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Today’s Functional Print: Baby Gate Support
In today’s “No, don’t go up there” news, I’ve printed a custom baby gate support. Based on a design by Thingiverse user Printed_Solid, this support allows a pressure gate to be used against a post without attaching a wall cup, which would leave a permanent screw hole. I updated the original design to have longer…
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Animating the Solar System with OpenSCAD
OpenSCAD is my language of choice for designing objects that will be 3D-printed, but I just recently learned that it also supports 3D animation. To familiarize myself with this feature, I decided to animate the movement of the planets in our solar system. Here’s a GIF excerpt of the animation generated by OpenSCAD; it covers…
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Today’s Functional Print: Board Game Piece Bases
In today’s “do you think this is some sort of game?” news, I’ve designed and printed some boardgame piece bases. These were printed specifically for my son’s “Thomas and Friends Tracks and Trestles” game, which was missing two of its bases, but the design is customizable to fit almost any size gamepiece. The OpenSCAD script…
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Today’s Functional Print: Stove Knob
In today’s “customizable knob” news, I’ve designed and printed a customizable knob. When we moved into our current house, the knob to control the stovetop fan was missing: After six months of procrastinating and one hour of OpenSCAD, it now looks like this: Now I don’t have to turn on the fan with a pliers!…
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Today’s Functional Prints: Train Track Repair Edition
In today’s “I choo choo choose to fix broken toys instead of buying replacements” news, I repaired two train track components: The track connector is a Thingiverse design by mrbenbritton, and the filling station support is just a run-of-the-mill dowel.
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Today’s Functional Print: Coat Rack Pegs
In today’s “I finally unpacked my 3D printer” news, I printed some pegs for a coat rack to replace the original pegs that we lost during a cross-country move. The base of each peg is flared to ensure a tight fit into the hole, but it also has a hole in the bottom to allow…
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LEGO Gender Equality
At the suggestion of Thingiverse user MrZaius, I’ve added support for female dual-sided bricks to my LEGO-compatible brick OpenSCAD library. The library already had support for male dual-sided bricks, so this is great progress towards eliminating the gender dual-sidedness gap. Female dual-sided bricks are twice as tall as their equivalent single-sided brick in order to…
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I Told Some Jokes
Every year at Automattic’s company-wide meetup, everyone is required to give a “flash talk” — a four-minute presentation on any (any) topic of their choosing. For a few years, I’ve been thinking of using my four minutes to try standup comedy, and this year, I finally did. All of the jokes are original material, and…
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Reenact for iOS
Reenact, the world’s most popular app for reenacting photos,* is now available for iOS. It is free and ad-free. Reenact for iOS was written in Swift in about three days. It’s compatible with any iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad running iOS 8 or newer. It’s open-source, just like the Android version. Take a few minutes…
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Reenact Now Available for Android
I’ve increased the audience for Reenact (an app for reenacting photos) by 100,000% by porting it from Firefox OS to Android. It took me about ten evenings to go from “I don’t even know what language Android apps are written in” to submitting the .apk to the Google PlayTM store. I’d like to thank Stack…
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A visual refresh for Reenact
After I released Reenact (an app for reenacting photos) last week, Joen Asmussen graciously offered to provide some professional design guidance. I could never say no to design help, and in almost no time at all, Joen put together a new look for Reenact. I love it, and it has given me extra motivation to…
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Introducing Reenact: an app for reenacting photos
Here’s an idea that I’ve been thinking about for a long time: a camera app for your phone that helps you reenact old photos, like those seen in Ze Frank’s “Young Me Now Me” project. For example, this picture that my wife took with her brother, sister, and childhood friend: Reenacting photographs from your youth,…
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What’s Old is New Again… and Then Old Again
My father-in-law built this hutch in the 1980s, and after being used as a bookshelf for twenty years, it sat unused in a rabbit shed. My wife asked me to repair it and refinish it. Here’s the main problem: one of the legs broke and had been replaced by a piece of scrap. Such an…
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…And Some Benches
After I finished our kitchen table, I started on two benches: one for each long side of the table. At the last minute, my wife and I decided (a.k.a., my wife decided) to include some storage areas in the benches too. Just like with the table, I started with a design in OpenSCAD: (And just…
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I Built a Table
Before we moved, we sold our kitchen table. We had bought it new a few years ago; it was expensive, but it got so thoroughly scratched and dinged up (and it couldn’t be refinished, since it was basically a plasticky veneer over fiberboard) that we didn’t want to bring it with us. So we sold…
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I Conquered the Ottoman Empire
My wife and I bought an ottoman seven years ago; it was upholstered in some sort of faux leather that was immediately torn by the vacuum cleaner. Over the years, the top began to crack, and more tears appeared on the sides. Buying another ottoman wasn’t in our budget, but neither was staring at the…
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I Made a Grasshopper Pull Toy
As soon as the weather warmed up enough to move the car out of the garage, I wanted to get started on a new woodworking project, and this grasshopper pull toy project from The Wood Whisperer looked like a fun one to make for my daughter. I started by gluing up some scrap to make…
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Published Again: WOOD Meets Plastic
The backhoe that I printed in plastic last year is featured in the May 2015 edition of WOOD Magazine. To complete the circle of irony, all of my future woodworking projects will be published in Plastics News.
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Implementing Mozilla Persona on Interpr.it
When I first launched Interpr.it as a Google Chrome extension translation platform four years ago, I used Google OpenID to authenticate users, because: a) I didn’t want people to have to create a new username and password. and b) It made sense that Chrome extension authors and translators would already have Google accounts. Years passed,…