Software – MickRed

LibreCAD Maybe its just me

LibreCAD is a free opensource CAD software that is available on Windows, Linux & MAC.

So for some reason I had a time figuring out how to use the text commands in LibreCAD to draw lines at specific angles at specific lengths. I think it has something to do with ortho vs polar degrees but I’m still not sure. I have it in my head that it should be 0/360, 45, 90, 135, 180, 225, 270, 315, 360/0 but instead it is 90, 45, 0/360, 315, 270, 225, 180, 135. Again I might be alone on this but that’s how I visual it in my head while drawing.

Unable to find a graphic at the time, again probably my fault, so I made one.

Update:

Found a wiki entry explaining the anti-clockwise 360 degrees

Code Contest on Instructables

Instructables with sponsorship by Microsoft is holding a contest for the best Instructables that are code related. The contest is called Coding Creations and among many prizes is a surface pro 3 and a Spark Prototyping Bundle. The judges prize is for the “best use of Visual Studio, Microsoft Azure, Kinect/Xbox, Windows Phone apps, or any Windows app” so if anyone has any ideas let me know.

So far I have submitted 2 Instructables for this competition, A View-State Key Generator (in c# & php) and a simple app that does Image Edge Detection.

This is a link to my profile on Instructables.

Interesting Finds Number 2

Daniel Bingham Image courtesy of http://theroadgoeson.com/

Tonight while googling some terms I ran across Daniel Bingham’s website http://www.theroadgoeson.com. This guy seems pretty cool and his website covers topics that I am interested in such as permaculture, programming to include game engine development and web design. The website isn’t perfect and has some broken links but interesting.

Funny enough I have the same Refactoring book pictured on the coding link. Its about the use of existing code.

Game Engine is called Middle Earth Mud and is described as “a multi-user dungeon written in C++, designed to be as flexible for in game building as possible”.
http://theroadgoeson.com/code/project/middle-earth-mud
http://www.me-mud.org/
https://github.com/danielbingham/muddyreality
or
http://theroadgoeson.com/code/project/muddy-reality
http://muddyreality.me-mud.org/index.php
https://github.com/danielbingham/muddyreality

Farm to Fridge is an opensource web based farmers market
http://theroadgoeson.com/code/project/farm-to-fridge
http://www.farmtofridge.net/
https://github.com/danielbingham/FarmToFridge

Opensource CAD Software

Archimedes is a free and opensource CAD software. The interface is comfortable, fairly easy to use and is similar to commercial platforms. Exportable formats are svg (vector), pdf, xml and arc which is Archimedes’ native format. The downside is that documentation seems to be lacking and I maybe wrong here but there doesn’t seem to be a way to change the unit of measurement. With that said I still love it and will be using it.

You can learn more and download Archimedes here http://archimedescad.github.io/Archimedes/

Interesting Finds

I found some interesting software on an MIT website today. There were 3 on this page that grabbed my attention.

STARCluster

“StarCluster is an open source cluster-computing toolkit for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)”. First off I didn’t realize Amazon’s distributed computing could be used like this. Then again I haven’t done much with parallel computing since early days with Beowulf clustering. If that doesn’t give enough of an indication this will, I used to get frustrated with some of the machines I had because they did not have math co-processors and most linux distributions at the time required them.

STARHPC

“StarHPC provides a virtual machine image configured for parallel programming in both OpenMP and OpenMPI technologies.” I love tinkering with custom linux distributions especially on a virtual machine. My first thought is that this would be fun to run on various embedded devices around the house.

STARHydro

“StarHydro is an application for distributed hydrological analysis. It allows the user to delineate watersheds and explore various watershed statistics.” Ok so this is probably my favorite find today. I love data especially when it involves the earth. I can’t wait to see someone make a complete computer model of the earth loaded up with live data fed from sensors all over the world.