Gather round the coffee table family. You’re about to see one of the most gut-grabbin’, practical applications of touchscreen tech yet. Your coffee table serves a lot of purposes, but Media Interaction Lab has one more to make your odd-looking neighbors peer in amazement, through the back window.. The premise is simple. Make the coffee table a universal remote control for the entire house. And it’s exactly what they’ve done, with CRISTAL.

Guest Post by Matthew Loew of DAXCON I realize this will be a controversial subject, but I am compelled to raise awareness of how rare a breed the Design Engineer is in industry. The Design Engineer may be headed for extinction (at least in the US). There is a HUGE difference between a design engineer and a CAD engineer. I feel strongly that the competent design engineer is one of the most critical roles in product development but there are fewer and fewer skilled engineers with these characteristics.

Can you even imagine? No OS? No compatibility issues with this system or that system. Pure 3D CAD applications delivered to your screen regardless of what you ‘boot up’ at your desk, or on the road, or on the plane? Could it happen? While visiting SolidWorks, Jon Hirshtick addressed a question about SolidWorks on a Mac or other OS. A lot of use want to see support for other operating system right? Well, he had some interesting comments, but first, what do you say? Will the OS As We Know It Go Away?

I bet two old tires and a bag of tortillas you’re a Engineer or Designer that loves to model flat-pack, laser cut designs in SolidWorks, but has never ventured to have them made, yeah? Or, maybe you’re curious about a company called Ponoko, but not sure how to get started creating your designs. Well, it’s true. Ponoko is by far one of the coolest ways to have your 2D or 3D designs actually manufactured. However, there’s that step of getting a SolidWorks part into the .EPS format Ponoko needs. Here are two ways you can do it.

W… what the..? WTWH, of course. The media conglomerate that harnesses the combine power of Design World, WindPower Engineering, MCAD Central and a slew of other paper and web properties. The past couple of days I’ve received multiple Twitter request in my inbox with the nicknames “wtwh_(name)”. At first I thought spam, but then I recognized some names and looked into it a little further. Here’s what I found.

You’re looking for the perfect beach cruiser, but nothing, I mean nothing, has tires fat enough to match the coolness you want to bring to dune dude. Your search is over. The Fat Tire Sand Bike designed by Mike Scarani could be the sand-spittin’ scrawler you’ve been looking for. He designed it using no 3D CAD of any sort, but his knowledge based in mountain biking, architecture and a few CAD applications, gave him just enough passion to push the limits of drive train dominance. Here’s the breakdown.