Welcome to Rainbowdreams links to interesting information
Permit approved Cob house
Find out about this Cob house constructed on Vancouver Island
Constructed by a couple who built a cob house on Vancouver Island, it is touted as North America's first building code-approved, seismically engineered load bearing, insulated cob house. Other features include solar PV power, grid inter tie, solar thermal heating, rainwater harvesting from a living roof, composting toilets, grey water re-use, passive solar design and plans for future wind power. The site also has a number of interesting links to green construction technologies, Building Code information and environmental organisations. Please click on the image to learn more.
Design and presentation
Ribbonsoft Qcad
The idea behind Qcad is to create a software that is a fresh approach to CAD, not emulating established products. It provides a broad range of drawing functions that makes drawing creation very quick and simple. Drawings files are stored in .dxf format, and there is good support for off the shelf and custom libraries of symbols. Qcad documentation and menus are available in a number of languages. There is also a Qcad book available to explain CAD concepts and help novices get started with the software. The integrated drawing publishing environment allows for placing the drawing onto sheets, and outputting to PostScript, PDF, SVG and bitmap. Please click on the image to learn more.
LaTeX document markup language
LaTeX (pronounced lay-tech) is a document formatting language run through the command terminal use it for formatting notes and specification documents. It is characterised by it's readability, and the separation of content and formatting, in other words, concentrate on your content and LaTeX will format your content automatically in the most readable way. Please click on the image to learn more.
GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program
GIMP is the software program I use to package my drawings and notes onto sheets with title blocks, and to manipulate my photo images for integration with drawings. It has many capabilities including a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMP is available for most operating systems including Linux, Microsoft Windows™ and Apple's Mac OS X™ (Darwin). The GIMP is a Free and open source software application covered by the General Public License ( GPL license). Please click on the image to learn more.
PSUtils
PSUtils is a collection of utilities for manipulating PostScript and .PDF documents, run through the command terminal. Programs included are psnup for combining several sheets onto on a single sheet of paper, psselect, for selecting pages from a document, pstops for re-arranging the pages, psresize for adjusting page sizes and most useful of all, I find, psmerge for combining separate sheets into a multi-page document. Please click on the image to learn more.
Blender
Blender offers 3d modelling, materials and textures, shading and rendering, interactive choices for fly-throughs and interactive animations, and video editing for mixing sound in with the visuals. It imports .dxf files. Be prepared for a steep learning curve. Please click on the image to learn more.