Having used autocad for nearly 40 years, I will say they stick it to their customers pretty fiercely. I still use 2010 with 3rd party software to get it to run on win10 at home. I do a lot of solid models and assemblies as well as technical 2D drawings and renderings.
FreeCAD is impressive, but it lacks an easy to use interface. NanoCAD and LibreCAD are not open source but are free and are both better 2D alternatives.
Edit: LibreCAD is open source.
They trip all over themselves just to seemingly not use the phrase “open source” huh?
I built a PC for my little sister in 2007. She was starting college and didn’t have a computer. It totaled 2805 and some change, custom built through Antares Digital (When you know, you Lili). These were all top of the line components (Asus M2N32-WS PRO, Amd athlon64 X2 AM2 5200, Corsair Memory). Not a cheapy system in its day.
Three nights before I was to deliver it to her, I completed all of the setup, had all the software ready to go, even setting up a custom theme for her (We were both metalheads). My folks said that she would need a printer/fax/copy/scanner as well, so last minute, I ended up buying an HP 5610 at target for 192 dollars.
The HP instructions didn’t say that if you connected the cable between the printer and the PC before you had installed the drivers, the printer would not mount as a device. In fact, it would never connect to that PC ever again. Apparently, it ruined the registry until you reformatted and reinstalled the OS.
To be fair, the manual did say to install the drivers first, then the cable, but this was not the norm back then and they didn’t really emphasize it in any way, nor did it mention that you were about to be FITA big time. Had to scramble to completely reformat the drive, reinstall all the software… Essentially, starting over from a blank slate and getting done in 2 days for delivery to her dorm on move in day. It did connect second time around.
I wrote them an angry letter regarding the poor deployment, but of course I never heard back from them. Never bought another HP for myself or anyone else ever again. I go out of my way to encourage people to not buy anything from HP. If I happen to be somewhere and see someone looking at an HP printer, I’ll just approach them, introduce myself, and tell them my story to discourage them from buying it.
CDs are still king with me. 1,957 and still counting. I feel cheated if I don’t get to enjoy that romance of flipping through the liner notes while listening to the CD that first time. I rip the songs I like after a few days of listening to it. I suspect the day will come when MP3’s will not be free.
DVD’s too. Almost 1,400 of them as well.
I did have to let the cassette tapes go. I kept some of the rarer ones, but they weren’t meant to last 40 years and would not likely survive another rewind.
I use Brave Browser (with Ublock Origin and AdBlock) and rarely have any issues. I do have Freetube downloaded, installed and ready to go for when they escalate their game (and they will). For certain other applications, a youtube downloader can be quite handy.
Ads truly are the most annoying, counterproductive and least creative way of putting yourself out there. Even worse, they can never seem to match an ad with the content it gets forced upon, and this serves only to train people to associate their brand with uselessness and irrelevance. Even if you have a product that is good, you’ve just presented yourself as an obstructing pair of clown shoes and that becomes your first and long-lasting impression. When the time comes that they may need it, most people will not remember your product from that ad, only that your brand is a pair of clown shoes.
The simple truth is, if you have a good product, you do not need advertising. You only need advertising if you have a bad product and you are worried that negative word of mouth will spread faster than you can dupe your share of people into buying it.
Edit: Replaced a word that may be taken as a slur.
C# with Unity. I sometimes write in VB for its form controls or VB/A for its spreadsheet interface.
I’m pretty good with it. I’ve always hated their syntax too. It’s not natural to my grey matter like a lot of other languages are. I’ll second Lee Mac. I use his numinc.lsp. Very handy. Afralisp is another good site. He does a bit better explaining certain things by example and in much smaller steps.
I can tell you that you get used to reading and writing autolisp after prolonged use. I’ve used it since learning of it around 1996ish on R11. I create lisp files as needed when I notice something being repetitive or time consuming. I currently have around 300 and they are pretty catered to my work as a mechanical designer or refractory designer. Most are very simple and pointed routines that save me a minute and I might use one of them 60 times a day.
However, a more complicated yet far more dynamic alternative exists. I often create .Net front end software programs that in turn create and output a dynamic lisp all based on the user inputs . They do require a bit more effort since they are for a more complex idea. It’s essentially making a vb or c# program that handles a geometry and its range of permutations. It does it’s own calculations and point plotting. It also knows how to write an autolisp script. So run program, input data, calculate, generate script. Then switch to Autocad, run script. Viola! An hour of work in a few seconds.
With that in mind, you can further this even more by chaining that module program and other module programs like it to an assembly type program. Teach the assembly how to determine it’s own plumbing and (presuming its calculatable), it can be programmed to create and send the module programs their inputs directly.
Here’s a video of an old one I did (sorry, no audio). You might find it neat. It’s software I made for counting and creating drawing views for brick dome module. Everything is to scale and is in fact accurate to (8) decimal places. It handled Domes, Cones, Cylinders, and all of the basic 3D geometries.
Ahh, I was mistaken. Libre is open source.