MattKendrick.com

My wife and I are big fans of the Dairy Queen Blizzard. She likes the Chocolate Chip Cookie Jar Blizzard and I like the Reese’s Cup Blizzard. Some of you may be readers of my On Screen Cars blog. If you haven’t, let me que you in on something. I like cars! Especially clean cars. But sometimes the Happy DQ Blizzard World and clean cars collide in a bad way. A mess, a spill, a stain whatever ya wanta call it. It happens. It ticks me off.

For a while it was happening on a regular biases. Our beloved Dairy Queen can’t make non-drippy Blizzard to save their lives. It may not be their fault. Not sure if they were not making the stuff correctly or not. But they were  drippy. What happened to the quality control flip before they hand it to ya? But anyways. Every-time I pulled into my parking spot on the return trip. There it would be… A little spot on my seat, a mess on my hands or a cup holder full of Blizzard soup. Well long gone are those days. Thanks to my simple solution. A cup in a cup.

Say that ten times fast. One night I had enough. I was determined to find a better way to bring home the Blizzard. I grabbed two large plastic cups from our cabinet and hit the road. I got to the drive thru and placed my order. Paid my money. Then I dropped my blizzards into their cups. Then I headed home. The whole way I was smiling end-to-end. I pulled into my spot and looked down. This time without fear of my black cloth seats being covered or my cup holders being full. Yep it was bliss.

So there ya have it. Before ya hit the road on a B-l-i-z-z-a-r-d-r-u-n. Grab a cup to drop it in. You’ll be glad ya did. I’m sure your car will be a bit happier too. By the way did you know it’s the 25th Anniversary of the Blizzard? Maybe ya did. But did ya know about the kid’s toy that allows your kids to make their own Blizzards? Given my history, maybe I’ll just make my own? I’m a big kid right? Check it out below!

I decided to get a little creative tonight with one of my old favorite PC games Rollercoaster Tycoon. There is something special about that game. I return to it often when I’m stressed. Recently we watched “How to Train Your Dragon.” The star dragon of the movie of course is “Toothless” a night fury dragon. I thought I would make a little kiddy coaster in Rollercoaster Tycoon themed after a night fury! Here’s my creation!

I know it’s not likely that any of my readers still play Rollercoaster Tycoon like I do. But I’ve included a download to my coaster creation. Catch ya next time.

I’ve been using WordPress blogging platform for over a year now. I’ve been extremely impressed with the ease of use and plugablity. I’ve also taken part in writing a few plugins for WordPress. Now I think I’m ready to take the next step and attend WordCamp. WordCamp is a convention so to speak for those who use WordPress. It’s a great way to meet people and expand your horzions on the great blogging platform. I just found out today, that WordCamp Louisville has been officially set. The date is Dec. 4th 2010. This will be the closest WordCamp event to where I live. Not completely sure if I will be able to make it. But I’m excited and can’t wait to attend. If I can make it, I’m looking forward to meeting other WordPress users and share ideas. This WordCamp event proceeds will benefit the University of Louisville Autism Training Center. So to help the gang at WordCamp Louisville out, I’m putting a supporting logo on my blog! So there ya have it!

We’ve been on vacation this week and I’ve found something new to rant about. In our travels through Florida and Georgia we’ve discovered that speed limit signs in Florida separate the minimum and maximum signs. These signs are often miles apart on the interstates throughout the state of Georgia and Florida. At one point I ran up on one of the minimum signs and had mistaken it for a maximum sign. I kept asking myself why would the speed limit drop from 70 to 40 miles per hour. Being a cautious drive I am, I slowed down right then. I’m trying to avoid a ticket at all costs. During the rough economic times, seems like law enforcement agencies and governments are ticketing more to help out. See the examples below to see my point.

The Bad

The Good

Universal Subtitles

A group of developers on a Mozilla Drumbeat project is working to provide a way add subtitles to online videos. I am extremely excited that this will open new doors for the deaf and hard of hearing. Being a hard of hearing person myself, I find it hard to understand what is being said on some online videos. This will also make it easy for those who don’t understand the language spoken on the video to enjoy translated subtitles as well. Granted it doesn’t mean subtitles will automatically work on any video. There will still need to be someone writing/translating subtitles. But I think it would be an awesome and noble service for someone to take the time to write subtitles for popular online videos. I know that any content that I would submit, given the right tools and knowledge would also have subtitles avaliable as well.

How does it work?

How does it work? It’s not completely clear. They’re still in the gathering stages of the project. But from what I’ve read, they’re working on a widget. The widget could make it easy for someone to add subtitles to video without needing to re-encoding. Basically the subtitles would over-lay the video. Through the use of browser plugins, subtitles could be fetched from centralized servers through a common protocol. The crew working on this project have their work cut out for them.

Great Tools + Community Mix

That’s what makes site’s like Drumbeat so great. They have a uniform place to work and share information. It’s like creating something while being miles or even worlds apart. Developers can jump right in any project they feel they can contribute to. I hope to be able to contribute to something like this at some point. I may not have time now. But someday I will have a chance to give back. Thanks to the guys at Drumbeat: Universal Subtitles team for working on something that I’ve wanted for a lifetime!

Mozilla Drumbeat: Universal Subtitles

This weekend I discovered another one of those, ‘Suck the life out of you’ flash games. You know the ones where ya sit down, play and don’t realize it’s been a few hours. This one is called Cargo Bridge. It’s a construction flash game where you design/build a bridge to complete task(s). Sounds easy right? Well it is for the first few levels. But like Fantastic Contraption, it gets harder as you go. The tasks get more advanced. As you move up, you’re presented with more building materials and so on. So go ahead, get sucked in. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.

This weekend, our friends rented the game Little Big Planet for the Playstation 3. It was a blast. I’m usually not real big into platform games, but I loved it! The game supports up to four players playing on 3 different platform planes all at once. Your characters are all little sack-boys that can be customized. We had hours of fun playing through most of the levels. However our friends only had two controllers. There were four of us. So ya get the picture.

For one the middle PS button is missing on the PS2 controllers. This is not an issue for 3rd and 4th players most of the time anyways. The triggers are slightly different as well. But again it depends on needs of the player and which game you’re playing. For games like Little Big Planet this is the perfect solution to add two more players to the game without breaking the bank. Not to mention Little Big Planet Game of the Year Edition
is available half off the original price! There ya go, we’ve saved ya money again!

I’ve decided to create a new segment on my site called “Self Made Tools.” From time to time, I make software tools to help me through tasks that I can’t find tools for quickly. I’ve decided to really jump on the Open Source movement bandwagon and share my tools with source. This week’s tool is “Proportional Image Resizer.” What? Ok, let me explain.

When coding HTML, you know when you have an image that is one size and you need it to fit within an area that is of another. Say the image is 800 px X 600 px and you need to make it fit into an area that is 500 px wide spot. Easy right? Just change the one dimension in your code to reflect the change. Sure your browser will adjust your image. But it may not pass some web standards for all browsers. It’s just not clean. You need to have both a width and height specified when resizing an image using code.

How do you resize these images proportionally? Use a simple equation to do the job. You know the before image is 800 px X 600 px right? You also know you need the image to fit within a 500 px width. Now you just need the other part of the equation (solve for x).

800 / 600 = 500 / X

Cross multiply and you’re done right? How about we just skip doing the equation every time and just use a tool? That’s how the proportional image resizer tool was born. You can also do the reverse as well (height vs width). I know there are other tools out there to perform the task. But why not use something homegrown? You could even code this yourself in a matter of minutes. I’ve posted the source to the script above. Thanks for reading!

<html>
<head>
<title>Proportional Image Resizer</title>

</body>
</html>

Contributors: Matt Kendrick
Tags: cafepress, t-shirts, ad, display
Requires at least: 2.6
Tested up to: 2.9.2
Stable tag: .85

This plugin adds a widget that displays random items from your CafePress.com store. Requires cURL and a CafePress API Key.

== Description ==

This plugin adds a widget that displays random items from your CafePress.com store. The display uses the 150px X 150px thumbnail provided by CafePress, description, price and ‘Buy Now’ link. See it in action at OnScreenCars.com It can also cache a copy of your items to avoid hitting API limits and performance issues. Your webserver will need to have the cURL extension for PHP in order for this plugin to work. You will also need to obtain a CafePress API Key. API Keys can be obtained from this link: http://developer.cafepress.com/apps/register.

== Installation ==

1. Upload zip file contents to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Add/Configure Your CafePress Ad Rotator Widget

After you install the plugin go to Widgets, add and configure the CafePress Ad Rotator widget. You’ll
need your CafePress store id (ex. http://www.cafepress.com/mystoreid, last part of the url),
API Key and a label name for your widget. You can obtain API Keys from http://developer.cafepress.com/apps/register Once you have your widget up and running it’s best to cache a copy of your CafePress items. From the widget control panel check “Update Cache” and click Save. You can clear or update the cache at anytime. It marks the last time you updated your item cache. Whenever changes are made to your store, you need to update your cache.

== Changelog ==

= .85 =

Bug fixes for PHP5, No sell-out price fix, total items variable correction.

= .80 =

First version released.

=== Downloads ===

=== Update ===

For those who are having trouble with which fields to fill out when requesting an API KEY. I’ve added an example form below with the correct responses.

Name of the application:
WordPress Ad Rotator User

Web Site:
Your Website Url

Please describe what your application will do:
Displays random CafePress items from my store on my blog.

What type of application are you building?
Other

Other? Tell us more:

How many people do you anticipate will use your application?
1-10

Is your application commercial? (Will you charge people to access the application?)
No

Does your application run advertising?
No

What one-word tags best describe your application?
WordPress

Notes:
(nothing)

How did you hear about this API?

http://mattkendrick.com

What is your preferred protocol?
REST

What is your preferred output format?
XML

Leave the “CafePress API” checked.

Check the “I agree to the terms of service”

Click “Register”

Hope that helps. Also be sure to not leave the required fields blank when configuring your widget. Also be sure not to leave spaces in the the API Key field.

=== API Tester ===

Below is a form for testing your Store Id and API Key. We do not log results, API Keys and Store Ids.

*** This is an unoffical test. We are not response-able for results or errors. ***

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not the best at doing my own web graphics in Photoshop. With input from other people, I do very well. But I’m not very creative when it comes doing my own web graphics. I think I have the skills to do the work, just not the creativity. This is partially due to the fact that I’m a coder, not a designer. In other words, I’m a robot. Hehe… Well I’ve found a cheap tool that is perfect for all the other robots out there who need a helping hand!

CoolText.com is a online logo and graphics generator. They have tons of predefined designs for logos, buttons, graphics and more. You can change the text, font, fore-ground/back-ground color, size and transparency. Once you’re ready, just click submit to sent it to the rendering engine and presto you have your own graphic! I used it to generate the “Free!” logo above. The best part is it’s free! I’ve already used this site a few dozen times for some mock up graphics for my apps. I thought I would pass on this free tool! Try it out and pass it around! Thanks CoolText.com!