timrowledge

Hmph. I am offended! Well, not really. But no mention of the Festool tracksaws? At least the DeWalt copy is shown, so that is something.
My Festool TS5 earned its keep while building my house. It made cutting subfloor pieces simpler and quicker - no measuring in many cases. It made trimming the T&G roof decking simpler, safer and faster. It quickly and safely cut formica to rough size.
All with no mess.

Cool tool; I wish I had known about it last year when doing mudsills on my own house. I actually invented something similar to do the job and in fact it is in the pile of possible FHB tips that might get published one day...

Also consider 'Evernote'. Simple note taking but it backs up to the cloud and the corresponding app for your other computers does likewise. Thus you make a note on your iPhone/iPad/android/palm/crackberry and it appears on your Mac/Windows laptop/desktop soon after.

Handles photos reasonably well and interestingly can do image processing to OCR any text in the image. I've successfully used this to end up with a picture of a contractor's truck with the phone number from his logo pulled out automagically.

And it's free, which makes it painless to try out.

www.evernote.com

I used a similar idea to work out and print (for the subs) a layout of the subfloor sheets for my house. Since the positioning of some joints was important it was nice to be able to specify exactly where to place and cut and screw the ply.

Amazing how valuable even very simple uses of SU can be!

I too have used SU for years, though mostly for furniture design. I have the Pro version and find the Layout tool a really good way of going from 3D models I can work with to 2D plans most contractors are comfortable with.

I've recently designed my own house using SU & LO and if you're really stuck for something sensible to do with your spare time you might find my build related web pages & blog amusing. http://www.rowledge.org/tim/building/building/blog.html

The thing that will end granite's high fashion appeal is nothing at all to do with the qualities of the material. The very fact that it has come down in price is what will make it unfashionable; that's always what happens. The entire point of fashion is that something is not available to everyone. The usual way of making sure that it is available only to a few is price, though there are other ways.

Same thing with stainless steel appliances. Originally it was simply that expensive units were stainless steel and so people wanted them; manufacturers made new models that used s/s but were less and less expensive and suddenly it's just ordinary. Same with Titanium; a few years ago anything titanium was ludicrously expensive and then the ex soviet union countries that had all the Ti mines wanted money and flooded the market and now you get titanium... anything.

None of it has any relation to the virtues of the materials; granite is still a fine worktop material, stainless is excellent on appliances, titanium is still incredibly strong for its mass, etc.