Ah, those cool 3D printing timelapse videos. They looks so smooth and effortless, so with my plethora of 3D printers I should be able to knock one out, no problem! Right??
Burning Yeti cups on the laser!
I knew after buying this 60watt Laser Engraver by OM Tech, I would eventually engrave some Yeti tumblers. Turns out I needed a separate add-on tool to rotate the cup correctly. Finally got the rotary attachment working, got the laser’s motorized bed to lower far enough, and got all the settings dialed in on Lightburn. So far I’ve burned about 150 tumblers, and my next steps are to streamline the process by setting up some sort of a mount or jig to hold the rotary in the same place on the honeycomb bed.
Shootin’ Laser beams
My buddy Trent is a great artist. I love all things related to makers and tech. It only made sense for Kat, Trent and I to go in on a new CO2 Laser cutter from OM Tech. After ordering and months of waiting, our new laser arrived stateside this morning. Trent and I rented a uhaul truck and drove down to Anaheim to OM Tech’s headquarters to pick up our new toy!
3D printing has been a hobby of mine for a little while, but just recently tried to turn that into a profit venture of sorts. Last year I decided on a whim to sell some homemade 3D-printed Star Wars ornaments on Etsy.com, and I sold a grand total of 8. Woohoo. Of course I didn’t put my store up until December 12th, and I only had 3 offerings and few pictures. This year I decided to put it up a month earlier, filled out my offerings and even tried to cash in on a few trends.
Diving into the world of quadcopters
I’ve been a lurker out on the fringes of the quadcopter FPV (First Person View) Racing community for a while now, but last month I decided to take the leap and build my own quad.
As a web developer, a constant frustration has been Apple’s decision to basically hijack any video player and play the video through their full-screen player. I mean I get the reasoning, especially with the first iPhones. The screen was so small that watching an inline video or using touch controls at that size could be a chore. The only caveat to that rule was with an iPad, where inline video was kosher. But it’s been 9 years since the phone first launched, time to get with the program. Thankfully with iOS 10 they have; sort of.
In the olden iOS 6 days, on an iPhone you could trigger the Safari browser to hide the URL bar by telling the your website to scroll one pixel when it loads. This would kickstart the Safari browser’s built-in behavior to minimize the URL bar once you started interacting with the page.
So you tried to get by with just a mobile-optimized version of your site, but it wasn’t cutting it and you built an app. How do you let iPhone users know you even have an app? Companies have tried pretty much everything under the sun and 99% of them are annoying as hell. Thankfully with IOS 6, Apple has provided a super simple standard to incorporate this.
Start by adding the snippet below into your site:
Diving back into iPhone app development
Man. It’s been 2 years since Felix and I build the Alphie app for Hasbro. At the time, our boss came to us and said “Which one of you knows how to make iPhone apps?” We looked at each other and said, “…Uh, neither of us?” To which our boss replied, “Well, you’d both better start learning. We already told the client we could.” What followed was a few months of a torturous crash course of trying to build an app that was a cross between a childrens learning game and a provide a backstory for the companion toy they were selling. After that, Felix went on to develop apps full-time, while I returned to my comfort zone of building Adobe Flash websites. Two years later, Flash is all but dead, I’m developing HTML / Javascript websites for a living and I’m wishing I had kept learning IOS.
Well, I finally got back into the iPhone app saddle and I’m spending all my free time learning Objective C. I’m taking a class a Santa Monica college, devouring a steady stream of tutorials and building a few different apps simultaneously. It won’t be quick but my goal is to be a bona-fide IOS dev in about 6 months. My goal is to post some tips and tricks here that I learn along the way, and also take note of any growing pains I come across that might help any other developers out there.
GoPro Sledding [vid]
Snow is fun! As long as I don’t live in it. Thats’ been my life long mantra and after spending about 6 months in Utah when I was 17, I confirmed that. So I’ll stick to sunny California, but when I need my snow fix I know where to go.