As purveyors of prime Grade A web content, the SolidSmack crew has done some of the heavy-lifting to make sure you get your Mondays started on the right track. Welcome to The Monday List. Every Monday, we link you up with some of the most insightful, informative, and socially-relevant stories to keep tabbed, bookmarked, reading listed, pocketed, or what have you to get your week started on the right foot. Be sure to check in each week for a new crop of freshly sprouted words curated straight from the source of your favorite homegrown ‘Smack. What We’re Reading This Week: Why the Periodic Table of Elements Is More Important Than Ever…

The massive Grigglus Quod bent beneath the bridge to avoid the dust storm’s gale. While some may have thought their presence unnerving, their arrival produced a strange warmth that made the fingertips of everyone above the water glow like the petals of a lightning flower that had been soaked in these links.  Ivana Besevic – Her portraiture and figurative paintings just jump off the screen a grab your eyes with a style that seems to capture the movement of painting a portrait. 42 – The mystery of 42 solved in three cubed 17-digit numbers, the last number under 100 to be solved as the sum of three cubes. Vile -…

Never one to fall behind the times, Acer is updating their previously announced Concept D laptops with NVIDIA’s new Quadro RTX graphics cards. The laptops in question are the Acer Concept D 9 Pro, Concept D 7 Pro, Concept D 5 Pro, Concept D 3 Pro – all of which will be out later this year. Starting with the flagship model, the Concept D 9 Pro will now have a 17.3-inch, 4K-enabled screen with 32 GB of RAM and Nvidia’s Quadro RTX 5000 GPU. Beefy. This laptop was supposed to support an RTX 2080 GPU but with the new graphics card, the Concept D 9 Pro seems much more suited…

I know all y’all SOLIDWORKS users have been loosing sleep over one thing and one thing only since February 2019. Why, in the pit of Elroy’s belly, did Dassault Systemes go and fiddle with the name of the beloved SOLIDWORKS World brand, changing it to 3DEXPERIENCE World? Well, it’s been a few, seven months since SOLIDWORKS World 2019 where CEO of Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS, Gian Paolo Bassi (GP), announced that SOLIDWORKS World 2020 would be called 3DEXPERIENCE World 2020 and here’s a bag. The announcement of the change sent ripples through the SOLIDWORKS community with some excited for the change and others vowing never to return to the conference. It…

It’s time for another round of apps that cover the spectrum of your beloved smart device(s)! The Weekly App Smack is the best of new or updated design and productivity apps (and maybe a couple of fun ones, too) for the busy design or engineering professional. This week we have a list sure to make you more efficient. Do you have an app suggestion that has made your life easier or changed up your workflow? Let us know in the comments below or send it to tips@solidsmack.com. Hit it! Prizmo 5 › Pro Scanner (iOS — Free) Prizmo is the most capable scanner app for iPhone & iPad to create stunning…

Over the past couple of years, China has had a major boom in the bike-sharing industry. By renting bicycles out to the public for a fee, companies earn money from cyclists who use the same docking system. Now this is all well and good if there are a handful of competitors in the market, but as of late China’s bike-sharing industry has expanded to a point where there are too many bikes and not enough people willing to ride them. The result is millions of unused and unwanted bicycles littering public areas, never to be used again. Hoping to make use of these poorly discarded bikes, industrial designer Qiang Huang…