Our bathroom fan light was driving me crazy for a while now. No matter how much wattage I would put into it, the plastic cover only allowed for a very dim light to come out. And the arrangement of the bulb in the fixture together with the housing forced most light to emit downward and to […] Read more..
Category: Tutorials
A collection of all my tutorials on this site.
What’s New in SketchUp 2014? Better Ruby, for Example!
By now you most probably have heard that SketchUp 2014 has been released. There are quite a few great new-feature overviews and reviews out there and I’ll suggest you look at the ones linked at the end of this post to get up to speed. For now, I just wanted to show you why the […] Read more..
I Vote Using Adsense!
I was reasonably shocked in 2012 when I saw an “Elect Romney” ad on my own website. As you might know by now, I am clearly not in their camp! Yet their ad showed up on my site. Even worse: in 2016, Trump showed up on my site because I had forgotten to block him. […] Read more..
That Was (Semi-)Easy: Creating a Book Index From PDF Page Proofs
I describe my method for creating a book index. This uses a PDF file of the proofs and a script to extract all comments.
Using robots.txt to your advantage to reduce server load
A little while ago, my hoster (1and1.com) whom I actually like quite a bit, decided that I was using too much of my fair share of the common server and decided to warn me that I was “abusing” the system. They told me that if I didn’t reduce my server load, I would have to […] Read more..
Project #22 in the Daddy Handbook: A Catapult
Because she saw one at her school’s science fair, last week our youngest daughter asked me to help her build a catapult. Feeling intrigued by the idea of putting together something that shoots something else but not wanting to go overboard (you never know what kids do with these), I came up with this design. As […] Read more..
Creating a KML file from MySQL data with PHP
I recently had a need for a PHP script that queries a MySQL database for location-based point data (a LatLong coordinate and some descriptive information) and then creates a KML-file from that data on the fly. A file like this can then easily be loaded into Google Maps, Google Earth and other geospatial applications. In […] Read more..