What do people care (search) about?

Did you ever wonder what people care about? Google let's you have a peak.
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Just discovered that google has a page where, albeit censored by some content, you can see what people are actually searching live. It is actually pretty cool and hypnotic. See for yourselves.
Got the tip from here
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End of Support for Windows XP

If you are of that 7,33% still on windows XP consider upgrading. Support ends on April 8, 2014
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If you are still using Windows XP (according to my analytics account 7,33% of you are) considering updating soon to Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1. Microsoft will no longer provide updates or support for Windows XP from April 8, 2014. This means security problems will not get fixed and you will no longer have updated to the sytem to match new requirments. So as long as you can afford it, update, Windows 7 is actually very stable and user friendly. I haven't tried Windows 8.

Heads up via CADIMAGE BLOG

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World Habitat Day is Today

Happy World Habitat Day.
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I didn't even know till today this existed, got the heads up in twitter by @CarlosCamara:

El primer Lunes de octubre se celebra el día Mundial de la Arquitectura en coincidencia con el Día Mundial del Hábitat Humano: ¡feliz día!

— Carlos Cámara (@carlescamara) October 7, 2013

After that, and before writing this post, I went to the UN Habitat website to see what it is about. According the UN Habitat Website "The United Nations has designated the first Monday of October every year as World Habitat Day. This year, it will be celebrated on 7 October 2013. The purpose of World Habitat Day is to reflect on the state of our towns and cities and the basic right of all to adequate shelter. It is also intended to remind the world that we all have responsibility to shape the future of our cities and towns." Sound nice.

Digging a bit more, I was specially surprised when I found out that former Barcelona's Mayor Joan Clos was involved in this in some way. (Executive Director of UN-Habitat on the occasion of World Habitat Day, 1 October 2012). So after that, I wonder if this World Habitat Day is anything useful at all considering its Executive Director credentials. Yes, his official credential look very good, Mayor, Industry Minister and Ambassador in Turkey. The thing is, this guy swore his position as a Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism, saying "I swore as Minister of JUSTICE, Trade and Tourism...". Yes, he didn't even know what position he was getting I guess.

So, despite the good intentions that one can feel from the motto of the UN-Habitat website, one wonders if this type of organizations are just elephant cemeteries where our no longer useful politicians (where they ever useful?) can retire with a big paycheck and paid expenses to attend events in different countries.

I am sure there are extremely valid people doing hard work in them, I just can't stop wondering how did we allow all these parasites to be our appointed representatives.

Happy World Habitat Day anyway, at least let's remember that all we do, all we try to improve, all the BIM, and Lean and IPD, efforts that try to increase profitability, improve the industry, reduce waste and all these dogmas we repeat ourselves should or may in a way or another make the built habitat better. Maybe, just maybe, all this transformation of the AEC industry we say we aim to achieve, can one day be put to help those without adequate shelter. Maybe a small percentage of what owners save by implementing BIM or Lean in their Projects, can be put to help those in need. Maybe, or maybe we are all too busy building ourselves a career.

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Top Visited Posts in 2012

2012 Summary
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#01. List of SketchUp Plugins: A post dated from 2009 but that has been (or used to be, when I had teh time) updated regularly with all the SU Plugins I have reviewed on this site. It needs some link updating which I will do soon, but it is still the favourite post for most visitors to CAD Addict.

#02. Using AutoCAD autosave files to recover lost work: This post explains what can you do after one of those moments when apparently you've lost part of your work in AutoCAD. It is the post with the most number of comments and all of them positive, so it is the one that made my work here feel more rewarded. Thanks to all who spend the time wirting down a comment, good or bad, it's great to know someone is reading.

#03. Plugin to Make faces from lines in SketchUp: I have toc onfess I am a bit puzzled by this post being so popular. The plugin was very useful back when the version of SU was v.6 or so and the program was not very smart creating lines from a closed set of lines. I think this was pretty much solved in later versions of SU, but oddly the post keeps getting a lot of visits. If anyone knows why the info will be very much appreciated.

#04. Volume Calculator Plugin for SketcHup: A post explaining how to use this old plugin to calculate volume of entities in SketchUp. A simple post about a simple plugin but that has had a lot of visitors and comments during these last months.

#05. How to install plugins in SketchUp: This is simple tutorial on how to get your plugins working in SketchUp. Sometimes the posts you think are too simple become the most wanted ones.

#06. List of BIM Software and Providers: Back when I was writing my Master Thesis, I started researching on all the scope of providers that have Building Information Modelling related software. This posts gathers most of that info and organizes it in different categories. One think this post taught me: People love lists.

#07. Converting 3D objects into 2D drwaings in AutoCAD: THis post explains the use of the FLATSHOT command in AutoCAD that allows you to flatten 3D Objects into a 2D drawing.

#08. Representing section cuts with solid fill in SketchUp: Another simple tutorial with images to get a nicer representation of the section cuts that SketchUp allows us to do very simple.

#09. Converting lines into tubes / cilinders in SketchUp: A post explaining the use of two different plugins that allow you to do this operation very fast.

#10. Mirroring objects in SketcUp: THree different methods to do the mirror operation in SketchUp. The oldest post (it dates back from 2008) to appear on this top ten list.

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Happy 2013 - End of year thoughts

The most innactive year comes to an end, hope next one is better.
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2012 comes to an end. It's time to think about all those new year's resolutions and of course, after checking that I only posted 6 times on this blog in 2012, my new year resolution seems obvious, POST MORE. I already explained the main reason why I was not having time to blog at all here. Well, good news for the blog (not so much for me) the construction is over and I am temporarily back to office. It is a more relaxed sort of job I am doing right now, but of course not so interesting. So apparently it seems I will have more time after work (and more energy) to think on posts and to write them. That is my new years resolution. Of course, there are others, but can't publish them here ;-). On the mean time, I just want to say thanks to all readers who keep coming here on purpose or just by chance through a google search during 2012, you are my motivation to keep the blog active. Cheers and happy 2013 to all! I have though one good news coming soon, will post it already in 2013!
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The reason i am not blogging

Can't find the time to blog sorry, too busy.
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Been to busy recently to keep on blogging, the reason? Last december I prepared a presentation for a project we were bidding to be the general contractors, and it seems the presentation was good enough to win the bid. You can see part of the presentation below.



SO now I am the Project Manager on site, dealing with all subcontractors, writing contracts, controling costs, taking care that we keep on the tied schedule we have, all that! So no time to blog at all other than this few lines 2 months after the last posts. At some point I'll be back, can't tell you when yet. Hope you don't leave the blog forever.




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Google Art Project: Visit Museums Around the World From Your Screen

Another google initiative to bring the world to your computer
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Have you wished to visit some muesums but didn't have the time or the means to get there? Google is bringing the museums to you. Google Art Project allows you to visit the MoMA in New York, or the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the National Gallery in London or even Versailles and many more (17 in total right now)


Another awesome initiative by Google.

And for the credits i will credit Twitter which is becoming an incredible source of interesting information. In this case @gemmaguell posted a link, then @guell made a retweet and finnally my friend @orillevat sent it to me. Twitter is powerful, I was a bit scheptical about it a year ago, but it is becoming an incredible source of information.

Remember that you can follow CAD Addict on twitter too.

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2010 Top 10 Posts

The yearly lis is here
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As I am trying to do evey year end, here comes the list of the top posts of 2010. Those that you guys have found to be the most interesting by visiting them more than any other pulished during this past year. Thanks for keeping coming here.

1. SketchUp Plugins: Extrude Edges by Face
2. SketchUp Plugins: TIG Extrusion Tools
3. SketchUp Plugins: Model Clean-Up
4. SketchUp Plugins: Make Fur / Grass
5. SketchUp Plugins: Component Stringer
6. SketchUp Plugins: Extrude Edges by Loft
7. SketchUp Plugins: Extrude with Rotation
8. SketchUp Plugins: Better Unfold Tool - Flattery
9. Revit Basics: Control the level of Detail of a View
10. AutoCAD: Manage Layers with the LAYWALK command

As you can see, SketchUp posts have bee the most popular considering the number of visitors in 2010. In any case, i am very happy to see a Revit post on the Top 10 list of 2010. Considering that I am not a blog of reference regarding BIM or Revit, it is a good start and big motivation to make more BIM related posts climb to the top of this list in 2011.

This doesn't mean I will completely abandon SketchUp or AutoCAD related posts, I will post if I use the tools and come along some nice tricks to share, but since my current focus is on BIM and on improving the Processes of the AEC industry, expect more posts on this line.

Again, thanks for reading, sorry for the misspllings and please comment more this coming year, despite the 939,575 Pageviews (591,188 of them in 2010) , it sometime feels a bit lonely here with only 167 Comments on 378 Posts.

Cheers.
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Happy Holidays!

Or as we say at home...
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Bon Nadal


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Off Topic: New York Times interactive USA Map

See the population distribution in USA in an amazing map by hte NY Times.
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Just got this from someone on twitter and I thought I'd share. Maybe not directly related to construction, Architecture and Design, but since I guess there will be some urban planners out there reading this blog once in a while this might be interesting for them.


The image above is from Downtown Manhattan. Wondering where China Town is? Red dots show you the way!. It is pretty amazing to see how despite the great variety of peoples that USA has, the different ethnicities tend to be quite segregated and clustered.

The image below is from Baltimore, where I used to live. Being there it always surprised me how the city changed radically from one block to the next one. On the image below, see the change from green to blue along Greenmount Ave. and York Road.


Probably there are some issues created by this segregation that the local governments should try to avoid. one of my guesses in the case of Baltimore is that creating the huge areas of projects (public housing) tends to limit the possibility of mixing peoples in the city and increases segregation. But I am no specialist, let those who know more talk about it.

The two snapshots are taken form the NY Times US Census Map. It has many more options like Hosuehold income, education, etc. A pretty interesting tool.

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CAD Addict at The Daily CatchUp

CAD Addict has been featured at The Daily CatchUp. Thank you guys!
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The Daily CatchUp is a reference blog for all news related to SketchUp. I've been following them for a long time and of course linking back to some of their great resources posted there.
I just saw that they had featured CAD Addict on one of their posts. I was wondering were did all those new visitors come from, and now I know.
This post is just to thank the friends at The Daily CatchUp for the post and to welcome all those visitors who might have stoped by CAD Addict coming from there.
To everyone else, I am back, i've been some weeks off on a trip, but soon more content will pop up here.
Cheers!


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Portuguese partnership

If you are a portuguese speaker, you want to check this blogCatalà - Castellano - Deutsch
New found blogging friends at Barsaglini e Amigos. For all Portuguese speakers these is a great website that just in half of 2010 has posted over 150 potst related to Architecture, CAD, SketchUp, etc. Looks prmomising and probably it might become a reference blog for the portuguese speaking community soon.

Follow them on their blog or using twitter at @barsaglini. You can also find the link to this great blog on my blog roll.

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Augmented and Diminished Reality

Incredible things are happening in the video industry, see two that might blow your mind
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I was recently reading about the possibilities open with the concept called Augmented Reality. This is already something pretty awesome (see some videos here)

What i found even more awesome is what I just saw about what it has been named "Diminished Reality". Software that is able to eliminate in real time objects from videos. See the video below. Endless possibilities! Even probably to retouch animations that have taken forever to render. Now you do not need to re-render them, probably just need some sort of software like the one used on the video below.




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Why do I blog?

Some people ask me that, I have a list of answers.
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Often I get the question, why do you blog? What does it bring to you to keep updating a website? Well the reasons are several.

Reason #01: To remember
As many of you might know, I started blogging more to remember what I had learned than to share knowledge. This website started as an online repository of my brain. Things we use every day stick in our heads, but sometimes, things we learn one day and we do not use until 6 months later tend to stay in that area of the brain where they are hard to retrieve. Writing them down on a notebook might help, for me, this was the platform I chose for my notebook, so I could come back here every time I couldn't remember something I knew I had already learned how to do.

Reason #02: To share
Soon after I started posting stuff here, I started to get comments like:"wow thanks, this helped me a lot". This was a big kick on my motivation to write more often. Think about it, how many times you google for some solution of a relatively simple problem but it takes you quite long to find the answer? Many people might be having the same problem. Posting the solution you find, might help many people save time by organizing the information better. Almost all the information is out there on the internet, the problem is that there is so much info and not always structured to answer your specific problem. Find it, organize it, post it on a blog. You'll be helping others and again helping yourself remember.

Reason #03: To learn
After blogging for some months, I must admit, I started caring about this website further than just being "my online repository". I decided to give it a better look, so I tried to learn what I could on how to rearrange widgets, columns, create expandable posts, burn feeds, etc. Everything I wanted to do with the website, I sort of learned it from others who blogged about it before.
But I not only learned about HTML, CSS or how the blogger platform works. I also learned more about Architecture, Construction, SketchUp, AutoCAD, Desing, etc. By forcing myself to find new content for the site. I am trying to have at least one post per week minimum. This means that every week I should learn something new that is worth being posted. Well that doesn't always happen. When I didn't learn anything knew, I searched for it on other blogs and when i found something I thought it was relevant I reposted or linked to it here.

Reason #04: To improve my language skills
I am not a native English speaker, I think this can still be seen in my way of writing. I do not think too much when I write in English, but in almost every post there is a couple of words I must look for on a dictionary because they are still missing on my "words I know in English" dictionary. If you are not a native English speaker, I really recommend you to blog in English. First, you'll be reaching a much wider audience and second, you'll be imporving your skills.
I have been also trying to extend this to German (there is a German version of the website here) to improve my technical knowledge of German while i was in Germany, although i have to confess German is in no way as easy as English to learn, so i got a bit stuck there.

Reason #05: Networking
As you build reader counts, or followers or whatever, you are actually building a sort of network of peers all over the world who have similar interests. I can't say this has helped me much professionally yet. The AEC industry is for many still an industry where IT enters slowly, where not so many people (compared to other industries) have an online presence, a twitter account or know the difference between a Blog or a regular website. Still, I think on the long run, and living in a society that tends to go more and more into the digital world, building yourself an online reputation is important. And if I am wrong with it, I can only say I am actually having fun with this anyway, so there is no time wasted.

If you reached this far, first thanks, and second, I would like to ask you what do you think. Why do you blog, if you do? And if you don't? What is it stopping you from doing it?


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New Beta Features at CAD Addict

New Site layout and some extra features to increase user participation
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I've been doing some "controlling" of the site through my analytics thingy. I discovered less than 9% of visitors are using screen resolutions under 1152 pixels wide, so I decided to increasde the website layout width to better handle some new features I had been testing in the last weeks. If you are of that low 9%, I am sorry if this causes you some discomfort, but the site needs to evolve following the user trends.


CAD Addict Forum: I have been receiving an increasing amount of questions through the contact form. I've managed to answer almost all of them so far, but I might not be able to do it in the next months. For this reason I've set up a Forum where you can directly post your questions, and I can reply there or anyone else can help. This way, we will all benefit from the questions and answers instead of remaining a private thing between me and one of you.


Comments: For shorter comments, random stuff, off topic discussions,etc. I created a conversation page using Google Web Elements. Let's see if there is a need for this. You can comment using your Open Id login.

This is all pretty new, so please be patient if something doesn't work properly. And of course feel free to let me know what you think about it and if you have any suggestions to improve it.


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Happy Independence Day to Indians and Pakistanis

Best wishes to everyone in Pakistan and India
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On this hard days of big floods just want to wish all the best for their respective Independece Day to all my Indian friends and to all Pakistanis.


We all hope the regions affected by the floods will recover soon. The pictures are just a snapshot of my Google Analytics page stats. Thanks to all Indians and Pakistanis who follow me in their countries or abroad.

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Free Video Screen Capture Software

A utility to capture videos from what you do on your computer.
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I needed some free software to capture some video of my screen and I found this software called CamStudio. It is extremly easy to use and has some nice features. It is not perfect, but it worked out well for me. I've been using to create some of the videos you have seen posted here in CAD-Addict, although some or most are post edited with Adobe Premiere.
You can download it for free here.
I did a quick capture from google earth to check if it worked, this is the result.

Most of the others I found are either only free for 30 days or you have to pay for them right away, so this one is worth the first try.

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CAD Addict is busy

I am not dead
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Working, studying and trying to follow a World Cup. Last month has been crazy, you've seen the low amount of posts. Hope to get back soon here as soon as I get things a bit in order.
By the way. CAD Addict has reached 300 posts. I really never though when i started writing those little notes about a command or two I had learned that it would reach here.
Soon more, thanks for reading!


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Whiteboards: Digital Whiteboard for Design Review

A very cheap way to create an Interactive Whiteboard
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I've been all day looking for different options to create a sort of Project War Room feature with the intention of performing Drawing reviews digitally.

The idea is that since we are working on a high-rise tower with 40 storeys, soon there will be so many drawings to review that making it on paper will end up costing too much time. So the idea came to use a Design Review Program (I suggested Autodesk Design Review since what we will be reviewing are mainly 2D drawings) and use a big format interactive screen so different team members can markup drawings digitally. We want the process to be as similar as it would be doing it on paper, but doing it directly on the PDF files will allow us to speed up the review process a lot.

As mentioned, Autodesk Design Review is the software chosen so far (for 3D coordination and collision checks we are using Navisworks). We are still in the process of choosing the hardware that will allow us interaction with the software using fingers or virtual pens.

There are several options, from big format touch screens, to Touch Screen Overlays, Digital Whiteboards, and others. The most cost effective option is based on a project by Johnny Chung Lee, and it consists on using the Nintendo Wii Remote control (Wiimote) and an Infrared LED Pen (IR LED Pen). Although the idea didn't seem to be of the liking in the office for its sort of DIY approach, it is so cheap, that I am gonna try it for sure as soon as I have some time and I get the parts necessary. Below I am posting the video by Johnny Chung Lee describing the system. Promising!


If I manage to make it work I'll post a video of the results.

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Autodesk Products: Poll Results

Just want to share the results of the Poll i recently asked you to answer.
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I recently asked everyone to answer a quick poll to see what software where you using. Although the results are surely a bit bias, since having here more posts about AutoCAD means certainly more AutoCAD users on the site, this are the results in case anyone is interested. Plain AutoCAD wins overwhelmingly over other software products by Autodesk.



Hopefully more and more people will jump on the BIM kart soon, and hopefully too they will show up at CAD-Addict once in a while, as a goal, I'll repeat this Poll every 6 months or so to see if there is any evolution both on the usage of Software and on the reader base of this website. Thanks to all those 58 who took the time to vote, and those who sent me their feedback per email after the poll was closed.


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