• Radio Controlled

    Creating Scenery for the neXt Simulator

    I’ve spent the past few weeks learning how to build scenery for the neXt simulator. If you haven’t tried neXt I highly recommend giving it a shot. It is, without a doubt, the most realistic RC heli simulator I’ve ever used (and I’ve used all of the top applications). It is so good that I decided it was worth my time to try to recreate our local flying field in the simulator. The developer provided some basic documentation for the process, but there were a lot of gaps to fill (due to my inexperience with Blender, mostly). I had never taken proper panoramic photos. I didn’t even know what a panoramic tripod head was. Cut to today… I built my own panoramic head (I’ll blog about this soon), I’ve gotten good at creating panoramic photos, and I can work my way around blender pretty well (at least for the purposes of creating a proper 3D scene).

  • Development,  Tech Tips

    Automatic Screenshots of Drupal Content

    In an earlier post I recommended webkit2png for automatically screenshotting a list of URLs. A lot of time has passed since that post, and I’ve discovered a more robust tool. Pageres is incredible, and it has a CLI and an api.

    I’ll let you discover, on your own, what the Pageres tool can do. I needed to take screenshots of all of the content types on a site, at all of the important resolutions. Here’s a quick Drupal function I threw together to get N number of random nodes per content type:

  • Tech Tips

    Keyboard Maestro – Looping Through Each Line of the Clipboard

    This graphic illustrates how you can loop through each line of the clipboard and use the line’s value for some purpose. It also demonstrates how to handle the first line differently than the others.

    This is zero-based. The second time through the loop will say “Line number 1” if you use the exact setup below. If you need your  i  variable to be “1” on the first loop, just move the  i + 1 calculation above the If All Conditions Met Execute Actions and change the  i is 0  to i is 1. Alternatively you could start i as 1 and change the i is 0  to i is 1.

    Screenshot_2015-09-06_07-17-17