RobiNZ CAD Blog

Kiwi affordable housing design, build, operation innovator

I posted this on my personal blog, but it has a lot of design and construction innovation. Simplicity Living is a non-profit retirement/investment fund that is building high quality affordable rental (they'll own and operate) and rent to own (they'll fund) housing. It's simple, when you know how | simplicity living . kiwi - RobiNZ Personal Blog (typepad.com) Read more →

March 2024 - 20th Anniversary!

March 31st means it is blog’iversary time. Twenty years since that first tentative post! I really appreciate the connections blogging, and more recently Mastodon, Substack, Discord, & Facebook, has enabled. While the other platforms have taken over much of the day-to-day activity, I still prefer having the content I really value, in terms of wanting to retain, on my ‘own’ platform. It has been a quiet year for the CAD Blog, but that's OK because I have been mostly retro-blogging on the other one about old cycle trips! To everyone, everywhere, thanks for visiting, reading, and subscribing both here and... Read more →

2023 Blogging Highlights

Happy New Year! Another year has flown by, time to look back from a bloggy/social media (not just CAD blog) perspective at the year: @ a new 'me' on the web Twenty three, and a bit, years after starting a blog I finally got around to getting my own domain for it. It's still published with TypePad it can now be found via www.robincapper.net. [2024-09-01 reverted back to Typepad as the domain mapping has broken] Back to CAD A new role, new industry, meant catching up with some new software. Fun to learn more about Civil 3D, QGIS and more... Read more →

CAD and car design at Renault

Patrick le Quément, Renault Design, on how he fostered the use of CAD at Renault... Of Mouse and Men – Driven To Write Amongst the traditional activities to be found in any design department there was one oddity which drew my immediate attention when I perused the organigramme — it was named CAD Design, staffed by 6 and headed by a gentleman named Philippe Gassie... Read more →

Curing 'phantom screen touches' on an old Surface Book?

My Surface Book 2 is old, well out of any warranty, but still performs really well for my own needs. It's a home machine but can still run CAD, Revit, even (just) Microsoft Flight Sim, well enough to not consider a replacement. It was a little tight for storage (only 500GB on board) but a card in the SD slot doubled that for storing Flight Sim (about 450GB on its own)! The then phantom touch arrived... I didn't get a screen shot (below is my reproduction) but the other day on start-up it looked like a phantom finger was permanently... Read more →

Breaking pinned taskbar shortcuts out of Taskbar Overflow Menu jail

If, like me, you pin a lot of commonly used shortcuts to the Windows 11 Taskbar it will eventually put excess ones into a ...Overflow Menu. How do shortcuts you want end up in there? If an application is updated it will be added to the end of your pinned apps. If a saved browser app update it will unpin from the taskbar, then when you re-pin it will be added to the end. Moving shortcuts out of Overflow confinement If Windows 11 were anywhere near finished you could just drag an icon from overflow to your preferred place on... Read more →

A challenge for Andrew Anagnost, make this using only the advertised product

Why do Autodesk show things that can't be done with the product being advertised? I recently got this advert on Facebook: The link went to a bundle offer for AutoCAD LT subscription: Look at that image: Can AutoCAD LT do proper 3D? No. Can it render? Not that I'm aware of... AutoCAD LT is fine, for what it is, but imagine you paid out $1888 expecting it to create what is shown? A challenge for Andrew Anagnost, make this using only the advertised product or stop marketing fantasy. Read more →

A new home for my blogs, Me Dot Net?

It must be a procrastination record; start a blog in March 2004 and only now get my own domain? Yes, my typepad.com/rcd blogs are now at www.robincapper.net I must credit this toot from NZ IT Journalist Bill Bennett for prompting me to, finally, do it. His article about owning your content resonated, the reason I still author all the content I really care about on my blogs, CAD or Personal, and link to it from social sites. I don't mind having it on TypePad as it is a portable format that can be moved should the need ever arise. Not... Read more →

Better controlling Word image placement

I saw this meme, on Mastodon, about the fight that is Word images. They hide the anchoring controls in a ribbon fly-out + dialog. Once you set them (per image sadly) to keep with text it becomes much more manageable. With the image selected access it from the flyout Layout Options > See more... link. or the Ribbon Picture Format > Position > More Layout Options > Position (tab) and set the Move with Text or Lock Anchor options. You can also accurately set the X,Y position relative to margins, paragraph, line etc Read more →

Fix a MindManager file with XML Processing Illegal XML Character Error

I recently opened a MindManager file and got this XML Processing error: Followed by this error, even though the file was in the folder, and then the file not opening. After some web searching, found this is a known error with MindManager Files and the recommended fix was to send the file to MindManager Support for them to remove the offending character. I didn't have time for that so tried fixing myself and it worked. DIY Fix NOTE: Everything that follows worked for the error I encountered, there may be other errors of this type it doesn't help. Be sure... Read more →

End of an era, as Autodesk leaves Shaan Hurley

On Tuesday 30 March 2004, I posted this on TypePad: Getting Started This is the first post to see how it all works. Read other weblogs, thought I'd have a go myself. RobiNZ CAD Blog The reason I chose TypePad, then a new'ish (public launch October 2003) hosted platform, is one of the most influential 'other weblogs' was Shaan Hurley's Between The Lines ~ AutoCAD Blog. I'd been thinking about blogging but had no interest in coding or self-hosting. When Shaan told me his pioneering CAD Blog was hosted, authored, on TypePad it was enough to spur me into action,... Read more →

March 2023 - 19th Anniversary!

March 31st means it is blog’iversary time. Nineteen years since that first tentative post! I really appreciate the connections blogging, and more recently on Mastodon (since I abandoned Twitter) & Facebook, have enabled. @robincapper on Twitter Won't delete this account but I've made it private and migrated most of my social media attention away from Twitter. See you on the other platforms if you are there. 7:06 PM · Nov 22, 2022 While the other platforms have taken over much of the day-to-day activity, I still prefer having the content I really value, in terms of wanting to retain, on... Read more →

Antarctic memories in QGIS

I was doing some QGIS training, testing, experimenting and the dataset provided was Antarctica. Had to spend a few minutes mapping where I've been! See; Antarctic memories in QGIS - RobiNZ Personal Blog (typepad.com) Landings and activities plotted Read more →

2022 Blogging Highlights

Happy New Year! I usually begin this post with "Another year has flown by..." but 2022 was a strange mix of COVID-19 impacted lockdown time dilation—where it both flew and dragged simultaneously—and a (temporary) change of lifestyle for me. I spent most of it—January to August—travelling New Zealand and then started a new job (still design software related) in a different industry! Time to look back from a bloggy/social media (not just CAD blog) perspective at year: Best social media related event(s): While riding I've been contributing, in a small way, to a few episodes of Walk The Pod podcast.... Read more →

ActiveWords time codes for video notes 0:00:00!

I'm not at Autodesk University, but I am watching the on-line content. I've long added time codes to notes for video, but only today used ActiveWords for the blindingly obvious. Decided 10-minute blocks were enough, changing one digit makes it minute accurate, so made a bunch of "time code" ActiveWords. Now when I type tc0 I get "0:00:00 | ". tc10 0:10:00 | , tc20 0:20:00 | etc. Why didn't I do this before now? Read more →

Autodesk testing my sanity...

Thought was going mad for a while, but it was just Autodesk playing with my mind... At The Warehouse Group distributed Tool Palettes (in AutoCAD Architecture/MEP) using Content Browser. Tick ‘Link when added to workspace’ on the catalog, drop palettes to users, when they are changed/updated tell the users to refresh, sorted. That's worked seamlessly since the Content Browser/Palette system turned up in... 2004? Now I need to share Civil 3D palettes that will be dynamic as we develop new/updated content. Yay, C3D uses the same system but… Create a Catalog (1), set it to Link items…. (2) all good... Read more →

upFront.eZine CAD industry legend Ralph Grabowski retires

The final upFront.eZine #1.138 This email, the final upFront.eZine #1,138, marks a significant event in the history of the CAD industry and media. I don't remember when I first read Ralph Grabowski's eZine but it long pre-dates meeting him in 2003. He presented at a CAD Productivity Conference in Auckland NZ and I have stayed connected, as a reader/commenter and meeting occasionally at US cad conferences, ever since. Ralph's in-depth coverage and straight talk about the CAD industry, often deep into the core technologies sitting under the end user products we know so well, is second to none. I was... Read more →