Author Archives: dopiaza

Little Notepad

I’ve been playing around with BERG’s Little Printer for a while now, and one of the things I find myself often wanting to do is print out quick notes – shopping lists, a quick To Do list – little things like that. There’s currently no easy way to do that, so I put together a simple little web page to enter some text, format it and send it on to your Little Printer, and here it is: Little Notepad.

It uses the Little Printer Direct Print API, and for that, you need to know the unique code for your Little Printer. You can find that at the bottom of this page. The text editor I’ve used is a jQuery plugin,  jWYSIWYG.

Little Notepad is still a work in progress, so you might find the odd glitch, and there are a few more features I’d like to add, but so far, it’s proving handy for printing out the odd few inches of notes.

The Daily Glitch on Little Printer

The first batch of Little Printers from BERG started shipping last week, and I got mine a few days ago. He’s all set up on my desk now, and looking very cute.

Little Printer

Little Printer

Naturally, one of the first things I did was to take a look at the developer documentation to see how to create a publication myself. It turns out to be pretty straightforward – each publication is simply a page of HTML/CSS with some meta-data held as JSON. The content and meta-data is presented to BERG Cloud as a simple web service, and they use that to distribute your publication to any Little Printers that have subscribed.

I have a couple of ideas kicking about for things I’d like to use Little Printer for, but to start with, I figured I’d do something simple. As many of you probably know, I’ve been a fan of Tiny Speck’s MMO Glitch for a very long time now. Sadly, the game formally closed last week, and is no more. I’ve written a bunch of Glitch-related tools over the years, and as a consequence have a fair amount of game-related data cached. I figured this was an opportunity to put it to use.

Glitch was well known for it’s high quality artwork, which extended to the individual player’s avatars. The avatars were highly customisable, and players could change both the facial features and the wardrobe, which led to a huge amount of diversity in their appearance. I have copies of the avatar files for rather a lot of players now, so why not show them off to the world. And so, the Daily Glitch was born. This is a Little Printer publication, that each day, showcases a random Glitch from my database.

Glitch on Little Printer

Glitch on Little Printer

The choice of Glitch is random, and I don’t maintain a history of who has already been shown, so I guess it’s possible that we’ll get a few repeats here and there, but given the number of Glitches I have stored, I suspect that’s not really going to be a problem.

If you have a Little Printer and would like to subscribe to the Daily Glitch, you can do that here.

Exquisite Corpse

Over in the Utata group on Flickr, there’s a social photo game that we occasionally play. Somebody takes an image of a piece of art (e.g. a painting) and chops it into small squares. Each participant is then randomly allocated one of these squares and they have to take a photograph that represents the square – a real-world representation of the contents of their allotted piece. The photographs are then stitched back together to produce something that (hopefully) resembles the original painting.

We’ve just completed the Round 2 of Exquisite Corpse, and I think we did a pretty good job.

Exquisite Corpse - Round 2

As before, I’ve put together a little widget to show the Utata version along with the original so you can compare the two. You can find that, along with our Round 1 result,  here.

DPZAppNet – a PHP5 library for App.net

App.net broke through their funding target yesterday, and so it seemed appropriate to celebrate with a new library. So, I took my DPZFlickr library, chopped and changed it about a bit, and turned it into DPZAppNet.

It all seems to work just fine, but there’s still a fair bit more to do – most notably, support for streams, but I’ll get onto that. In the meantime, you can find it over on github.