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Some teasers, some free cloud space - getting ready for next semester!

This blog post is more a personal note, to share with the readers, whoever you may be, from wherever you may live.

I have a few plans that I'd like to share with you. If you comment, you have the chance of steering it a bit. After all, what's blogging just for the sake of yourself.

Unity for Architectural Visualization

I'm about to finish the last revisions for the final chapters of my upcoming book Unity for Architectural Visualization. I do hope I live up to the expectations. It will be published by Packt and they have a pre-order page ready:

ArchiCAD Summer School

Next week, I'm heading off to Cardiff (Wales) for the ArchiCAD Summer School 2013. There will be a BIM Teacher gathering, the introduction of ArchiCAD 17 (which I'm already using) and Artlantis 5 (which I'm using less, since moving more to Cinema4D, but interesting nonetheless). I will be too late for the openBIM day, alas, as I'm driving with a few friends on thursday.

BIM and collaboration

After a successful start of our collaborative exercise with students from architecture and engineering, we plan to continue this work. Last year we introduced them to quite a lot: ArchiCAD, TeamWork, Solibri Model Checker, IFC Export from ArchiCAD, IFC Import in Revit... 

I'm presenting some of the results at eCAADe 2013 in Delft (The Netherlands), 18 till 20th September.

At the same conference, I'm co-organizing a workshop on "Custom Digital Workflows" (monday morning 16th of September) and we'll try to be ready to demonstrate the use of VisTrails, alongside some custom scripts.
There is also a BIM educators workshop on tuesday morning, which I will be attending as well.

Teaching

This semester, I'll repeat most of the exercises of last, but try to complete the series of video tutorials. At least, the introduction to Grasshopper (using Rhinoceros 5), some updates for ArchiCAD 17 (I don't have time anymore to re-record the whole ArchiCAD BIM Course - maybe next year) and a few updates for Unity, based on the experience from the book (e.g. some tips on character animation and camera-switching/material-switching).

They will be published on Youtube, for free as usual:

Cloud

I've created an account on two more Cloud Service providers. If you are not registered to any of these, you can use these links to get a small bonus when signing up (both for you and me). Competition is sometimes good for end users.
  • Dropbox is well-known, but you start with a very small 2Gb and need quite some referrals to pump that up: http://db.tt/dhFofiC to gain 16Gb at most. You can get 3Gb more by allowing mobile uploads (at least once) and by using the Mailbox app on iOS, for another 1Gb.
  • SugarSync has a nice option of syncing "any" folder you want. I sometimes use it for sharing particular folders, such as the Processing Sketch folder, so I can reuse my sketches when loading Windows or when at the iMac at home:  https://www.sugarsync.com/referral?rf=cwqkfed6rnyq7
  • Box had some offers in the past to get 50 Gb for life. Still quite a lot in 2013. Maybe not so in 2050... I don't have a referral link, but I can offer co-workers (using the same domain name) the same amount: http://www.box.com
The previous three are fairly similar: start free, use referrals to increase space, web-, desktop and mobile clients. You also have the offers from Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which anybody can access.

The following are probably less known, but they have a good offer:
  • Copy is comparable to Dropbox and the others, but you start with 15GB and get 5Gb per referral: https://copy.com?r=lxfYd4
  • Shared provides a quite extensive amount of cloud space for free: 100Gb! It's completely web-based, so you'd use it differently from other providers. Their referral program provides a share of paid subscriptions https://shared.com/sign-up?ref=54097

Future?

And finally, I've submitted my CV for a fixed position, but it's an open competition, so nothing is sure at the moment. Wish me luck!


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