20+ Years of Design, Technology & More
20+ Years of Design, Technology & More
Kate Brown's Civil Anarchy Den explains Civil 3D pipe networks, data shortcuts, surfaces, units and Forma with real fixes and real humor. Ten posts to start with, plus the gremlin I want her to hunt next.
Why Overlay is my default for AutoCAD and Civil 3D Xrefs, when Attach makes sense, and why data shortcuts need their own dependency check.
Shaan's CER Viewer 1.0.3 reads the journal Revit 2026 ships with its crash reports, shows Revit and Plant 3D release years, and adds a Stack Dumps tab.
Attaching an Xref can drag nested references, images, point clouds, and Civil 3D objects into downstream drawings. Here's what Overlay stops, and what it doesn't.
I tried Live Translation on the new AirPods 5 in a meeting with a Japanese startup. Coming from AirPods Pro 3, here is how it held up, plus what else is new.
AI cloned Adobe and NVIDIA open-sourced a geometry kernel. That doesn't mean a free AutoCAD or SolidWorks is weeks away. A plea for patience, skepticism, and real competition.
Autodesk is pushing AEC toward connected cloud workflows and AI. The bigger opportunity isn't automation. It's software that cares more about the design than the commands. Reliability, data control, and firms that can't go all-in on the cloud are still open questions.
I came home from Autodesk University 2026 with swag, new connections, and a lab-confirmed case of Influenza A. Plus a modest proposal for germ-free AU 2027: the AU Suit.
Shaan's CER Viewer 1.0 helps users analyze crash reports from Autodesk products by reading XML and binary .pb files. It's a free, portable tool that requires no installation or internet connection. The viewer organizes crash data for easy comparison and includes features for batch analysis and anonymization, making troubleshooting efficient.
A day-by-day look at AU 2026 in Las Vegas - product team meetings, keynotes, a crashed live demo, my standing-room-only session on AI and the CAD manager role, Rebelution at Brooklyn Bowl, and the 36-hour crash afterward.
Autodesk moved CER crash reports from XML to binary protobuf with the 2025 products. Here is the viewer I built to read both, the parser bug that made me misreport the data twice, and the real numbers on the drawing field.
In March I said the v7 protobuf crash format had lost most of what made CER useful. The data was there. Two mistakes in how I decoded and parsed the files hid it, and here is what I found once I fixed them.