When I received it, a few parts were merged together, probably because of low clearance. Both the gears were merged with their respective axles, but a careful twist got them loose. The only other assembly required was to push the top axle with the gears into position (it was left out of position so the gears wouldn’t merge together).

The BraidMaker worked as intended right away, except for locking up once in a while. This is solved by gently tapping the device so the pieces fall into the right spot (I have to do this a few times in the video). It runs smoother the more you use it though, probably a combination of me learning how to operate it properly and the track getting smoothed by the moving parts.

Some of the parts of the device are very thin, like the gear teeth (which are no more than a millimeter thick) but it is still very tough and handles being used very well. The material is truly white, strong and flexible. When running it leaves a thin blanket of white dust on the ground, probably from the moving parts grinding against each other, but that is (hopefully) only while it is new.

All in all I’m very satisfied with the BraidMaker. I was expecting several parts to be merged together, the gear teeth to be too thin and therefore snap when I’d try to use it, and the device failing to braid at all. Nothing has broken off yet, and it is quite capable of braiding (thin) threads!

The BraidMaker is available at my Shapeways shop for $17 in WSF.

The latest version can be downloaded here: WakeMeUpSpotify (0.2)

Using Wake Me Up Spotify

When you start Wake Me Up Spotify for the first time, a yellow banner (1) at the top of the app will indicate that you need to locate Spotify on your computer. Click on the banner, and find the folder where Spotify is installed (usually C:\Program Files\Spotify). You only have to do this once.

Now you need to specify the time you want to wake up at. Enter the time (in hours:minutes) in the small text box (2). Next you need to find a song or playlist that you want to wake up to. Open Spotify and find a song or playlist, right click it, and click “Copy Spotify URI”. Then paste it in the large textbox in Wake Me Up Spotify (3). Now you are ready to go to sleep!

You can hide Wake Me Up Spotify by clicking the minimize arrow on the toolbar. This will minimize the app to the taskbar (the bottom right corner of Windows). The app will still run from here. If you close it, it will not wake you up.

The design I got printed was a CentripetalBox, a cube which needs to be spun around quickly to be opened. You can see a video of how it works below. The original design had 4 plugs which would fit inside the 4 slots in the box and lid, but due to the inaccuracy of the printing process, the plugs where slightly too big. The lid was also a bit too big, and needed to be sanded down slightly to fit inside the box. This was expected, but what was not expected was how tough the material was. I printed in White, Strong and Flexible, and while the surface is quite rough and seems fragile (small particles of the raw material powder will come loose if you scratch it), the actual box is pretty solid. I tried sanding down the plugs so they would fit inside the slots, but quickly moved to a file instead. A Dremel might have been a good tool to have handy. Instead of using the printed plastic plugs I used a thin steel rod cut into plugs. It might even be that the plastic plugs are too light to work. A few more days of sanding/filing, and I’ll know.

Having discussed the end result and design with my dad, we came up with some improvements. I’ll make a new version for the Shapeways shop with those improvements (and bug fixes, like smaller plugs, and a tiny gap between the lid and the box). This is the first thing I have ever made in Blender and then 3D printed, and the fact that it works (with a bit of post-production work) is more than I expected. I have a few other ideas for 3D printing, and I’ll work on them this spring (or autumn, if you are in Australia).

I solved this by making a page Template (not to be confused with Theme, which is something completely different). The template lists all the subcategories of a category, specified in the page metadata, along with the category description and the last 5 posts for each category. This way you can list all the projects on one page and link to the most recent information for each one. Because the category name is specified in the page metadata, you can have multiple CMS pages, for example, ideas, projects or experiments.

Add the template file to /wp-content/themes/<active theme>. To use this template, make a new page, then select the template called ‘CMS’ from the list of templates. The content will be shown at the top of the page. Next you need to add a metadata (also called custom field) to the page, with name ‘category’ and value equal to the category you want the page to show. You might need to edit the template slightly for it to display properly with your theme.

<?php

/*

Template Name: CMS

*/

?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<?php if (have_posts()) : the_post(); update_post_caches($posts); ?>

  <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

    <h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>

    <div class="content">

      <?php the_content(); ?>

      <?php if(count(get_post_custom_values('category')) > 0 ): ?>

        <?php $category_slug = get_post_custom_values('category'); $category_slug = $category_slug[0];?>

        <?php if(($category = get_category_by_slug($category_slug)) != null): ?>

          <?php $categories = get_categories(array('child_of' => $category->term_id, 'orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'asc')); ?>

          <?php foreach($categories as $category): ?>

            <div class="post">

              <h2><a class="title" href="/category/<?php echo $category_slug."/".$category->category_nicename; ?>"><?php echo $category->name; ?></a></h2>

              <div class="content">

                <p><?php echo $category->description; ?></p>

                <!--Latest post -->

                <?php $posts = get_posts("cat=$category->term_id&numberposts=5&order=DESC&orderby=date"); ?>

                <h5>Latest posts</h5>

                <?php foreach($posts as $post): ?>

                  <?php setup_postdata($post); ?>

                  <div class="content">

                    <a class="title" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>

                    <span style="float:right" class="date"><?php the_time(__('F jS, Y', 'inove')); ?></span>

                  </div>

                <?php endforeach; ?>

              </div>

            </div>

          <?php endforeach; ?>

        <?php else: ?>

          <div class="errorbox">

            <?php echo("Category '$category_slug' was not found!"); ?>

          </div>

        <?php endif; ?>

      <?php else: ?>

        <div class="errorbox">

          <?php echo("Add a custom field with name 'category' and value equal to the name of a category"); ?>

        </div>

      <?php endif; ?>

    </div>

  </div>

<?php else : ?>

  <div class="errorbox">

    <?php echo('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?>

  </div>

<?php endif; ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Wake Me Up Spotify

This simple app lets you wake up to your favorite song or playlist by using Spotify as an alarm clock. Just set the time you want to wake up and the Spotify URI you want it to play, and your done. It will automatically open Spotify and start playing, and you can minimize it to the tray so it stays out of the way.

This is the first program I’ve ever made in C# and WinForms, so it’s pretty simple. Most of the development time was spent making WinForms look nice, something it’s definitively not designed for. For example, to add the nice shadow around the app, I had to sacrifice the blinking caret in the textboxes. Styling textboxes is also pretty difficult, so the simplest thing is to position so they line up with a background picture of the form. The rest of the time was  spent making it work with Spotify, using the Spotify Remote API. Spotify gives you very little control; I’m only able to play, pause, stop, play next and previous song and change the volume. To play a song specified by a Spotify URI I have to start Spotify with that URI as argument.

The program still has a few bugs, so don’t use it as the only way to wake up. For example, while it is possible to play a song at any time by starting Spotify with a song URI, it is not possible to make it play playlist when it is already open. If you want to wake up to a playlist, make sure you close the Spotify before you go to bed!

Download WakeMeUpSpotify (65kB)

This week I set out to make a simple batch application for renaming files. Specifically I wanted to rename folders containing episodes of a TV-show. These files tend to have very ugly names, containing the name of the show, the season and episode, the guy who uploaded it and the file type. I want my collection to contain prettier names, and so I decided to make a batch renamer that could make the folder look more appealing.

I decided to make the application using XUL Runner. XUL Runner is made by Mozilla, and is essentially what Firefox and Thunderbird runs in. It lets you create an GUI using XUL, JavaScript and CSS and then run it as an application. Having made a few extensions to Firefox in my time, XUL was a familiar concept and it didn’t take long until I had a simple working version.

Regex Renamer lets you pick a pattern from a drop down list. It will then look for files that match the regular expression, and renames only those files. This means that if you have a folder where all the files have similar names, then you can rename all of them with a single click. The application also lets you create custom patterns, import and export the list of patterns from/to a file.

It’s not the most user friendly application in the world, and it could do with some work on editing the pattern list, and maybe have a cheatsheet on regex built inn. But for a simple application that took less than a week to code up, it works pretty well.

You can download the application for windows below. It should run on any system that XUL Runner runs on, which would include Windows, Linux and OS X, but you need to download XUL Runner for the last two platforms.

RegexRenamer

• Abortion of long-running scripts
• Syntax highlighting (still a bit buggy)
• Help

There are a few bugs left to sort out, but this version is a lot better than 0.1, so I decided to release it. If you notice any bugs or have any new ideas, post them in the comments.

EcmaCalc 0.4

EcmaCalc 0.1

I’ve used the built in windows calculator for years now, but it’s missing some important features. So I made EcmaCalc, which is a pretty stupid, short, name for EcmaScript Calculator. It implements QtScript, which is based on EcmaScript, which is based on JavaScript. That is, you can write JavaScript code in it. This means you can write expressions, functions, loops and create objects and arrays to make your calculations.

For example, you can enter 7*9 and hit the Execute button (or F7) and you will get the answer (in green, on the right). Or you could write something more complicated, like (7+1)*(3-5)/(8+2). You can store the results in variables, just like in JavaScript, like var a = 7+8;var b = 3+2; var c = a * b;.

There’s a lot more you can do, like functions, objects, arrays and loops. There are a few built in things, like the ans variable and the answer and result arrays, which will return the last few results of your expressions. There is also a print function which you can use to print stuff in the middle of loops.

I haven’t written the help yet, because this is an early version. If you find any bugs or have any comments, then please share them.

EcmaCalc 0.1