Some time ago I raised a glass to Autodesk for supporting students and educators by making its software available free. I have been remiss in neglecting to point out that Bricsys also does this.
So I raise a glass of dark, tasty and ridiculously strong Belgian beer to Bricsys for doing this. Cheers!
I have to raise a glass to Autodesk for supporting students and educators by making its software available free. Further props are due for removing the virus-like educational watermark.
A further program that Autodesk supports is the FIRST robotics competition series, helping to develop young people into technology leaders; a member of my family has benefited directly from that.
Credit where credit is due, Autodesk deserves praise for supporting education. Of course, Autodesk will ultimately benefit from this support, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Doing good and being smart are not mutually exclusive.
My CADLock, Inc. colleague, Owen Wengerd has posted about a fix utility he has written to help clean up drawings infested with the language pack problem discussed here. I have not yet tested Owen’s utility*, but as this should run in any AutoCAD-based product from 2007 on, it could well be a better partial solution than Autodesk’s Civil 3D-only (so far) patches. Autodesk still needs to sort out its dodgy templates, of course, and should probably provide its own non-Civil 3D fixes, if only to maintain a little corporate self-respect.
As Owen has a long and distinguished history of being consistently and demonstrably better at AutoCAD programming than Autodesk’s own programmers, I’d be tempted to try this one first. However, Civil 3D users should probably apply the patches and updates anyway to help resolve other issues.
To find Owen’s utility, go to the ManuSoft ARX freebies page and look for CleanLanguage.zip. While you’re there, use the Software menu to check out some of the other stuff Owen has done.
* Edit: I have now tested it, and it works beautifully in both AutoCAD 2010 and Civil 3D 2011.
For the next few hours, you can get a free registered version of the screen capture software Snagit from TechSmith. It’s a couple of versions old and not supported on Vista, but nevertheless is well worthwhile. No, the Print Scrn key isn’t the same thing at all; Snagit is much, much more useful than that. Try it for yourself, you can thank me later.
To get the freebie, first get a registration key by clicking here and then download your copy of Snagit 7.2.5 from here. Be quick, because this offer closes at 5 PM EST (9 PM GMT/UTC) today, 5 June 2009.
Even if you were planning on buying the latest version of Snagit, get this freebie anyway. As a registered user of Snagit, you automatically qualify for upgrade offers. This means you can get the latest Snagit for US$24.95 rather than US$49.95 (depending on location).
TechSmith has another screen capture utility, Jing. This is also free, with a more powerful version available at a cost. Which is the best TechSmith screen capture utility? Dunno, I’ve never used Jing. Grab ’em both and see what you think.
Source: mCADForums via SolidMentor.
Disclosure: at Autodesk University 2006, I was given free copies of Snagit 8.1 and Camtasia Studio 4.0 (thanks Shaan), both of which I still use regularly (i.e. it’s not shelfware). I was also given a TechSmith T-shirt, which I ruined within hours by spilling red wine on it.
In case you missed it on WorldCAD Access, Dave Weisberg has released a history of CAD as a free book on-line. It is called The Engineering Design Revolution and subtitled The People, Companies and Computer Systems That Changed Forever the Practice of Engineering.
I don’t like regurgitating things from other blogs, but this is an exception for two reasons. First, I find it very interesting. Second, it’s in a good cause and deserves all the publicity it can get. Access to the book in PDF form is free, but Dave is asking for voluntary contributions to the Cancer League of Colorado Foundation.
I’ve skimmed through the Autodesk and AutoCAD chapter of the book, and while I was already familiar with much of the content that particular section and could pedantically quibble with its accuracy in a few places, I still found it highly informative and interesting.
You can find the book at www.cadhistory.net.
I use the Firefox web browser when I have a choice. I’ve tried Safari and it’s fine once I turn off the horrible fuzzy text, but whatever I try I always come back to Firefox. Today, FireFox 3.0 is released and the Mozilla people are hoping to set a world record for downloads. I’ve done my bit (it was a surprisingly quick download), over to you.