Personal
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This picture should say it all. Back next week!
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I'm up in the Alps enjoying a week of skiing (in my case snowboarding) with my family. Swiss schools have a very civilised "ski week" where the kids get a week off school sometime between the Christmas and Easter holidays – the specific week varies from canton to canton and this week happens to be Neuchâtel's (it extends the usual March 1st holiday celebrating the 1848 revolution leading to Neuchâtel joining the Swiss confederation) – so I decided to take the week off to be with them. Here's a quick snap I took this morning before heading up to the…
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Being a bit of a Star Wars fan, I was delighted to come across this blog post by former MakerBot employee Todd Blatt (now working at Custom 3D Stuff), who modeled an Imperial Scout Trooper Blaster in AutoCAD for 3D printing. You can download the STL output and the original DWG file from here. Here's a view on the finished gun with the "shades of gray" visual style: And here's one that's "realistic" with a nice metallic material applied to it: 3D printing functional weapon parts is clearly a contentious subject – which, according to some, may sadly lead to the…
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It's always a bit of a shock when the annual Autodesk "week of rest" comes to an end: it's the one time during the year during which the internal flow of email drops down to a trickle and you can truly relax. Although it seems that social media-related traffic no longer means much of a disconnect, these days, but that thankfully comes down to personal choice. So now it's over: over the coming days Autodeskers will be returning to their normal routines, preparing for the end of the financial year and/or thinking about our usual first quarter activities (there should…
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One of the ulterior motives (although you might really consider it a mere side benefit) for my recent trip back to the UK was to pick up the Christmas presents I'd bought for myself on behalf of my wife and kids. 🙂 The first – one of the new Raspberry Pi Model B's with 512 MB of memory – could have been ordered from Switzerland, but I was a bit frustrated at the mark-up added by the local reseller (the previous one I bought from the UK and had shipped directly here from China… that no longer seems possible now…
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I've taken a few days off to visit some very old friends who are back in the UK from New Zealand for the festive season, but thought I'd go ahead and share some code I've been playing with, even if I can't actually tell you what it's for. I can tell you what it does, of course, but I'm using it in conjunction with some other capabilities that I'm probably not allowed to talk about explicitly. Feel free to speculate at your leisure, I may or may not be able to confirm or deny your suspicions (I need to check…
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As I inexorably head towards the end of my 30s (just a few months to go, now), I feel more and more justified to get cracking on a proper midlife crisis. And I've been told that to get the most out of a good crisis, you really need to invest in at least a little crisis planning. 🙂 My most recent bout of rumination kicked off at AU2012, when – to my huge surprise – I stumbled across a new Morgan 3 Wheeler. Here's a picture of the car with Jon Wells, the Senior Designer at Morgan Motor Company Ltd.,…
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As mentioned in this previous post, I've been having fun with an old 16K ZX Spectrum that a colleague kindly gave me a few months ago. After getting it working with a modern TV set, the next challenge was to get some games loaded into it. Pretty much any game you've ever played or heard of for the Spectrum is available online in digital format, although it should be stated that most are still protected by copyright. World of Spectrum has a great collection, and if you go further afield you can find "complete" archives that people have posted. For…
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I'm sitting at SFO, waiting for my flight to Heathrow to board and depart (hopefully on time, considering the series of storms that have hit San Francisco over the last few days). I was going to write something technical to post, but in the end I changed my mind: I'm going to sit back, watch some TV and have a drink. Thanks for all the support and kind words I received at this year's AU: as ever it was an incredibly interesting and rewarding experience (just speaking from a personal perspective), but it was especially important to me, this year,…
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I was going to start posting my AU handouts today, but I'll leave that until tomorrow (an exceptional four-post week for me!). I decided to fulfill a casual request from an old Autodesk buddy of mine, Thomas Schwaiger, although I thought I'd broaden the topic just slightly. 🙂 I've been to see a couple of my favourite rock bands as they've passed through Switzerland, this year. The first was a bit opportunistic: some friends had tickets to the original Radiohead concert date in Switzerland on their recent tour to be held at an incredible venue, a disused quarry in Saint…