In a previous post I talked about my project with Dunbar Aitkens to create Glass Plate Game markers. I am using Python to directly generate SVG for this project. Mostly, this has worked exceptionally well. There is one place, however, where SVG has caused me grief…

I noticed this morning that I was missing all the anonymous comments in the entire history of FOB. Not a good thing. I screwed around with it for a while, and then did what any sensible person does in 2014: asked Google to show me things on the Internet. Victory!. I don't seem to be able to comment on Ryan's blog, so I'm thanking him publicly and very gratefully here. It took me about 20 minutes of screwing around with MySQL on the old and new databases, but it seems to be OK now.

So I've done two things today and this evening. First, I moved FOB off of my work machine and back home. In the process, I cleaned up the Drupal 6 installation a bit and brought it up to date here. Second, I threw away the 6500 spam user applications that had piled up. That was a start…

I plan to finally upgrade FOB to Drupal 7 in the next few days. At the same time, I will move hosting back to my house from work, as my bandwidth here is enough to handle it now.

Moving to Drupal 7 will enable modern anti-spam, which should allow anonymous comments and reasonable user registration. It may have other benefits and drawbacks yet to be determined.

(Yes, we know what it's really called, but who wants to dilute any trademarks?)

This has become my go-to treat in the last day or two. It's not that healthy, but way better than Nutella™ or other similar heavily-sweetened chocolate peanut spreads:

2 tbsp almond butter
2 tsp unsweetened shredded coconut
1 tsp unsweetened cocoa powder

Mix well in a small bowl. Serves 1-2.

Trader Joe's has cheap almond butter with a lot of oil and very finely ground—this is what you want if you can get it.

I told my CS 161 students they had to start keeping a notebook, so I would too. I'm basically using Google Keep for my notes: it's mirrored online and automatically datestamps each new note, so what's not to like?

Yesterday I talked about my attempt to generate SVG to make PDF suitable for laser cutting Glass Plate Game markers. Today, I tried out the PDFs I had generated. After deleting the Haskell generator as a distraction, and fixing a few bugs in the Python generator, I ended up cutting some number markers. Here's what the result looked like, plus or minus photographic oddities:

There are several things worth noting about this…

I built some code recently to generate SVG that could be transformed into PDF and then fed to a laser cutter along with a bamboo sheet to get markers for the Glass Plate Game. (This is why I cared about X DPI: I wanted to see what the markers would look like "actual size".)

So I decided, because reasons, that I wanted the PDF display application evince to display at actual size on my screen. This should be straightforward, as my monitor is correctly telling Xorg, when asked during EDID, its physical height and width in millimeters when displaying in maximal resolution mode. Thus, it would seem to be a simple matter to for Xorg to take this default physical size and resolution and use it to calculate a DPI value for applications such as evince to use.

This is the first in my (perhaps one-entry) "lifehack" series. I'll post others as I notice I have been using them.

Label small valuables with text cut out of a business card and scotch-taped on.