Christopher Finke writes about software, woodworking, and other creative endeavors.

Category: Programming

  • Today’s Functional Print: Christmas Light Clips

    In today’s “’tis the season to be printing” news, I’ve printed replacement Christmas light clips. They took about half an hour to model in OpenSCAD, and each one can print in only three minutes. Their exact design appears to be unique to the decoration that they came from, but these very similar clips sell for…

  • Today’s Functional Print: Cootie Eyes

    In today’s “is he posting about Cootie again?” news, I’ve printed replacement eyes for our Cootie game. The eyes are tiny and get lost really easily, so they are a natural candidate for replenishment. These eyes are so small that I had to dial the print speed down to 3 millimeters per second (from 30…

  • Today’s Functional Print: Cootie Legs

    In today’s “does that really count as functional” news, I’ve printed replacement legs for our Cootie game. You can’t buy replacement parts for Cootie, so the retail value of these legs is literally priceless. These legs are low-polygon because I’m not yet experienced enough in OpenSCAD to replicate organic shapes. I generated these legs by…

  • Today’s Functional Print: Train Valve Gear

    In today’s “how did I ever live without a 3D printer” news, I’ve saved a decades-old toy train from the trash heap by printing a new valve gear for its left side of its wheels. The train is a 1986 model New Bright toy train, and it was destined to encircle our Christmas tree, but…

  • Today’s Functional Print: Shop-Vac Adapter

    In today’s “printing meets programming meets woodworking” news, I’ve printed an adapter that allows me to hook up my Shop-Vac hose (1 1/4″ diameter) to my planer’s dust port (4″ diameter). The adapter was designed in OpenSCAD using a module I wrote that can create adapters between two hoses of any size. This print was…

  • Today’s Functional Print: Guitar Strap Button

    In today’s “validating my 3D printer purchase” news, I’ve printed a replacement strap button for a child’s guitar. Designed in OpenSCAD in about ten minutes, it took eight minutes to print and has an approximate retail value of $2.62. The original remaining button (left) and the printed reproduction (right). The OpenSCAD script and STL file…

  • Meet Akisbot

    Akisbot is the Akismet mascot; he was originally designed by Dan Hauk, but this 3D version was modeled and printed by yours truly. Here’s Dan’s design that I used as a reference during fabrication: I designed the entire thing in OpenSCAD, and I’ve published all of the source files on GitHub, so you can print…

  • OpenSCAD is Awesome

    I’ve been getting into 3D printing, and until recently, I was using SketchUp to create all of the models for my 3D prints. However, whenever I needed to do anything even mildly involved, like align the center of a sphere with the center of the top of a cylinder (or even create a sphere in…

  • Quick and Dirty Command Line PHP

    I do 99% of my programming in PHP, and when I’m on the command line, I would rather use the PHP functions I know than look up the Bash functions I don’t, so I wrote this PHP script and saved it in my $PATH as an executable file named p. #!/usr/bin/env php <?php var_dump( call_user_func_array(…

  • Data Mining My Family Tree

    I wanted to see what trends I could extract from my family tree, so I started writing a collection of scripts to read, manipulate, and extract stats from GEDCOM files.

  • Turn your iPhoto library into a Web photo album

    Update: Now that Apple has dropped support for iPhoto, you may be more interested in the new version of this software, Photos Disc Export. iPhoto is good for managing and organizing photos and photo metadata, but it’s not easy to get that information back out if you want to share more than a few photos.…

  • Import your Reddit activity into WordPress

    I try to maintain a copy of all of my social media activity in a single WordPress-powered archive. Twitter, Facebook, foursquare, Reddit, Usenet, chat logs: all searchable in one place via a single search box. Or, I can just scroll back in time, using Jetpack’s Infinite Scroll module. It’s heavenly. To import my activity from…

  • Does Minnesota really have more shoreline than California?

    There’s a popular piece of trivia that says that Minnesota, ostensibly due to 10,000+ lakes, has more shoreline than California. Sometimes, the ante is upped and Minnesota is claimed to have more shoreline than California, Florida, and Hawaii combined. Other times, it’s simply “Minnesota has more than 90,000 miles of shoreline.” According to Explore Minnesota…

  • Automatically set window titles in GNU screen

    Although GNU screen is actually a window manager, I mainly use it to turn nano into a tabbed text editor. If you do something similar, you might be interested in the way that I automatically set each window’s title to the filename that I’m editing (and reset it back to a default value when I…

  • Import your chat transcripts into WordPress

    Problem: You have years’ worth of chat (AIM/MSN/Adium/IRC) transcripts saved on your computer, and you’d love to stroll down memory lane and reread some of them, but how? Manually open each one in your browser or chat program?? There’s got to be a better way! Solution: Install IM-porter, the WordPress plugin that imports your instant…

  • Export your Facebook posts to WordPress

    I’m a big proponent of owning the data that you create. I use WordPress (of course) wherever I blog, and I use the Keyring Social Importers plugin to make backup copies of my Twitter updates and Foursquare checkins. And as of today, I am also syncing my Facebook updates back to a private WordPress blog…

  • Websites shouldn’t close at 10pm

    HealthCare.gov is getting a lot of flack for being inaccessible and just generally bad, so I thought I’d check if Minnesota’s state insurance exchange website is any better. I learned this: And once the website is up and running, it won’t offer 24/7 service. Instead, it will operate from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday…

  • Inline Preview Plugin for WordPress

    Update: Inline Preview has been intentionally abandoned as of WordPress 4.9.8. {{ the_content }

  • OPML Support updated for Firefox 20

    I’ve just published an update to my OPML Support Firefox extension for the first time in three years. The extension previously added an OPML button to the toolbar in the Bookmarks Manager, but as of Firefox 20, the button disappears because of a change to the way that the Bookmarks Manager’s toolbar is assembled. Version…

  • The Plight of the Self-Taught Programmer

    At each company-wide Automattic meetup, every employee is required to give a flash talk on a topic of his or her choosing. At our meetup last September, I gave a short overview of some of the programming terms I don’t pronounce correctly in my head, since I initially learned them on my own and took…

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