchanges flopped (except for,... Read more →

Do We Need a New 2D CAD Program?

Opinion During the era of zero-interest rates, investors were desperate for returns. The desperation turned to the ridiculous, such as buying cartoons of anthropomorphized apes and believing in 20% annual returns from crypto-exchanges. Others invested in new companies that promised to deliver on buzzwords like AR, crypto, AI, carbon. The passion to invest in anything-everything has now retreated, what with with banks paying as much as 4% on savings accounts. Nevertheless, Techcrunch* continues to document those who dream of making it big with the Next Big Thing, and one of those is a new online 2D CAD (computer-aided design) program,... Read more →

Update: Getting Eudora to Work with GMail

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

Will ChatGPT Replace CAD Programmers?

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

Smart LED Bulbs Are Peak Technology

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

A Tiny Case for the Smallest Solid State Drive

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

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

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

Reliving the Jornada Era

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

A different kind of earphone

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