RobiNZ CAD Blog

Excel to CAD/BIM, in ASCII

I haven’t used this product, other DotSoft stuff I’ve tried has been great, but it gets a mention due to the lovely ascii art diagram* that featured in the plain text email that announced it. Who needs Visio… DotSoft Excel2DWG 5.1 DotSoft has developed a revolutionary new way to solve the old problem of placing Excel spreadsheets into CAD applications. The result is Excel2DWG. We moved all the processing code inside Microsoft Excel, directly creating a DWG file of areas. You simply select your area of interest and click an icon to create the DWG file. The best part is... Read more →

Notice of Revit User Group Auckland November Meeting

Details of the next Revit User Group - Auckland (RUGAKL) meeting: Final meeting for 2009 - Wednesday 18 November 2009 - from 5.30pm This weeks meeting proudly supported by Mercer Products Locati... Read more →

Autodesk University Prep 1.05 – Snap, Business Cards to iPhone

It’s a digital age but after Autodesk University, and other conferences, I invariably end up with a stack of business cards. I keep the originals but it’s not much fun copying contact details into Outlook (which is synced with my phone). When I saw Shape Services Business Card Reader on an iPhone blog it looked like a possible solution. Take a photo of the card with the phone, let the software scan the image and OCR it into into a digital contact. The reality can be a little trickier as I got about about 1 in 10 cards that weren’t... Read more →

An admission, it’s not really Plagiarism but…

Plagiarism has been in the news in New Zealand but I didn’t think it would be an issue on my blog. Ideas for posts arise from a variety of sources. Sometimes I get stuck at work and blog about the solution, often found with the help of other blogs. Maybe I just stumble upon something cool while browsing or have a process I think may help others. When I refer to other blogs it’s generally with a link, short quote and my spin on the topic. I try to be fair about attribution but recently published a post very similar... Read more →

Notice of Revit User Group Wellington November Meeting

Details of the next Revit User Group - Wellington (RUGWELL) meeting: RUGWELL, 25th November 2009 This upcoming RUGWELL is a special occasion. We are going to have a.... Best Of RUGWELL 200... Read more →

Autodesk University Preparation 1.04 – Update TweetDeck iPhone

Just in time for the Autodesk University TweetUp! Took a bit of experimenting to work out some of the icons, why doesn’t the iPhone have tooltips? Best features are #tags & @address picker, will save a lot of finger taps entering #au2009! TweetDeck for iPhone - now with added Awesome Facebook integration Video uploading Landscape compose mode Trending Topics Tweets Nearby column Address Picker Tags Save Message Draft. Open in Safari bit.ly account support Read more →

Revit OpEd sorts Project Browser Sorting

Thanks to Steve for this tip! I have been mucking about with templates, with browser sorting using shared parameters, and had exactly the same problem. Revit OpEd: Dept. of Subtle - Can't Get Rid of Parameter Value - Project Browser Sorting ”When I was asked about it my answer was, "A view is assigned/using it." The response was, "No we've fixed all the views already but it won't go away!". We checked again using a view list and sure enough the rogue value wasn't being used. That's when it occurred to me…” On the topic of Browser Views/Sorting here are... Read more →

EKlectiCAD Blog

It is a pleasure to welcome Earl Kubaskie to the world of CAD blogs. His focus is on all things Civil 3D, some things not Civil 3D and whatever else takes his fancy. Eclectic + CAD equals… EKlectiCAD? - eklecticad.typepad.com What that means is that this "CAD" blog will sometimes have stuff non-CAD. I'm a Civil 3D guy, and a Map 3D guy, and involved with the vanilla CAD world some... and ESRI GIS, and lots of software tools, so you never know what you're gonna find here. Look up "eclectic" and you'll get the idea - I just sort... Read more →

Remember that post about… ? Map it, find it!

Often I’ll read a blog post, or article, and think that’s special/cool/handy/not to be forgotten. But the fact is there are zillions of blogs, gazillions of posts and while a search engine can probably find it again it’s often hard to narrow down the results. There are services which will store a link or you could “favourite” the post in your browser/reader but that doesn’t help with context as often the post title is not enough. To get around this I started aggregating “special” posts in a map as shown below. I have one map for each CAD platform, operating... Read more →

RSS Bandit v1.9… is out

RSS Bandit, my favourite Feed Reader, has had an update. Apart from adding support for the Facebook news feed this release is mostly bug fixes and background work in preparation for a new Windows 7 version with a Fluent UI. It is well worth the, free, download. I’ve tried a number of other readers, including on-line ones, but always come back to the Bandit. Although not perfect – and some of my annoyances have been sorted in this update – it handles my hefty 1241 item feed list nicely. I’d hoped the ribbon UX would arrive in this version but... Read more →