Binary options can be traded legally in the United States, but only on a regulated American exchange. Designated Contract Markets (DCMs) are these exchanges. Some binary options are traded on DCMs or listed on registered exchanges regulated by the CFTC or SEC. Now we are going to discuss one of the best-regulated binary brokers of…
The simple answer to this question is a big YES!! Agile practices are involved in this ever-evolving digital era where there is project management. Agile project management methodologies have become integral to every organization across every industry. To give a brief intro to Agile, it is a procedure of project management where a project is…
There are many ways to level up a character, using quests or passing only dungeons. Many players have already made the best route for a long time, so as not to waste a lot of time. But for newcomers who first enter World of Warcraft, it will be difficult to understand all the nuances of…
In the United States, there are more than 50 distinct infant formulae. Parents can select between formulas produced from ordinary, pure, or soy milk and formulas indicated for irritable or colicky newborns. Moreover, baby formula is among the most heavily controlled food products in the United States, with well-known food authorities prescribing minerals and vitamins…
Are you a content creator sharing insightful content with your audience with the use of music and sounds? Are you an influencer imparting your knowledge to netizens and your followers through videos, webinars, and the like? Or, are you a singer sharing the gift of music with your listeners? No matter who you are, as…
Marketers in the financial services industry today face a variety of challenges. They need to keep up with new financial services marketing trends but they also need to keep up with the latest economic and marketing technology in order to provide customers with what they want and increase their market share. The personalization era has…
A promotional budget, sound advertising strategies, and professional photography are essential. But if the content on a website or blog is boring and doesn’t address their audience’s interests, everything else is irrelevant. Users will come to the page, but they won’t stay for long. Let’s figure out how to create content that will be interesting…
Apps are a great way to expand our capabilities. Everyone has at least one smartphone in their pocket, and in addition to apps for work and news, there are plenty of entertainment options too. Do you already have online pokies real money app on your device? If negative, then it’s time to choose the best and…
When we talk about internet service providers, there are just too many in the US. Each with more to offer than the last, with exciting combinations and bundles. It is easy to get distracted by big brand names like Xfinity, Spectrum, and others of the sort. They are widely available, and the marketing on them…
There’s simply no lack of options for gear to hold your laptop. We each have our own preference, I’m sure, but when my backpack finally gave out recently, I decided to consider other options. One of those options is the Harber London Leather Laptop Case. It’s simple and unassuming, yet durable and well-designed. Harber London…
It’s time to crack open a can of beef jerky, shutter the windows, and snuggle up with a tower workstation again. That’s not weird at all because this workstation happens to be a Lenovo ThinkStation P520. Yes, quell your exuberance. As you may know, the P Series is Lenovo’s top o’ the line PC family…
3D printing is additive. CNC milling is subtractive. Vacuum forming is transformative. It transforms a sheet of formless flat plastic into extraordinary complex copies. It transforms preconceived limitations about functional part thinness — the interplay between “consumable goods” (foodstuff) and “durable goods”(not food) — and low-volume throughput speeds. It transforms endless eternities (hours) staring at…
3D printers (people) have a bad habit of wasting their print improvement effort on the shiny and new instead of the useful. I get it, I do. 3D printers (machines) are cool, and it’s fun to make them look cool. A big part of the fun is customizing and talking shop about mods. We spend…
I just ran out the door with a Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Mobile Workstation tucked under my arm. That’s no surprise to most people today but, at the same time, it’s comical that I can sprint to a meeting clutching a mobile workstation housing a 2.7Ghz 6-core processor, 64GB RAM, and 2 terabytes of SSD storage.…
We seasoned digital craftspeople can take an idea from a digital model to a physical concept with lightning speed. Unfortunately, that process seems prefered over starting with a physical part to create a digital part. For example, when I get an existing item, already designed with complex molded shapes, that I want to add to…
I’m not sure what size monitor you’re chewing on these days, but I’m guessing a 24″-25″ is as small and plastic-tasting as you’re willing to go for desktop monitor. What’s that? You don’t use a monitor – VR only, huh? Well, we’re heading there, but until then, many are still siftin’ 3D on a 2D…
When you think of mobile workstations, a laptop with a detachable keyboard probably doesn’t pop in your head. In fact, a laptop that converts to a tablet – Well, the majority of 2-in-one laptops are low-power consumer products that, at best, gives you touchscreen capability and web access in a pinch. HP, however, has reached deep…
For as long we’ve been finger jabbing commands into a computer, there’s one thing that’s always been an afterthought – appropriate times to high-five coworkers. But followed closely by that is how to recover lost data. That is until it happens and your co-workers are like, ‘Where did you put that file?’ and you’re like, ‘What…
I have a notepad and I have a laptop. I’m one of the people who NEEDS a notepad, who looks like a monkey elbow-jabbing a computer screen if you say, “just take notes on your laptop.” CAN’T BE DONE. But ahh, the feel of paper beneath my pen *ahem* So, I have a notepad, but…
There are two things I never thought I would do. Base jump and wet shave. I’ve not base jumped yet, but for the last two months I’ve lathered up (my face) and used a traditional razor to make me look less like a vagrant and more like a vagrant with the cleanest shave this side…
I remember the first 27″ monitor I had. It took a good year to get it requisitioned and cost $899. 1024×768 was the highest resolution and it could bake cookies if you laid it flat. Things have changed just a little bit. BenQ has introduced a 27″ monitor for us CAD/CAM folks with 2560×1440 resolution,…
I bet you have one bag you really love. And then an excess of other bags you don’t use at all. If you collect the goody bags at your favorite Tech/CAD conference each year, you probably have a massive stack o’ bag history in your closet. “I’ve made them into a bed. I SLEEP ON…
When your plans for unboxing a laptop at 80 mph, while eating Lupita’s famous 50oz sour cream enchilada, doesn’t work out, you’re left with grabbing a cracked iPhone and shooting some shots of the laptop sitting atop some colorful blocks whilst being interrogated by a Stormtrooper with a stuffed lizard. That’s just what happened when…
When you’re mixing the sweet cream of CAD geometry on the screen like a dairyman on a mission from God, that intense look on your face is enough to make your boss step back for fear of being sucked into the vat of your frothy CAD skills. And then you hear that gasp, the one when they…
It’s not often I can say a laptop serves well as a shield, serving tray, pillow, media center and power serving CAD/Render workstation, but that’s exactly what this HP ZBook 15 G3 Mobile Workstation has done over the past few months I’ve used it, with emphasis on the last item, of course. I had thought…
Every once in a while, I get out from behind the computers here at SolidSmack. When I do, I run for the hills with nothing but a tent and sleeping bag… and a van of food, water, emergency supplies, chairs, pop-up tents, bikes, Frisbees, electrical cords, a luggable loo and a healthy supply of toilet…
I can’t even recall the first time I thought about using SolidWorks on a tablet. It was years ago, but let’s go back even further. I started using CAD software with AutoCAD and a digitizer. A digitizer, if you’re wrinkled enough to remember, is a bit like a touchscreen, off the screen. Similar to a…
You grip that mouse so tightly at times, you hear its wee screws buckle and pop under the pressure. It’s ok. That’s just the result of the constant roller-coaster of excitement and frustration that consumes the life of those who use CAD software all day. We’re always on a lookout for a mouse that can…
When you get that video card upgrade and see it supports 4K resolution, your first thought may be, “I should be getting paid more.” Your second thought, however, is, “I need to replace this scrubby blur of a screen with the rich, encompassing light of a 4K monitor.” While the prices for 4K monitors have…
Of the mobile workstations currently available, the ones I could strap to my back and go on a 5-mile run number at four. There’s only one that wouldn’t leave me wheezing like a grandpa badger with a collapsed lung. That’s the Lenovo ThinkPad W550s. It’s a 15″ lappy with an optional touchscreen, pro features, portability,…
“How many CPUs you runnin?” That’s not usually such a common phrase you hear. It’s more likely to be seen on a forum or heard as a pick-up line at your local IT meet-up. The HP Workstation division is making that phrase a tad more ubiquitous however, as their Zx40 line adds a mid and…
The Lenovo ThinkStation P500 sits there. Dark. Rigid. Ready to start the day. You sip your coffee. It hums every once in a while, letting you know when it’s cooling itself off. Ahhh. You give it a little pat, then look around to make sure no one saw you. The P500 is a desktop workstation…
13 Inches of Awesome and a Projector. With a subtitle like 13 inches of Awesome, you may expect nothing but praise for the most innovative (we don’t use that word lightly) tablet we saw launch in 2014. If you recall, the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 Pro is the device that was developed with actor Ashton Kutcher, who was brought…
If you’ve been in product development for any number of years, you know a person’s productivity is directly proportional to the size of their screen. You also know that’s completely unsubstantiated. Still, we like’em big. The more monitors floating above the desk, the better 3d software obeys our bidding (also unsubstantiated). 22″ and 24″ monitors…
When it comes to rendering a 3D model, there are generally two directions one could go in: a drag and drop solution or a fine-tuned custom solution with more dials and knobs than a 747 cockpit. Full-stack programs such as MODO offer the latter for those who are particular about every last measurement of fresnel,…
Lately we’ve been seeing quite a few discussions around various SolidSmack social media outlets discussing the best portable digital sketching tools. Sure, most people will gravitate towards an iPad and the Microsoft Surface based on cost and applications for other uses. However, if you consider yourself a professional designer with the need to have full-blown…
As many of you might already be aware, some exciting developments have been unfolding in the portable fuel cell market in recent months. Unfortunately, the excitement at the moment seems to be geared more-toward the potential for the technology itself, rather than the strange array of available consumer products which currently employ it. But hey,…
Product designers who have found success using the iPad as a sketchbook are a rare breed: it takes patience and pre-existing skill to successfully communicate your ideas with large nubs nearly the size of your pinky finger. Could Wacom’s newly-released Intuos Creative Stylus be the answer to finally being able to sketch (more) naturally on…
Do you ever imagine a day where you won’t have a computer tower tucked up under your desk? Cords wadded in the corner next to a year-old corn chip/skittle/dust bunny mass that escaped the reach of the occasional vacuum cleaning. Granted, the box creates a cozy, warm home for your feet during a cold winter,…
The term ‘Knolling’ has been around since the mid-1980’s and is centered around the practice of organizing any number of objects for a specific purpose in an easy-to-view manner. More recently, design blogs, style magazines, and recipe books have used the practice as a way to instantly communicate a grouping of objects—whether it be items…
One of the more exciting announcements to come out of SolidWorks World 2013 this year was the addition of an augmented reality-based update to SolidWorks’ popular eDrawings iOS app. What has been a go-to solution for many designers looking to present their models easily to clients and other designers in an easy-to-carry solution has now…
Released last week, the Caustic Series2 accelerator boards are a pair of ray tracing accelerator PC boards that use Imagination Technologies’ ray tracing technologies to bring us the world’s first chipset dedicated to high performance, fully interactive ray tracing in a workstation environment. I had the opportunity to sit down with VFX madman and Caustic…
Having been a user of Wacom pressure-sensitive products for years, my expectations going into testing the Pogo Connect pressure-sensitive iPad stylus were set at a pretty high bar. Up until the Pogo Connect came out, I always asked myself, “Do I really need to sketch something on my iPad or can I just wait until…
Ah, the smell of fresh workstation sitting beneath your desk. The silent (and sometimes not so silent) arbitrator of workweek tasks determining the speed at which you get your work done and the density of muscle in your slowly atrophying office chair legs. Every computer manufacturer touts speed and performance at the best price, but…
Next week, we’ll be giving away a Lenovo W530 mobile workstation in the ‘Make your Lasercut Toy’ design challenge. There are a few days left to enter, so be sure to submit your entry soon! I’m sure you have the picture of the perfect mobile workstation in your wallet–or perhaps displayed decoratively as a collage…
For those ‘Paper Junkies’ out there, your world just got a whole lot more colorful. FiftyThree has released a much-anticipated color upgrade to their Paper app, as well as a new touch sensitive feature for your iPad masterpieces.
Back when I was in design school my fellow students seemed to have one of two traits that were exceptional in their own right: Sketching or CAD Modeling. Ketchup or Mustard. Peanut Butter or Jelly. Alone these things are ‘okay’. Put them together and you have an unstoppable force capable of breaking the outer limits…
Some things make viewing your 3D files easier. Like a monitor. Without it, you look pretty silly typing on a keyboard whilst pretending to adjust the screen brightness. Some things also make viewing your 3D files more enjoyable. This 27″ monitor from HP is one of them. It’s just a monitor sure, but if you’re…
Two months ago, I received a very special package in the mail. No, my Chia Pet collection didn’t have a new member – rather, I received a new Dell M6600 Mobile Workstation from thee SolidBox. SolidBox is the custom auto shop of computers, taking stock builds, then modifying and optimizing them to your liking. How…
Do you have a soft spot for hardcore hacks, fanatical fabrication, robots, steampunk and funnel cakes? Do we even need to ask? It’s exactly why we were at this year’s Bay Area 2012 Maker Faire featuring all of that and a mass of 3D printers, tons of guest speakers, Tesla coils set to music and…