Zaggo’s Pleasant3D v2.0

I’ve always been a PC kinda guy ever since my IBM 286.1  PC’s are inherently more modular and hackable than Macs – I can buy any off the shelf no-name brand part and fix something myself.

That said, Zaggo’s software is making me wish I had a Mac.  His Pleasant3D v2.0 software is crazy awesome.  I use Google Sketchup to design and a combination of Netfabb and Blender to convert formats.  But nothing I have lets me view models in the way Zaggo wrote.

  1. Which still works – rockin’ a 20 MB hard drive! [↩]

I trust my life to open source

I use open source software for nearly everything.  Now I get to use an open source robot too!

I stopped using MicroSoft Office, Eudora, CuteFTP, TextPad, Internet Explorer, and ASP and other proprietary products about four years ago in favor of Open Office, Thunderbird, FileZilla, Notepad++, Mozilla, PHP/MySQL,  etc.  I’m still on a Windows box… for now.

But, damn, some days you get your ass handed to you too.  Today’s been one of those days.  In the last twenty four hours I’ve spent a LOT of time unscrambling two of my WordPress installs.  They were SO messed up that they were offering anyone who cared to look the option to enter a new blog name and administrative address.  Yeah, that’s not good.

Admittedly, this can happen with any software.  But, today man.  Today I feel like I’ve been run over by an open source Humvee.

Open Everything

The ideal is obviously using a totally open source environment to develop things with a RepRap/MakerBot.  For the most part I use open source software – FireFox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Pigin, PHP, MySQL, WordPress.

However, I’m still tied to certain closed source proprietary software.  I still use Windows and haven’t made the leap of faith to Linux/Ubuntu.  I really like the ease of use and intuitive nature of Google’s Sketchup.  But, I can’t help feel like a little bit of a sham – still clinging to Windows and Sketchup because they’re easy and familiar.  All the while cranking out wonderful plastic goodness with my open source hardware ‘bot.

I have a feeling I could get used to Linux/Ubuntu if I gave them a shot, but the alternatives to Sketchup I’ve seen and tried are nearly unintelligible.  Does this mean I try to run Wine or break down and spend the time to learn something else?