Scrapbook notes August 16 (moaning)

[Rick 4F]

No pictures this time just me moaning (a bit).

First things first:

I've just made some minor updates to the "Escape pod 16 image", where I removed some white spots on the left of the image and added a slightly modified harness to a second version.

https://4f-creations.com/site/forum/index.php?/gallery/image/7567-escape_pod16_sd2jpg/
V2:
https://4f-creations.com/site/forum/index.php?/gallery/image/7566-escape_pod16_sd2_v2jpg/

 

Bulk mail:

I'm using bulk mail to tell people when there is something new. I keep that bulk mailing to the absolute minimum as I hate getting over-communicated with stuff myself. Currently there are +360 people on the mailing list.

To send bulk-mail I must use a third party because my hosting company has a limit of emails I can send per hour which conflicts with the forum bulk-mail software. So after climbing some technical high mountains I got Sparkpost working.

Three years ago they promised to have forever a free option to send under the 10.000 mails. Of course corporate greed knows no limit and they broke their promise this year. I either have to cough up 30.- bucks a month (to send 360 emails! Muhaghahaha), or be limited to 500 emails a month. So if I want to send 2 bulk-mails a month I'm sporked.

But there is Sendgrid, who seems to be not yet corrupted by greed so I'm going to try to switch to that. Wish me luck as I have little knowledge about DNS, CNAMES value's and what not.

 

Cinema 4D

Talking about corporate greed, Maxon the company behind my favorite 3D application, Cinema 4D, fired its 3 founders and hired an Ex-Adobe guy.

Do I need to write more? 

Last year the maintenance price went up by 50.- Euro to 550. That was ok because it has been that price for years.This year it's suddenly 720.- and they quit the maintenance option and have instead a nice phone-home every 14 days extortion in place. An subscription of course which means if you don't pay, you can no longer access your own files. There's still a perpetual license but everybody knows that's going the way of the Dodo soon.

Being a loyal customer for 14 years or so holds apparently zero value for Nemechek/Maxon. Fine, they're no longer getting my money. So I'll stick with what I have until it stops working and then I'll switch over to Blender. In the meantime I try to make sometime free to roam around in blender to get familiar with it.

 

One picture to end:

No pictures I wrote... Ugh. That's not nice. Lemme see...
This is as preliminary as it gets. See it as a sketch, nothing set in stone. Just trying to get a feel for it but I like the idea of zooming all the way out. Of course if this evolves into a final piece in some sort of form, I'll add a more zoomed-in version too.