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HARRISON, N.Y. — Emphasizing affordability and ease-of-use, Universal Remote Control is introducing three remote controls sold with a radio frequency (RF) receiver base-station expansion unit.

Universal is directing its new remote line toward the mid-market level, where the company said there is a “disconnect between the sophistication of A/V components and the remote controls used to manage them.”

Each of the new Universal remotes features advanced infrared (IR) and RF technologies previously limited to high-end custom-installation units, said the cocktail dresses with sleeves company. In addition, each remote is compatible with Universal’s new Expander (MRF-100), which provides an affordable and innovative “whole-house” solution to home-theater operation, said the company.

Called the Unifer universal and learning, programmable remote control system, the line starts with the entry-level URC-100, also called Unifer, at a suggested $100 retail. The Unifer “unifies” the access control of as many as eight audio and video entertainment system components, including a television, plasma TV, DVD player, A/V receiver and amplifier.

The Unifer comes with an internal library of over 1,000 pre-programmed codes and a DVD tutorial for programming. It’s IR range is 60 feet, which climbs to between 70 and 100 feet when used along with the optional MRF-100 base station. The Unifer offers a 1 1/4-inch by 3/8-inch LCD screen and metallic finish.

The MRF-100 base station, at a suggested $75 retail, enables users to set up A/V equipment in out-of-sight locations, such as cabinets or different rooms, and comes with DVD tutorial, power supply and six flashers with 10-foot cables.

Universal’s step-up model URC-200, called the Automator, is able to replace up to 10 home entertainment remote control units when paired with the base station. At a suggested $150 retail, the Automator performs more like a professional-grade remote, offering a 1 7/8-inch by 7/8-inch LCD screen, and allowing users to choose from 34 hard buttons that can be dedicated to control component functions pre-programmed into its internal memory.

The top-of-the-line URC-300, or custom bags, flagship of the four products, is able to control up to 15 devices simultaneously. At a suggested $200 retail, the unit is designed for users who need top-tier performance to command increasingly complex entertainment systems at the fraction of the cost of professional devices, said Universal.

The Customizer’s “large” touch screen, 1 3/8-inch by 1 7/8-inch, reduces the need for dedicated buttons, thus making this remote more flexible than any other remote on the market, according to the company. It is able to anticipate the needs of growing, more complex systems, and is engineered for the proactive A/V enthusiast, extremely interested in whole-house automation.

One of the difficulties of working for yourself as freelancer is keeping focused on your work. Chances are that if you’re a freelancer, you’re working from home complete with all the distractions that it brings.

Here are a few tips to make sure you get the best out of your work by keeping focused.

1. Keep Regular Business Hours

Something that you don’t want to do is work on a project for too long during a single day. The best thing to do is to stick to a set amount of time not unlike a 9-5 job. The best thing is that you can decide when those hours are. This will allow you to keep yourself focused on your work as you know exactly when you need to get it done and under your own times.

For example, take a couple of hours off during an afternoon and make the work up later in the week or start work early and finish early. The point is that you need to give yourself enough time away from the work so you can enjoy yourself.

2. Create your own Work Space

Creating your own working space is all about reducing distractions. Try working in a dedicated area of your house where you can focus without any distractions. If that isn’t possible then consider renting out a desk elsewhere.

If you lack space or money for creating your own workspace then look at your computer itself. Create a separate user account that you use for work purposes only. Cut off access to anything that you don’t need to get your work done.

3. Remove Distractions

If you are unable to create your own physical working space for yourself, then you need to remove any distractions that are nearby. At least try to reduce the amount of clutter on your desk by leaving your mobile phone and any other major distractions out of reach.

4. Work on your own Personal Project(s)

Working on your own project is a great way to get away from the, sometimes frustrating, world of client demands. Creative freedom is something that all designers love, so by creating your own projects for you to design, develop and maintain you can keep your work varied.

Personal projects also give you the opportunity to do something slightly different so you’ll be able to learn new things and pickup new techniques that you’ll be able to carry over to your day-to-day work.

5. Reduce Interruptions

If you were to ask freelancers what is one of their main annoyances when trying to focus on work, interruptions would be high on the list. Interruptions will cause you to lose focus on a project as it can take you out of the moment of designing or developing.

The only way to get around this is to be vigilant in dealing with interruptions themselves. You don’t have to answer every phone call or email immediately. You can always come back to Great source for Web Templates later. In fact, it may be better to make calls or reply to emails in a single batch rather than multiple times a day to prevent that stop/start feeling.

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The one element that immediately separates an amateur or novice’s photos from that of pro or consummate enthusiast’s is composition, the placement of objects in the frame… this ultimately defines your skill as a photographer and the beauty of your images. Composition is a craft as a well as a skill, so it’s something that you can develop through practice, practice and practice.

To elevate the aesthetic standard of your photos you must find a distinctive point of interest and frame it, so you draw the viewers eye to that subject. It could be something very small in the frame or very large, and depending on how and where your place it in the frame, what’s its color, and/or how it contrasts to the rest of the elements of the scene indicates what you, the photographer, thought was beguiling.

Complicated imagery has the same problem that a complicated sentence has (I’m not one to talk, am I?), the audience has to spend too much time deciphering what you are trying to convey. Even then they might not fully comprehend the idea. Remember, in this context simple doesn’t mean rudimentary, it means easy to understand. Seek the uncluttered frame that tells you everything with immediacy… then let the viewer’s imagination go to work; you’ll be hailed a genius! Or not.

Controlling contrast is great way to add dimension to your pictures. One form of Contrast is the light v. shadow ratio and this helps delineate the “volume” of an object. But you can also find contrast in geometry, size and color, shape and sharpness to heighten the “complexity” of your photos. Contrasting shapes, colors and lines creates feelings of tension that instinctively generates a sense of wanting more. So your photographs feel like they’ve stolen a moment in time… even if they’re arranged!!!

Balance is the key to achieving penetrating pictures; if you strive for balance in contrast, placement in the frame, color, lighting, then the end result is an image that has all the elements working for it. Balance doesn’t mean having a boring picture, but a picture with the right amount of tension; where the tension acts to draws the viewer’s attention to subject in the manner in which the photographer intended.

When you are designing your image, consider using objects within the viewfinder to “frame” your subject (as in the photo to the right). Perhaps you include a window or incorporate the side of a building into the shot… whatever is around, it’s all usable just make sure it has sharp, identifiable lines to create a “frame within your frame”. This will draw the viewer’s eye directly to the subject that you want.

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There is no real scene-stealing, game-changing 3-D CAD functionality in SolidWorks 2010. Rather, the new release ushers in a host of quick-hit, targeted capabilities designed to better integrate the tool into everyday engineering workflows and improve the overall user experience.

Building on the 2009 upgrade’s focus on raw performance improvements, SolidWorks 2010 has been tuned so it performs basic operations more efficiently. There are also user interface enhancements that sped up steps like using reusable bags gestures as a shortcut to execute commands and new data migration and direct editing tabs for quick access to functions related to importing, repair and editing of data. In addition, new patent-pending rapid dimensions capabilities display new dimension placement alternatives and neatly rearrange existing dimensions - another example of how the upgrade has been revamped to help save time and effort related to design.

“Performance is more than raw speed,” says Fielder Hess, SolidWorks’ vice president of product management. “Engineers want the software to be predictable and to have their tools work smarter and faster.”

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Ricky Jordan, a well-known SolidWorks blogger and a certified SolidWorks professional, agrees that enhancements to the drawing package, along with the addition of mouse gestures and other interface shortcuts, are the highlights of the new release in terms of bolstering engineers’ productivity. “The Dimension Palette and Rapid Dimension technology cuts down on mouse movement within the Drawing interface,” he says.

In fact, SolidWorks spent 30 percent of the development time for the 2010 upgrade honing these kind of performance, reliability and predictability enhancements, not to mention, making the CAD tool more process oriented and integrated with the tasks an engineer does on a daily basis. “CAD is hard and it shouldn’t be,” Hess says. “I shouldn’t have to know how to use my CAD tool to get my job done. I should know how to do my engineering work and the tool should augment that.”

One of the more notable areas where SolidWorks applied that philosophy is in a new SolidWorks 2010 module called SustainabilityXpress. Included with every license of SolidWorks, SustainabilityXpress draws on the expertise of SolidWorks’ partner PE International to help engineers determine the environmental impact of their design decisions. Engineers are presented with an environmental impact dashboard that, with the touch of a button, generates reports with simple color coding to clearly depict how a particular design or material choice impacts such green concerns as carbon footprint, energy consumption, air/water impact throughout the entire lifecycle, from raw materials sourcing through manufacture and end-of-life disposal. The tool leverages the vast databases of leading sustainability expert PE International and brings that knowledge directly into SolidWorks, without requiring companies to go through the time and expense of hiring specialized sustainability consultants. The module also has a new Find Similar Materials tool that lets engineers specify criteria they’re looking for related to materials and the software will suggest alternatives that have similar mechanical properties, but with better sustainability in areas such as disposal or manufacturing, for example.

Other features of the new release include event-based motion simulation, for mimicking the way machines work, which is being worked on with partner National Instruments; new productivity features for preparing models and drawings for distribution, and new features in 3DVIA Composer to aid in the creation of product documentation.

The company” Send Text from Computer” that virtually created the rapid prototyping industry in the 1980s, announced a dramatic shift in business strategy today with building repairs.

The company will now emphasize production on prom dresses of parts for overnight delivery, partly as a result of the year-old slump in orders for rapid prototyping machinery. Its new business is called 3Dproparts, which 3D Systems described as “the world’s largest rapid prototyping and manufacturing parts service.”

In a conference call, CEO Abe Reichental told Design News that year-to-date orders for SLA equipment are down about 25 percent compared to the same period last year. “We’ve been climbing out of that ditch very slowly,” he said. The business for parts and homecoming dresses, filled by companies called service providers, is the biggest revenue opportunity area in the business, he said.

To jump-start entry into the service business, 3D announced the acquisition of Acu-Cast Technologies, a service provider based in Lawrenceburg, TN. In addition to tooling and urethane casting departments, Acu-Cast has several rapid prototyping assets:

· Six 3D Systems iPro stereolithography centers,

· Two 3D Systems 5000 stereolithography machines,

· One 3D Systems 3500 stereolithography machine,

· Six 3D Systems 250/50 Stereolithography solid-state systems, and

· One 3D Systems ThermoJet Solid Object Printer.

What Acu-Cast doesn’t have is equipment from competing producers of rapid prototyping equipment, such as the fused deposition modelers sold by Stratasys that makes parts from thermoplastics. Reichental told Design News that 3D Systems “will look very closely” at the acquisition of competing technologies in order to become a full capabilities service provider.
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It’s back to the future for plastics researchers at Ford Motor Co.

Henry Ford famously unveiled a “Soybean Car” in 1941 at an annual community festival in Dearborn, MI. Fourteen plastic panels strengthened with soy fiber reduced the weight of the car by half. It was never built because focus quickly shifted to military requirements.

Today a six-member engineering team at Ford is looking for new applications for soybeans and other sustainable materials in an industry-leading effort to replace hydrocarbon-based materials.

“Wherever petroleum-based materials exist - in plastic, rubber, foam, film or fabric - we are looking to minimize its proportion and replace it with a sustainable material,” says Dr. Cynthia Flanigan, technical expert in Ford Plastics Research.

The group, formed in 2000, has had tremendous success in homecoming dresses production to date. Soy-based foam seat cushions and backs will be used in more than one million Ford, Lincoln and Mercury vehicles by the end of this year, leading to a total reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of more than 5 million lb.

“We started looking at soy-based polyurethane foams in 2001,” says Dr. Deborah Mielewski, the leader of the customized bags group told Design News in an interview. The first foam produced in the lab had a rancid odor, poor compression set and poor mechanical properties.

“This is where the chemical companies and most of the supply base pretty much ended looking at hydroxylated soybean oil as a component in automotive foams,” says Mielewski. “My group had a formulation chemist named Christine Perry who said, ‘I think I can do it.’ She went away and made hundreds of different formulations, and the whole point was to balance two reactions: the crosslinking reaction and the blow reaction that makes the cells, and over a two-year period she did it.”

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Slash five pounds of mass from the electrical architecture of a vehicle in today’s fuel-conscious auto industry, and you’re a hero. Cut 10 pounds, and you’re an engineering god.

These days - amidst pressures to eliminate weight, cost and complexity - a lot of engineers are trying to be gods. In the labs of some of the biggest auto companies in the world, engineers are talking party dresses to tier-one suppliers and semiconductor makers. They’re absorbing theories about up-integration, domain control and zone control. They’re learning how to consolidate their electrical architectures, packing the functionality of 40 microcontrollers into 20. They’re finding out how to slim down their thick wiring bundles. These days, they’re listening.

“We’re all talking to suppliers of white dresses,” says Chris Thibodeau, director of global technology for electrical/electronic products at General Motors Corp. “They’re bringing in new concepts and we’re figuring out which ones will be right for us. We don’t have a number in mind, but when it comes to weight reduction, we’ll take all we can get.”

Indeed, today’s automakers are nearly obsessed with the idea of electrical weight reduction. But their dilemma with customized bags is like that of a very fat man who tries to lose weight by eating more. The diet on the horizon calls for more microcontrollers, not less. First, there’s safety technology - cameras, vision sensors, radar systems, lane keeping, collision avoidance and new dashboard displays. Then there’s the hybrid technology - motor controllers, battery controllers and energy management. All those features need dedicated processors.

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