Tag: blog

Categories
Design Tutorials Urban papercraft

Pre-post about Urban Paper Toy tutorials

One of my most popular post is about how to create papertoys (How to create your own papercraft).
It seems that a lot of people are interested in papertoys and how to make themselves.
On Nice paper toys (NPT) this question pops up now and again on the forum.
You can buy a book about it, if you want to know more about it: Urban paper toys (well you should buy this book anyhow because I’m in it πŸ™‚ ).

But besides my post about this subject you’re on your own…..
Well perhaps not for long! I’ve been playing with this idea for a while now of making a tutorial series about papertoy and how you can make one yourself. That got me thinking….
It seems that people really enjoy making/creating papertoys, so why not make a book about it?

…… hmmm a book, I have never thought about writing a book (grammar is not really my thing, not in English and not in my native tongue), I never wrote a book or designed one (well… not recently).
So I have no idea where this series is taking me, but here it is:

I want to make a “book” about creating/designing Urban Paper toys. But I’m a internet designer/developer, I have no experience with book design, no experience with writing a book and no idea how to do it.
It doesn’t matter, I have my blog. I can write and rewrite as much as I want.
And I have something that a conventional writer doesn’t have: User generated feedback….. (no idea what that means? It’s you giving me comments/advice/whatever and helping me write this “book” by giving comments).

I say “book” because you don’t really need the book, because you can read it on my blog. But for the less internet savy peeps I can create a download link for a e-book or a you can buy a book.
I have searched for options to Self Publish and I found a couple, but these two sites seem to popup the most: lulu.com/ and booksurge.com/.
But before I can think about that, I need to write about papertoys and how they are made.

So this week I’m focusing on how I will do this on my blog.
But in the mean time, use the comments to show me what you want to know

And perhaps we will write a book πŸ™‚

Categories
Design Urban papercraft

Calling All Cars! Calling All Cars

Previous post I mentioned my broken wrist (another 5 weeks….) and the coming of the book “Urban Paper” from Matt Hawkins.

One of the designers started a project to promote the book. This is a project from Jack Hankins aka Horrorwood.

Calling All Cars! Calling All Cars.

Calling all cars poster

Read more about this project. Or the comments at NPT.

Download the template and lets start racing:
Calling all cars template

Categories
AS3 Flash

Box2DFlashAS3 Refactored

If you are a Flex/Flash developer (and not familiar with another programming language), you will agree that the syntax for Box2DFlash is not following the AS3 coding conventions and seems funny.

Not that I’m so good at it (seem to have a lot of problem shaking the suffix “_mc”) but other people have the same problem: read this, this and this.

And one of them refactored the code, and not just someone: it done by John Lindquist (box2D user-name is pv3d).
John is one of the “Committer team” (?) of papervision3D and writes tutorials for papervision3D on pv3d.org.

You can find the code at http://code.google.com/p/box2dflash/ and John started working on tutorials (http://box2dflash.org/) but stopped after completing one… πŸ™

[swf]http://box2dflash.org/sites/default/files/flash/RefactoredBox2dSpeedTest.swf, 520, 390[/swf]

I’ve took a quick look in the examples made by John, and I must confess that it seems more familiar/easier.
Conventions are you friend…

But what to do? Use the box2D port to AS3 from C++ or use the refactored one.
I’m using the original Box2DFlash AS3 2.0.1, not only for this reason (shaktool is one of two programmers responsible for the C++ to AS3 conversion and maintenance) but a lot of tutorials are based upon the original.

But I can’t wait for Box2DFlash AS3 2.0.2 and see what skatehead, shaktool and borisTheBrave have decided (I’m secretly cheering for John’s version!)

Categories
Misc

Upgrading WordPress 2.6

Today I upgraded to WordPress 2.6.

I followed the instructions how to upgrading WordPress and this has never failed… till today πŸ™ .

This is what happened: I upgraded and everything was oke. I could login, the upgrading of the database worked fine. I could see my post, pages, etc, etc in the admin and edit them.
So I checked out my homepage: and everything was as it should: mission completed…. NOT!! πŸ™

Every link to another page didn’t work, you can navigate by “older post” but not with “recent posts” or the title of the post.

It took me some time to find the correct way to search about this problem: it has something to do with the permalinks. In all cases, these people have permalink structures that contain “index.php”.
Example: “http://www.matthijskamstra.nl/blog/index.php/2008/07/09/drukks-the-selfish-series-drukkgrumm/”

Still no idea? Go to your “[your WordPress install]/wp-admin/options-permalink.php” (Customize Permalink Structure) and you will probable see that you don’t have the default setting ( http://www.matthijskamstra.nl/blog/?p=123 :: no “index.php”) but have chosen something else (in my case: [x] Day and name — http://www.matthijskamstra.nl/blog/index.php/2008/07/16/sample-post/ )

I found the explanation here: 2.6 Permalink issues with “index.php” and in my case the second option worked.

2. If you need/want the index.php to be there, then on the Settings->Permalinks screen, add some values in for the category and tag bases. The words “category” and “tag” will do just fine. As long as they are not blank, this should work around the bug.

This is bug in WordPress 2.6, read more about it here: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7306. It will be fixed in the next version (2.6.1)

But for now you can make your WordPress work again: visit your “[your WordPress install]/wp-admin/options-permalink.php” (Customize Permalink Structure) and fill in the two boxes at the bottom with “category” and “tag”

happy blogging