Sometimes my hobbies cross over into each other. This year I attended WordCamp US in Nashville and had an idea. Why not download and make a bow tie with a WordPress logo on it?
First I went to Thingiverse and I quickly found this one. I already had the WordPress logo from converting the SVG with Fusion 360 and I began to work on combining the two files.
About an hour later I swore profusely. I had a lot of problems. My PC was a little under powered. Fusion 360 can do amazing things and you can design a V8 engine with it including all the parts. My limited Fusion 360 skills were failing me.
All I wanted to do was take the logo, position it on the tie and export the results to a new STL file for printing. But I'm not really good at manipulating imported objects that way in a tool like that.
Tinkercad to the Rescue!
Autodesk makes Fusion 360 but they also have a 3D editor that lives on the web and runs in your browser called Tinkercad. I imported the two files, positioned the logo where I wanted it and exported it for printing.
It took me all of 5 minutes. The first pass had the logo a little too thin and it broke too easily. It was also upside down; I thought the clip on bow tie would work that way. Sometimes I make poor choices.
Different Colors
Just as before with my WordPress coin, I wanted the bow tie to be one color and the logo to be another. My working printer does this like so:
Print using one color filament till the 59th layer. I used a tool to figure that out.
Move the nozzle to the corner and the print away from the nozzle. The nozzle is 200° C and that will melt any plastic it is near.
Beep loudly. This is an important step as the 3D printer is in the basement.
I remove the old filament and insert the new color.
Log into Octopi via my iPhone's browser and tell the printer to resume.
That's it. The bow tie came out well and I printed a few more. Did I mention that I sometimes go overboard? I printed 9.
Opensource All of The Things
The bow tie I downloaded is licensed via Creative Commons – Attribution and Thingiverse provides an easy to print attribution card HTML. Which I could not incorporate into this post except as a graphic and a link.
The 3D printer community is mostly opensource and these were printed on a Prusa i3 clone. I used Simplify 3D to slice the file into gcode but there are some really good opensource slicers such as Cura and Slic3r. I've had some bad luck with Slic3r but I think I sorted that out now.
If you want to play with this modified bow tie then you can download it via Thingiverse. Or create an account in Tinkercad and play with it there. It's an easy thing to do and is lots of fun.
Yesterday I went to work at a data center in NJ. I don't often go as the round trip is more than 5 hours on the road. I had to do some heavy lifting and I wasn't sure if I had access to the last place I needed. So my pal walked me to the man trap there so I could check.
Man traps worked like this: I badged into the trap, the first door closed me into a small room. I badged to a second door, added another type of mandatory authentication and the second door would open. If it didn't work then the first door will unlock and I would have had to exit and try again. Or I just didn't have access and I wasn't getting in.
I did this. The second door opened. Sweet! I walked through and waited for my friend to join me.
Once I closed the second door on the data center side, the LCD panel lit up RED and the speaker started loudly repeating these words.
PIGGY BACK ALERT! AN ATTEMPT TO PIGGY BACK INTO THE DATA CENTER WAS MADE!
That happened. It was loud. It did not stop, it just yelled at me on a loop.
The stern recorded voice just kept repeating that. I was in the data center and the door would not open to let me exit. There was an emergency open door exit button for safety but there was no way I was going to set off that alarm too. I was not in any danger.
I had to call my pal on his cell. He was on the other side of the man trap and he could not come in either. The speaker was on both sides and we were both getting yelled at by a recording.
In short, I put that section of the data center into lock down mode.
What happened was that the first door's handle was not quite in the fully reset position. The door was locked magnetically (I checked) but it wasn't considered fully closed. When I went past the second door pandemonium was the result.
A security guard came and reset the system. He was a good sport about it and it happened to other people before. I tried a couple more times just to be safe. It was all good now.
I'm just glad the local cops weren't called. That would not look good on my next employee review.
My daughter and a lot of her friends have begun to follow different K-pop bands. Putting aside that none of them understand Korean, they like the visuals and the beat of the music. And some of it is sung in English.
My daughter is crafty and I don’t just mean her attitude. Today she’s attending a birthday party and her friend is a big fan too. She took a small binder and using a word processor on the iMac made a 50+ sheet printed on both sides compendium of the bands they follow. Complete with the current band member bios.
BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!
She made stickers with the color laser printer and set them on the pages using Velcro. That way they can be re-positioned in different sections. The holes on each page and insert were done with a single hole punch.
She made folder inserts from stiff color paper and put printed material on and in them. She solicited her other friends to email her content and dolled that up too, formatting it so it printed and inserted correctly with the rest. She made a K-pop quiz complete with the answers in the back.
To make sure it’s a “living” book, she put all the document files and images on a USB drive that she’s included with the binder. That way the new owner can add or change the content as she sees fit.
I don’t know what to say. She draws and does crafts better than anyone I know.
Here’s a gallery of the book before it was given. I’m gobsmacked about all the attention to detail for this. She pulled all the images from online fan sites and formatted all the data.
This may fall under category of "bad parenting" but probably not. I hope not. Just don't tell Lily, OK?
My daughter saw all of the fun her brother has playing Team Fortress 2 and wanted in on the action. The kitchen iMac doesn't play games very well but my PC does. So I set her up on an account there, logged her into Steam and the rest was history.
She picked up TF2 quickly. Then she saw that she could play Borderlands 2, Torchlight II, Portal 2 (is there a "two" thing going on?) and spent hours on the PC.
Her normal activity is drawing on the iPad. She's really good and has developed a real skill. Video games are normally the domain of her brother. But they seem to like playing on the same TF2 server. When they're on the same team she plays the medic and supplies health to the other players. When she's on different teams she plays the scout.
She spent the whole evening playing and I had no clue. It wasn't till I went to turn off the light in the office that I saw her. Her mother would not be happy had she walked into the room.
There is hope that the has inherited Lily's Adult Supervision™ genes. I told her that I'd get a third PC for her, probably from Costco. Her answer?
That's wasteful. I can share yours when you are not using it.
I have no idea where she picks that stuff up. I've certainly never encouraged that sort of behavior.
In 2011 Lily and I took the kids to China. Part of that trip included stopping at Shanghai and we visited the Pearl Tower. The tower is concrete and very orderly, tourists lined up and took a fast elevator to the observation deck. Part of the deck goes around the perimeter and has thick glass panels for the floor.
It’s at least an 800 foot drop. It’s very safe but when you are walking around it and looking down you don’t think about the safety. It didn’t help that the kids worked up their courage and started jumping on the floor panels. That’s not what freaked me out though.
Making our way around the deck we came across a part that had those bank teller line posts. Except these posts were set at the corners of a new looking and very clean glass floor panel. Instead of a velvet rope, it had yellow plastic tape.
There was YELLOW DO NOT CROSS TAPE TELLING YOU NOT TO STEP ON THAT GLASS FLOOR PANEL.
That freaked me out. I wish I took a photo but instead I grabbed the kids and we went to the inside of the deck where the floor was concrete. The tower is amazing but at that moment I had to find an Internet connection. I really wanted to visit Google in the worst way possible. I had to look something up.
I like the WP Tavern and the people who run it. Recently they did something very cool and implemented a comment policy. I had gotten into a small debate there and do not want to use those comments as my own personal soapbox.
No one should abuse the comments on someone else’s site to take over a post like that. That’s just rude and more than a little inappropriate.
*Pulls out and gets on top of my own personal soapbox*
The following words are defined by me as terms of endearment like so:
Boneheaded – adjective: describing an action that is not smart, possibly foolish.
Boneheadee – noun: someone who does something boneheaded.
I’m writing these things on the off chance someone claims I am besmirching their character. I’m not, I think they went about something in a foolish way.
What is this post about?
Over at The WP Tavern there was a couple of posts about this “thing” where someone did something (really boneheaded) and the expected outcome of settling out of court (remarkably, not so boneheaded) was arrived at.
But one of the points from the boneheadee was that he now has a “license” from the WordPress Foundation to use the word “WordPress” in a subdomain. Yes, I am cherry picking here as I don’t really want to link to a bonehead site. 😉
I now have a license from WordPress to use, even after they stop allowing the use of w-o-r-d-p-r-e-s-s in subdomains .
I get his “I did something amazingly foolish and I now want to save some face” but that statement is just incorrect. The section of that posted online agreement says the following.
c. Consistent with the WPF policy regarding doman names and notwithstanding any other provision in this Agreement, WPF shall not object to Yablon’s use of the WordPress Marks as part of any subdomains or subdirectories associated with any second level domain name registered to and controlled exclusively by Yablon, including for example, wordrpess.answerguy.com or answerguy.com/wordpress, in connection with services that involve use of the WordPress platform and support the WordPress brand services that do not otherwise violate the rights of WPF.
This isn’t new and has been published for years on the WordPress Foundation’s page about trademarks. Anyone can do that without getting sued. Besides, the verbiage above has some conditions. It’s not a statement for that person to do as he sees fit.
Words matter and to say a paragraph that just reaffirms their existing policy isn’t a license. It says that the boneheadee can do what the policy has said for years.
Now IANAL but that doesn’t look like a license to me as much as a statement of “Hey, if you play nice and do as we’ve been saying for a while now, then we’re cool.” The point is that this person feels that the trademark policy will have to be changed in the future.
I don’t think he’s a lawyer either or if he is not a very good one. If a trademark holder can permit use of by someone, why couldn’t they do so to a community? You know, via some policy statement?
The Footer Statement!
When you visit the supposed “licensed” site you’ll see this around the bottom.
We use “wordpress” as a subdomain of Answer Guy Central under license from The WordPress Foundation.
Hey, it’s his site and he can put whatever he likes, even if it’s loose with the facts.
The Plugin!
But this did get me thinking.
Why not come up with a plugin that will check your host name in your site URL settings contains “wordpress” and if so, is it as a subdomain or directory?
If your site was using WordPress (case insensitive) in your home_url() then add to the loop_end() action a nice statement about that.
Yes, using wp_footer() is safer. But when I use that and tested on many themes, including the Twenty Ten through Twenty Sixteen themes, the output was either obscured by a (stage) left sidebar or it put the HTML in places I didn’t really want.
By using this simple code I can put the notice at the end of the main loop.
add_action( 'loop_end' , 'mh_licensed' );
function mh_licensed( $query ) {
if( $query->is_main_query() ) {
// Stuff is echo'ed here
}
}
This introduces HTML where the theme designer didn’t intend but for most themes it works out. It puts right after the end of the loop the text I want.
If you use “WordPress” (it’s case insensitive) in your sub-domain then you’ll get this text and link at the end.
But if your site contains WordPress in the domain name such as wordpressneedsme.com or themisguidedwordpresspeople.com then the output this.
We use WordPress as part of out second level domain in direct violation of The WordPress Foundation Trademark Policy. We are horrible people and you only hate us because you do not understand that we are trying to save WordPress. From itself. And people like YOU. We are smarter than you and you do not understand the intricacies of business and trademarks. It is not your fault and we do not want to reveal the details of our Grand and Glorious Scheme™.
*Drinks more coffee*
I may change that last text. I think it comes off as being too humble.
If you’re not using Those Nine Letters™ in your home_url() then nothing will be outputted.
The ZIP name and directory will be goofy but you can install that plugin using your WordPress dashboard.
The code is ugly but it should work for you. And with this plugin you’ll be telling all of your visitors that you’re a good WordPress community member. 😉
Eventually headed to my PC to check the Interwebz (meaning: play FPS video games, my son wanted to show me something he earned on Steam).
I turned on my monitor and my PC was frozen at the BIOS boot screen. Weird. A quick reboot and I received the following message on my screen.
The SSD you put into this PC less than 2 months ago is about to suffer imminent and permanent death. Please back up all of your data again and press F2 to continue. Press F10 to enter the BIOS.
P.S. You suck.
That may not be the exact wording. You get the idea.
That PC is soon going to turn 6 years old. When this happened with the original drive a couple of months ago I believed it. I leave my PC on all the time and the old HD was slowing down and giving me grief.
Now it seems like there is something screwy with the system itself. Either that or I hit the jackpot and my SSD is dead but I find that unlikely.
I turned off the whole works, unplugged the PC and contemplated running to Best Buy and getting a new one right there. Then Lily got home and a calmer head prevailed. I explained what happened and in between my outbursts she got the idea.
Lily: “Don’t just get one right now. Do some research first and then decide.”
Grownups. They just don’t understand the thrill of instant gratification.
Except for being able to play Windows games, the dead PC isn’t that big a deal. Almost all productive work can be done on my old MacBook Air. I have a separate work laptop so my work from home days are not effected. Still, it’s a major pain and will kill more of my down time.
Oh, Windows 10 is good. Except for changing 2 settings and not having any use for the animated start menu, it really is a sensible upgrade from Windows 7.
