This past holiday season nostalgia took over and I started collecting old animated holiday TV specials. It wasn’t a very big leap to go from animated specials to classic cartoon shorts and TV series. Soon my mailbox was stuffed with discs to rip and place on my server. Messing around in Plex I discovered a little shuffle button over on the side (the one that looks like criss-crossed tracks) which will randomly select a show and start playing it. When the show ends it’ll...

I run a small web hosting company called MagicEdit which lets web designers setup a CMS using standard HTML pages. It works great because it gives non-programmers an easy way to create websites that they can give to clients and their customers can edit right in their browser without having to mess with any kind of confusing backend. Yesterday one of our customers complained that some of his sites were loading a little slowly. He had done some investigation and thought maybe there was a problem...

Yesterday I went to cut out some new stickers in preparation for the next theme week on RetroBattlestations . I loaded the design into the program, repeated it a few times on the page, and told it to cut. After it was done I cut the stickers apart and started to weed them but found it hadn't cut all the way through. And there were also a lot of scrape marks on the vinyl where the knife moved from one path to another. It only took a moment to realize what had happened, the cutter head...

Back when I first started doing fireworks at my house, we need a place to stack all the fireworks and sort through them to decide what should be lit and when. I cobbled something temporary together out of scrap wood I had around. Over the years it has evolved to make setting it up and taking it down easier. Instead of screwing supports together, they are now hinged. Pieces of wood that had been intended to be re-used in real projects later have now become permanent parts of the stand. A few...

Some time in the early part of last year, Disney released a small papercraft R2D2 . After printing out a few in the office, I printed out a gigantic one that was life size . Once that one had been assembled I had decided that it was so cool that I was going to adapt the design and at Christmas someone was going to get a present wrapped like R2D2. In order to save time I simplified the shape of R2D2, making the body and legs simple rectangular boxes. I had to make my own boxes to get the scale...