My.Sketchup is quickly coming of age

Have you had chance to play with my.sketchup.com lately, I should if I were you, its suddenly becoming a very useful tool.

I have left it alone for a month or two, and today I thought lets have a peep and see whats been added, well to my surprise, most of the major tools are there and working well.

First is section plane, and scene settings, these work well and the dialog box for playing the scenes is so easy to set.

Next is save, now if like me you use Chrome, then you might have to addmy.sketchup.com to the advanced privacy setting to allow it to communicate, but as its a named site ythis is the only one that it will allow.

Views works well and all the usual are there, so are styles, and to my mind are easier to use than the stand alone program.

Layers are also there and again I find them easy to use and set.

The two main menu pallets are simple to use, but not movable, but they work well and as so small they fold away without taking up to much Realestate.

As for upload I tried to load in a dwg but could not see how to do this, currently limited to skp, jpg & png

If layout is added, then this is going to change the whole CAD market, I can easily do my work on any Chrome book and thats simply going to do away with the rather expensive Mac I currently use, simply because I can't run Autocad or Vectorworks in any other way,

Saving models seems limited, and as far as I can tell, I can't share models with a team, so this area needs work.

Overall I like what I see, the improvements are working well and just need a few tweeks, plus one or two more functions added to make this a real product, but as it's still beta, I don't think I can moan to much, just ask nicely.

Tech Junky at Sea

On the 4th Jan 2017, I left Southampton, on the P & O ship Oceana, for a 35 night cruise to the Caribbean and the USA on what promised to be a really great start to my 65 year.

I will turn 65 in October so by my calculations I should have, by now, been created, and will be forming, I would liked to have talked to my mom, and asked her, when she knew she was pregnant, but unfortunately she has dementia and that memory is lost.

I had brought with me most of my travelling computing equipment, my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and my Kindle, with the first 6 days after out initial stop in Spain, at sea, I have planned to complete a little work, and start writing a little. The ships WiFi showed up on my Mac, and I logged in, it has been some time since our last cruise, but it looked the same, £12 for 24 hours, fine by me I thought, I will dib into this and let my system catch up, 15 min should be enough to send stored emails, pick up waiting mail, and let Apple save the photos on line and I will log out as before,  24 hours should last a long while.

Little did I realise, and the opening screen made no reference, but once the 24 hours has started, there is no logging out, I can’t stop it, I can stop my machines use, but the 24 hour clock kept ticking.

So my plans to dib into the time like all the other cruises was scuppered, to use a nautical phrase. So after complaining to reception I got no where, but referred to the cyber librarian, who understood my pain, but was unable to help, except give me a credit for the last 24 hour period I had lost because I thought I was able to use it as before. At this point the word maritime was used saying anything connected to satellites is expensive and slow, I intend to come back to this point later.

So for the best part of my trip, what I planned as a technology fuelled holiday, fully connected turned out to be anything but, OK the trip was otherwise as planned, great ship, good food, plenty of onboard entertainment, and far to much to drink. But I am a tech junky, I want full connection to the net, I wanted to talk to my family and friends. Google and the like, and I am on the cusp here, I use gmail, as well as Apple,   They both promote the life style of connection,yet the moment I leave land I am stuffed,

So here it is P & O, I like your ships, yet for such a simple thing you take such a ridiculous stance, the ship is full of wifi, the walls in the bar are promoting the latest game of English football, live yet for accessing email a paltry insignificant portion of your ships download I am penalised.

Let's just review what the ship is using in terms of wifi connection, and satellite connection, general navigation, engineering, communication back to p& o base, a lot more than the passenger use, I once did some research in passenger flights and realised that each engine on an airplane say just four engines, has 2500 sensors,, per engine communicating with its base, live.

It does not take too much imagination to establish to general communication campsite of and ocean going liner the size of Oceana, to realise that the ships use is far in excess of the passengers, yet we are treated like morons and charges inexcusable as a profit margin. Over dinner, one of the table mentioned that several of the screens in one of the bars was playing live football, and that is coming into the ship by satellite

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CIAT CPD Officers Meet 20-06-2016

In about five weeks, or on the 20th June 2016, all the region CIAT CPD officers will meet in City Road, London, to discuss CPD. As yet I have seen no agenda, but you know me, thats not going to stop me making a list of things I want to talk about, from manufacturers presentations, to real study time, to reading lists, to note taking to building up some sort of personal archive of information. to just an electronic record system.

I also want to discus the way BIM seems to be taking hold of CAD, not that thats a bad thing, just the way the "CAD" bit is being dropped and I hear only I am going to BIM this up, not CAD or draw it up. Yet BIM surely should be on the list as it will and is affecting the way we draw, and also with it huge potential for data rules base, or internal / external algorithms, and how it will be shared via IFC.

Evernote, or anything similar, is there anything!, should surely be discussed, as the personal archive I mentioned before.

Is there a place for online lecture, or hangouts, I attend several and find then just as good, with no travel time.

I wonder if the way academic papers are written and viewed, might be discussed, its a major way to learn and research a subject, but for many its a system that might be unknown, thinking its only for academics, yet its not, and so many of the AT universities might well help is reading and advising on a papers format and subject.

So there it is, if you want to add to my list,  drop me a line and  will raise it, or contact your local CPD officer.

Todays photo is of the old Queens Hotel that was built onto the side of Curzon Street Station Birmingham the subject of much discussion as HS2 becomes more of a certainty,  and pulled down as part of the saving of the main station entrance building. I have never seen any other photos of the hotel building, one of the other lecturers who was heavily involved in the work says there are some, so watch this space to see if they turn up. This shot was from the rear of the site looking south West wish.

Terabyte,Petabyte,Exabyte,Zettabyte,Yottabyte

When I first got a computer, it was a commodore 64, with, little or no memory, no internal disk, just floppy disks with 64K and the idea of a megabyte of memory, a thing of beauty and wonder, The Mac Plus came out and it had a 1mb of memory, truly outstanding.

We then saw leaps and bounds over the years, till my latest Mac boasting 1Tb ( Terabyte ), of dish space, and 16 Gb of memory it now seems this is not the end, as machines become so much faster, and memory cheaper, we are going to see an increase in memory and now storage, as cloud space becomes the next big leap in computing, I currently have about 1TB of online storage shared between Dropbox and Google Drive.

This article is not about the fast pace, but the buzz words we now are staring to use, :

Terabyte,Petabyte,Exabyte,Zettabyte,Yottabyte

Notice megabyte is no longer listed, the list starts at Terabyte, for a full list try the Wiki site

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