One of my friends recently bought a custom built Lifereef filter for his 140 gallon tank. The filter is hand built by Jeff Turcheck (the one man crew behind Lifereef) and they are truly a work of art! My friends tank is tall tank, versus the traditional large, and Jeff did an amazing job puzzling together an amazing multi part filter, reefugium and protein skimmer, and it all fit like a charm.
Why There Is No Flickr Alternative: Redux
A little over a month ago I gave some reasons why my failed attempts to find a flickr alternative (see Flickr Alternatives) failed in my first “Why There Is No Flickr Alternative” post. Little did I know Marissa Meyer is on a war path to turn Yahoo! around, and it looks like she is focusing in all off the right places. Despite what critics may say of her recent Tumblr purchase or of the new Flickr revamp, things are changing, and you cannot wrong her for trying to turn the company around. After all, that is her job.
But this isn’t a post to praise Meyer for her attempts. Rather, this is is a post to talk about why patience and sticking with a sinking ship can sometimes yield pleasant results.
DIY Reptile Hide III: 10 Gallon Insert
In my last two posts (see: DIY Reptile Hide and DIY Reptile Hide II: Painting) I documented the creation of a reptile hide from floral foam bricks, plaster of paris and acrylic paints. While working on that hide I had also been conspiring to create a much larger insert for my ten gallon aquarium where I will be housing any baby leo’s I hatch this season. This article will cover the creation and modelling of the insert and like last time I will follow up with post about the painting process. Unlike last time, however, I will take PLENTY of photographs to share.
Updates to Javascript Maze Generator
I’ve updated my Javascript Maze Generator to include some great new features:
- Printer-Friendly Mode: Click to toggle a gray scale printer-friendly mode of the page to allow for easy printing or export to PDF!
- Save and Load Mazes: Generates a string you can use to save and share your mazes. Copy and paste the resulting string to save it, or paste one you receive to load the pre-generated maze. (Note: heatmaps are not currently available on loaded mazes).
- Removed Size Limits: Mazes can be generated to any size now and scrolling will occur when maze gets too large. Please be warned: generating very large mazes can take a long time and be quite slow / cause unexpected halting of your computer.
- Added Zooming: You can now zoom in and out on mazes. Great if you want to generate the maze at one size and print at another.
See Also:
Google Analytics: The Inverse Click Through Rate Theory
I’ve been actively maintaining this blog for a little under three months. While this isn’t exactly a breakthrough length of time, I can start to begin to see trends in my Google Analytics. Today I am going to cover what I’d like to call the “Inverse Click Through Rate (CTR) Theory”. This is one of those “no shit” kind of theories that scientists in leading schools across the nation are paid a lot of grant money to come up with. Basically, as your blog grows, you become less relevant.
DIY: Handmade Reptile Hide II, Painting
In the last part of this series, DIY Handmade Reptile Hide I covered how to create a simple reptile hide out of green florists foam and plaster of paris. I have painted the hide that I started in that article and would like to share with you some tips and suggestions to finishing off your handmade reptile hide to fit your vivarium’s style. After completing this first hide I now think I can say my ten gallon insert (which may become my twenty gallon insert…it has gotten quite big) will be more awesome. Hopefully the following suggestions will help you finish off your DIY reptile hide too!
Continue reading…
In Defense of Ordering Crickets Online
As it turns out when you buy a leopard gecko, you are actually purchasing two pets: the leo, and crickets. Crickets are a vessel for food for your gecko. What you feed the cricket, inevitably feeds the gecko. This means your crickets need food, water and a habitat to survive. However, crickets aren’t cheap! Now that I own three beautiful leopard geckos, my budget alarm was going off. While I didn’t want to sacrifice my leopard geckos health just because I was cheap, I needed to make a change.
As it turns out, what I found not only saved me money, but meant my leopard geckos were actually eating better in the end!
Maze Generating Algorithms: Fun With HTML and JavaScript
While playing Legend of Grimrock I remembered sitting down with graph paper as a child and drawing endless mazes. A great boredom killer, and oh the cool mazes you could make! Always on the look out for something fun to implement with JavaScript and HTML I decided I should read up on maze generating algorithms. This brought me to an excellent slide show by Jamis Buck, called “‘Algorithm’ is Not a Four Letter Word”. It covers a variety of awesome ways to generate mazes as well as the implications and plenty of inspiration to get you writing you own (without giving away a single line of code to boot). I’d highly recommend you check it out, even if you aren’t a Comp Sci minded individual. Of course, I said “sure, I can do this” and that lead to my HTML and JavaScript based maze generator.
Spring Cleaning Tip: Evernote Tags
If it isn’t blatantly clear by now, I love Evernote. One thing that can get a little annoying is after years of using Evernote, your tags can become a wasteland of typos which crop up in your auto-suggest while adding new tags. This annoyance is easy (albeit a little time consuming) to fix, but is a great way to make adding tags more efficient.
Correction: Converting RGB to HSL with PHP
I had to make a correction to my old converting RGB to HSL post and Gist for RGB to HSL conversion. The inverse worked fine, but I was not multiplying the hue calculations by 60º, so the color was always off. I’ve updated the Gist, and the correct snippet is included after the break.