Posted on Sunday, January 31, 2010 at
Google, being the benevolent giant they are, have made the api to their document viewer public. Upon realizing this, I added the option to view PDFs through Google rather than downloading a copy each time you wanted to check something. It works reasonably well, although you have to set your PDF to be public in order for it to work (or show up as an option). Hope you guys have fun with that.
Posted on Saturday, January 30, 2010 at
Instead of sleeping, I wrote a new story. Here’s an older, experimental one:
Friend: feels highly unmotivated - no inspiration right now.
Me:
I know just what you need! How does a juvenile sea dragon sound?
The salesman came from behind: facing the wall, there was no way out without breaking several generally held social contracts. Escape would have to wait until he made a mistake.
Such a pet will highly motivate you!
Posted on Saturday, January 30, 2010 at
So, quick status report before I sleep. I haven’t been getting enough sleep, so I’m kind of wiped out right now. My day went like this: school, talk to professor, eat, school, work on next iteration of coilgun, break an ott light, eat greasy food, go to a concert, made a smoothie, and tried to hack a quickie robot before realizing that I am an idiot and have no place on this earth.
Posted on Friday, January 29, 2010 at
At long last, I’ve upgraded wordpress: it was surprisingly painless, since I’d finally figured out how to smooth the process. Well, I’m going to be upgrading much more often now.
Also, I’ve taken to writing stories on-the-fly for various posts on Facebook. I’m thinking about posting them here for posterity, so here’s the first one.
Friend status update: can't concentrate! :(
Me: having to exact revenge does wonders for focus. of course, it might not cause you to focus on what you want, but that's a small detail
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 at
So, I’ve decided that every friday will be devoted to ignoring homework as much as humanly possible, and instead working on one of my side projects. So, today, I fixed the showing older document function (technically, actually made it publicly available), fixed the image handling so that it works with the dual LaTeX engines, and just did some plain ol’ code refactoring for the image handling. You’ll also notice that there’s a new reload function that will reload your images for you, so you don’t have to reload the page to get the newest images uploaded by someone else.
Posted on Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at
I’ve done some work on EZLO! The first time in at least a month! Even though I haven’t exposed the functionality, you can access your old stuff now. Also, I gave the login page a facelift and exposed the link to the quickstart. Now for outstanding issues:
Diffs *need* to work. If more than one person (myself) uses this at a time, bandwidth could become a problem. Also, diffs would allow multiple people to work on a doc at a time.
Posted on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at
Although it’s not technically a hack, I put some good minutes and iterations into making this work, so here’s a system I cobbled together one late night, when the rent was due and my handwriting bad.
Doing envelopes is not especially straightforward under Linux (as of yet). Open office does have an envelope wizard, but one has to play with the page/printer settings until it prints in the right direction, and then it prints down the middle of the page.
Posted on Sunday, January 10, 2010 at
This is a very quick and easy hack to convert an LED light that runs off batteries to mains (wall) power.
Standard warning: following these instructions may kill/maim/turn into flowers everyone your know and hold dear. Be smart.
Usually, LED lights run off batteries, because… well, let’s expand the acronym. LED stands for light-emitting diode, a diode being a circuit element that usually only lets current through in one direction. Hence, it stands to reason that trying to put an alternating voltage across it will result in subpar performance, since half the time the current is trying to go “the wrong way”, and it won’t light up very brightly*.
Posted on Friday, January 1, 2010 at
Good things: I’m done (kind of, depending on whether I’ll apply tweaks to the final or before) with the animatric for anim3, I hacked a light (more on this, perhaps tomorrow), and I found another webcomic (dresdencodak.com, filled with all sorts of cool art, interesting stories, and thinking material. It’s a wonder I hadn’t found it sooner. However, the update rate is horrendous, although I suppose he has to do other things for a living scratch that, he does it for a living.