Personal
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From my cubicle in the depths of the Death Star… To celebrate this Star Wars Day, why not build your own Death Star using AutoCAD and 123D Make, or script the opening crawl inside AutoCAD using F#? May the 4th be with you, always.
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Today's my birthday, which I'm spending with a fairly intense work schedule here in Singapore. My family gave me my present early on Saturday night, before I flew out on Sunday morning. To my absolute delight, it's a Stormtrooper onesy, which I suspect is going to soon become my preferred WFH uniform. There's a reason I'm looking so happy. When I was growing up there were children who wanted to be Luke Skywalker or Han Solo during our Star Wars re-enactments. I wanted to be a Stormtrooper. Which I have no doubt says something very important about my personality. When…
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Last night the section of motorway closest to my home was closed from 10pm to 6am. They closed it to install a new cycle bridge intended primarily for children from one local village to cycle safely to school in another. Closing a motorway is considered quite an event around here, so a small crowd gathered to watch the proceedings in spite of the hour and the pre-spring nip in the air. Admittedly the drinks laid on by the local government – tea or wine, depending on your preferred approach for keeping warm – didn't hurt the mood. At around 11pm…
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I headed over to Geneva yesterday afternoon for the first press day of this year's Geneva Motor Show. I was there courtesy of our friends at the Morgan Motor Company who launched their new Aero 8 (it was actually nice being there as a guest, in contrast to last year's collaboration). Here's the launch video for this exciting car: I love this video, but I did have one minor gripe for the Morgan team: why was Jon Wells, Morgan's Head of Design, shaving a piece of clay rather than using Autodesk tools to develop the design? I was joking –…
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Every so often I get hit by a wave of computing nostalgia. This weekend it was a veritable tsunami triggered by the discovery that a number of old MS-DOS games are available to play online in your browser, including the seminal Prince of Persia. This game has a strong connection with AutoCAD, for me, so today I'm blogging about that. I first started working with AutoCAD while I was still at high school – it must have been around 1989. After a successful (but mind-numbingly boring) summer project at a local manufacturing company, converting their old engineering calculation routines…
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Back in September, Dyson announced their long-awaited entry into the robo-vacuum market with the Dyson 360 Eye. I was delighted to see an old friend of mine, Mike Aldred, in one of the launch videos: Mike and I were undergraduates at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) together, back in the '90s. I was studying European Computer Science (which meant I was on a 4-year degree programme with the 3rd year spent studying Computer Science in Paris) while Mike was studying Computer Systems Engineering. I vaguely recall having common classes together with Mike, although as Mike started at UKC…
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After the excitement around Magic Leap and HoloLens, on Friday of this week there's another big VR-related tech announcement being made. But wait… isn't CES finished? And Build doesn't happen for a few more months? That's right: this one is being made at the New York Toy Fair. Say whaaat? Mattel has owned the View-Master brand since their acquisition of Tyco Toys in 1997 (who had in turn acquired the brand in 1989). I now have probably twenty or so View-Masters – something I talked about recently – but there's nothing very interesting about the later models, in my opinion.…
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Thank you for your readership and support during the last year. It's really the interactions with this blog's readers that motivate me to keep posting after 8½ years. As a small gesture of appreciation, here's a simple HTML card that serves up random posts from this blog's first 1,220 (or so). If you're not interested by the post it shows when it loads, just click on the "Merry Christmas!" banner until you find one you feel like reading. The provided link will launch the post in a separate browser tab. In case you're interested in the implementation details, the shadow…
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Some friends from the UK were visiting Switzerland (although not staying with us) over the weekend, so we decided to meet them for dinner on Sunday at Geneva airport before their flight home. Thankfully I'd flown in from Las Vegas (and then Heathrow) to Zurich, the day before, otherwise visiting the same airport twice in one weekend would have seemed very weird. My wife suggested we go a little early (despite me being Vegas-lagged) and visit an exhibition she'd heard about at Palexpo (which is right at Geneva airport, and is also where the Geneva Motor Show takes place). The…
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As mentioned in the last post, we recently got back from our first trip to the beautiful Greek island of Andros. While we managed to visit 8 beaches during our 12 days on the island – some multiple times – there are more to see: the list is far from exhaustive. I've done my best to state my (admittedly subjective) criteria, in case you're looking for something different from a beach holiday. I've rated the various beaches in 5 different areas: Access [easy or hard to get to, state of access road, parking relative to the beach] Facilities [umbrellas, shade,…