Author: Dan

Technically a brain in a jar.
Opinion

A robot might be the only thing that saves your job

2020-03-22 Dan

I picture a world where every apartment building has a robot arm on a little electric car. It picks up supplies ordered online at the door and brings them to each suite.

The robot does not use AI or some other dumb vaporware: A real human’s job is to drive the robot. Sometimes the robot switches drivers: Got a broken gizmo? Gizmo lady calls you online, uses the robot to sooth the gizmo back into crumulence. (It’s a perfectly crumulent word.) Want your hair did? Same robot, haircutter from home.

Safe, clean, remote. The robot didn’t steal your job – the robot saved it.

Tutorials

How to quickly replace money_format() in your PHP

2020-03-04 Dan

If you’ve been using money_format() in your PHP code you may have recently (as of PHP 7.4.0) seen that it is now deprecated and the new hotness revolves around a class called NumberFormatter. Here’s how I quickly refactored to make the booboo go away.

I have a scheduled script that runs once a month to recalculate How much money you’d make if you bought Netflix shares instead of a Netflix subscription. Naturally, it uses money_format(formatString,value) all over the place. I didn’t want to manually change every instance, so….

At the top of my PHP file I added the following:

$fmt = numfmt_create( 'en-US', NumberFormatter::CURRENCY );
$symbol = $fmt->getSymbol(NumberFormatter::INTL_CURRENCY_SYMBOL);

function money_format($ignore,$value) {
        global $fmt,$symbol;

        return $fmt->formatCurrency($value,$symbol);
}

Then (because I am a VI user) I replaced all:

:%s/money_format/money_format2/g

Which changes money_format() I wrote in the first part into money_format2(), but it does that to everything everywhere in the file, so it’s all good. Merely redeclaring money_format() makes PHP sad.

because I am running a LAMP stack (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) I had to also install php-intl:

$ sudo apt-get install php-intl

So there you go! Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. If you liked that share with your friends and so on.

News

Victims of Success

2020-01-19 Dan

Just as I was getting on a plane to a very remote location, the website became so popular that Apache rolled over and gave up. It took a while to get through my own darn security to fix things. While I was at it, I upped settings that should handle more traffic. Thank you for your patience and understanding!

Makelangelo News

Makelangelo dev blog 2020 #2

2020-01-17 Dan

Out of office

January 18-30 I will be out of the country for some down time. Jin will still be here working on testing machines and filling orders, but no custom builds of Makelangelo Huge will be happening.

Experimental

In the development branch of Makelangelo software there’s always lots going on.

Get the Makelangelo 7.22.6 experimental here.

Pi camera

Github user Mishafarms has added raspberry pi camera support: If you run the software on a pi with a camera it can detect your camera and then use that as a source for images to convert. Nicely done!

Smooth speed improvements

I’ve put in a TON of work to improve the top speed and reducing stutter. I’m currently drawing at 100mm/s and moving (without drawing) at 400mm/s. So it’s now faster and bigger than an AxiDraw plotter. The motors move so smoothly now that they sound almost musical.

Long file names

Another nice to have is that the menus are more responsive on the LCD panel and the filenames on SD cards are now full-length instead of 8 characters.

European number formats

Thanks to the patient feedback of user Joram Neumark I’ve been working to improve support for european users. German computers (or computers with the German Locale) write numbers with a comma instead of a decimal, and the robot does not understand. It doesn’t know it’s in Germany! So instead I’m make sure all numbers written to files are done in the format the robot expects.

Please post to the forums with your experience!