Accidental Hobbies

Motivated only to keep our amiibos out of the hands our crazed^† 2 year old, I purchased some NFC cards to copy our amiibos to. Then if he chews the card, we won't be as heart-broken, right?

I can't remember how, but somewhere along the line, I saw Breath of the Wild cards styled like Magic the Gathering. I had to have that as an NFC. HAD TO HAVE

So, I purchased a set of NFC cards, credit card sized, and started looking at printing on them.

We have a black & white laser printer that I purchased a few years back for around $70 on clearance. We're still on the starter cartridge. I'm also cheap, so instead of getting a proper setup, I tried a variety of ways to get the cards printed on without purchasing anything extra, using everything from acetone to glue.

After finding a color laser printer, also for $70 on clearance, we got serious about it, purchased some supplies, wax paper, parchment paper, sticker paper, decal paper, jammed some pages, and ruined some furniture. But in the end, we had Breath of the Wild amiibo cards.

MtG BotW cards, with a Pokemon style Detective Pickachu

The current Zelda set below. Some of these are from a reddit post I can't find now, that had printable MtG Zelda cards. I made them taller, and erased the content and replaced with BotW drops. The Wolf Link is different.

The Wolf Link is a 20 heart Wolf Link (it's not cheating if it's just a variable :) ), so I wanted to make it special: full card background, Wolf Link overlapping the title, etc.
It needed something else though, so glossy Mod Podge was added to Wolf Link, and extra was added to Link.

The final process is probably going to be the official one everyone does: Photo Medium, then matte or glossy Mod Podge to cover.
I might still use the decals though. If done correctly, it looks much better than a paper transfer.

^†Crazed. Synonyms: Demonic, Two year old, Toddler.
^†He's not demonic, he's just two. He likes to eat amiibos, starship models and homework. Only some kind of eff'd up, evil parents would call their kids demonic.

2018/05/18 posted in Projects

OpenDyslexic mentioned on CNN, Included on Amazon Kindle

Traffic jumped to the website after CNN Money linked an article to OpenDyslexic. Looks like there is a new Kindle Oasis that has been released.

2017/10/12

Android 8 Quick Settings

Ars Technica calls the design of the new Android quick settings "more consistent" than the previous version.

Sure, it's better than before. At the same time I could not go through every reason this design is poor in just one night.
I'll cover just one though, based on this screen grab from Ars.

The old design from 7.1 is on the right. The rectangles are the area that the button part covers. It looks good, but the buttons, and their abilities are ambiguous. There's no way to obviously discover there's more options behind some of these buttons. Android 8 on the left fixes that.

Unfortunately, it looks like the hit targets for Android 8 are inconsistent. The labels have a wider target than the icon above them, and the icons have a smaller target. Two steps forward, two steps backward again.

2017/09/19

Windows is not Doomed

Many articles have been written about the end of Windows or Apple, etc, and they never come to pass. The latest naysaying, Windows is doomed on The Week gets it wrong.

There are core products a company relies on, and there are the products that are there to support the core products.

Microsoft Windows was created for Office, to provide a platform to protect it if (and when, in the 90s) Apple declined.

Microsoft Windows was never a core Microsoft product. It was made to run their core products (Office) back when a declining Apple could bring down Microsoft with it.

In that light, it does not really matter if Windows is beyond saving or not. What does matter is that Microsoft has platforms to run it's core software, and today it does: Android, iOS, MacOS, Linux are all available. And Microsoft is already diversifying it's platforms.

2017/09/03