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UPDATE: Since Twitter has now ditched RSS feeds as part of their careful plan to make using their service increasingly difficult for anybody that doesn’t want to use their clients, Twimage no longer works. At all. Sorry!

Ever since I joined Twitter, it always bothered me that there was no way to display my tweets in a controlled web environment, one that didn’t allow scripts or embedded Flash content. Twitter offers plenty of badges in Flash and Javascript, but if I wanted to display my latest tweet in, say, my forum signature, I was basically screwed. Most forum software such as phpBB is very restrictive on what users can and cannot put into their signatures, but the one thing they all allow are images. And so Twimage was born.

Twimage is a PHP script I wrote that grabs your Twitter account’s RSS feed, reads it, strips it down, and then prints the latest tweet from it to a 648 x 40 pixel PNG image. You can then display this image anywhere you would normally be able to put a regular PNG image file – including your forum signature! The final result looks a lot like this (resized for width, see full size here):

Because Twitter’s RSS feeds are painfully unstable – often returning HTTP 400 errors for no fucking reason whatsoever – I’ve also included a Twimage Feedchecker. This is nothing more than a simple PHP file which tries to print your RSS feed in plaintext, and will helpfully tell you any errors it encounters so you can accurately troubleshoot. I’ve also included the source file for the background image, if the colours I’ve chosen don’t take your fancy.

I’m not going to lie: this script is basically a complete and total hackjob and is very, very rudimentary in nature. RSS2HTML does most of the heavy lifting, and I just polish it, clean it up and print it into a PNG. It’s nothing that somebody else couldn’t write for themselves in about ten seconds, and indeed if anybody out there wishes to improve on it (which shouldn’t be hard!) I welcome them. I’d love to see what you do with it. Enjoy.

Good morning Cat-Dogs!

That’s right its morning here, almost 5am to be exact. Which I guess makes it morning over in Perth as well, and in like 50% of the world. But that’s not the point. The point is, I’m AWAKE. AGAIN. Tonight I realy can’t blame anyone but myself, I did nothing but sleep and drink tea and eat sugar all day, so I sort of saw this coming. Anyway, I figure, if I can’t sleep, BLOG.

My only problem with that, you see, is Tim’s ridiculously loud spacebar. I basically have to turn and see if he’s woken up after every word, which will make this post, at the very least, well thought out. Every space might be your last!

Continue reading If you can’t sleep, blog!

Hey, have you guys heard of Teh Learning Curve yet? It’s a pretty cool gig; the premise of which being that a couple of guys sit on a couch, play a video game together for 30 minutes, then give their impressions of it – all of which is condensed into a five-minute YouTube video for the ridiculously short attention span of the discerning modern internet viewer. I did some logo work for them a little while back, but before that I actually took time out from my busy schedule as an international man of dysentry to appear, in real life, and show them the correct and most efficient way to play Braid.

 

 

If you’re having trouble recognising me, I am the attractive ponytailed Adonis sitting on the right hand side. I think we can all agree I have a bright future in game reviews, if not actual successful game play, or any manner of timing and co-ordination.

For those who don’t know, I used to do a (semi) regular webcomic by the name of Refried. I was looking back through the archives last night, and aside from the odd cringe or two, it really made me want to pick up the webcomic gig again. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt like this; it’s been almost two years since I stopped updating Refried and so I’ve had quite a reasonable amount of time to consider my position. So much time in fact, that I apparently fell asleep at the wheel and drove my car off the webcomics highway into the blissful ditch of real life.

Continue reading Video Games, Comics, and Navel-Gazing

On today’s episode of Aluminium Chef, you will learn the following things:

1) Putting a Cadbury Creme Egg in the microwave to make it all “nice and melty” to go over your ice cream will result in a loud, ear-piercing shriek as the gooey creme filling bursts forth, geyser like, from the chocolate shell and sprays all over the inside of the microwave.

2) The gooey creme filling will be superheated to a temperature comparable to that of molten lava as it exits the chocolate shell. Touching the gooey creme lava will cause first degree burns to your fingers.

3) As the filling that decorates the inside of your microwave slowly cools, you will discover that it is almost impossible to clean off. You will spend at least fifteen minutes furiously scrubbing as you hold your hand in a glass of cold water, incredulous with pain and rage, alternating under your breath between vicious swearing and confused denial.

4) Thoroughly cautious, you will gently touch the now-empty but surprisingly intact chocolate shell of the Creme Egg, only to find that is in fact stone fucking cold.

This morning, I’d like to tell you all a story. It’s a story about the single most inspirational man I’ve ever met. Despite the length of time since I last saw him, which is probably close to 4 years, and the fact that I’ll probably never see him again, doesn’t change the fact that he often comes up in my thoughts as a vague guideline to attitudes and life in general. I’ve probably mentioned him in passing to a number of you in the past, mostly regarding his unorthodox teaching methods.

You see, he was a lecturer at SIBT, a bridging institution with delusions of grandeur, that I attended for a year. His name is Aaron. I somehow never discovered his last name, perhaps he did that deliberately, most lecturers are all about the simple firstname.lastname@dumbuniversitydomain.com.au email addresses and things, but in any case, I never knew it.

Of the three trimesters SIBT was divided into, I was lucky enough to have three units, over two trimesters with Aaron as a lecturer. I’d heard of him from friends who had previously taken the units I was, and also been lucky enough to have him as a lecturer, but I’d always assumed what people had said about him was exaggerated. I mean, how good can this one guy BE, right?

The thing that probably needs to be mentioned somewhere, so here seems like a good place, was that SIBT is like baby-uni. The tutorials were about the same size, but instead of lectures with literally hundreds of people, you were reduced to classes of say, 20? Maybe less if it wasn’t a popular class. So when I say he interacted with you personally, he really did. He knew most every student by name, greeted them in corridors, and really made you feel like you meant something to him.

I realise, reading back, that a lot of the words I’m using and will continue to use might make it sound like a schoolgirl crush was going down. But I gotta tell ya, that simply wasn’t the case. I’ll be using a lot of these emotional words, because that’s what he did to you, he made you feel like an individual, not a faceless student, or a number. But I had nothing but the greatest respect for this guy.

I’m sort of all over the place with this. It sounded more structured in my head. But I haven’t even really started yet. This is kind of just backstory. I’ll understand if you wanna stop reading now.

Continue reading This is why I am.