I started messing with CamStudio which I’ve been very impressed with as well as I’m impressed that PDF-XChange viewer can dump a PDF to a png. But the greatest find is the newest version of inkscape has PDF editing capabilities!!! this is tremendous!
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Wow, that was fast 🙂
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So after working continuously on ‘reducing to practice’ of my latest invention for at least over the past six months (have to check my ‘inventors notebook’, something I read a lot about since in the US we are a first to patent country as opposed to a first to file) I finally decided to file a PPA or provisional patent application. With the baby coming any time soon I don’t know how much time I will have to work on it so I wanted to use the PPA to help solidify the creation date. The whole idea came about when I was messing around with Justin Bergevin and we were working on creating flat candles. We started bouncing ideas off of each other and the idea for the Connectable Modular Candle was born. This allows you to create candles of all sorts of cool 3D shapes with out having to melt down your candle and start over. Basically snap together modules, made of wax, with pathways that allow wicks to pass through them. I’ll post some pictures of a ‘WickBrick’ that’s what I’m calling them. And some of the PPA just for fun. Figuring out everything was a chore at times but definitely good for my brain.
Oh, and would you buy a WickBrick?
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Find this post interesting? Do you like interesting things? Maybe you would like my invention, a connectible candle called a WickBrick!
Get one here http://wickbrick.etsy.com/
So I ended up using a few more open source programs with my patent drawings. I needed to add some cross hatch to the drawings which I couldn’t get to look right in sketchup. I was pleasantly surprised by the section tool, but I still needed to do some manual adjusting. So I exported to 2D (I changed the size to be about double) then I fired up the GIMP and brought in my drawing. I then created a hatch pattern, basically created a 20 x 20 pixel image with a line across it and then saved it as .pat file. I then moved my .pat file into the pattern directory of the GIMP and then restarted the GIMP (you have to restart to get it to reload the patterns). Then I pattern filled into the places I wanted cross hatched.
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Xobni is pretty cool. Email really is the killer app and Xobni adds a few nice features to it. Xobni search is very quick, and I like being able to see files that I have exchanged with different users and the conversation threading. Most of the rest of the app is just eye candy though. Really nice eye candy, but eye candy nonetheless. I see microsoft adding the useful features in a next release.
I guess the answer is, Xobni, sorry, nope not really.
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So, I recently have started to use Google Sketchup for some patent drawings. I just barely touched SU a while ago and I remember not really getting it. Well, this time I actually watched a few tutorials and since I had some drawings I wanted to get done I started to get in the groove of SU. I like it, its pretty powerful. There are some times that I get stuck but little by little I get better. My favorite 3D program though is still http://www.rhino3d.com/ but its pricey, I should have bought a copy while I was a student 🙂
I definitely have a love hate relationship with the patent that I am working on right now. But I am learning a ton by going through the process. I was having trouble getting my drawings out in a manner I could manipulate and completly overlooked the fact that you could do an export to 2D and then to .PNG etc..
Hopefully with luck I may even file the provisional patent tonight! We will see. After a day of work its hard to come home and bang on the patent for a few more hours….
I also got a copy of Patent it Yourself. I have really enjoyed this book. Very well written! and I am just devouring it.
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I wanted to change the user that was autologging the server in but then I noticed that the TransformTool.jar ceased to function…. grr…. well come to find out there is a config file that needs to match the user you are logging in as, and get this the user is case sensitive as well. Thats pretty annoying.
The config file is c:\Program Files\objarch\cfg\eie.cfg
TransformTool.jar reads this config file (and locks it grr)
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