Last weekend, I’ve started my claywork class on making plates. The process is somewhat different from making cylinder shaped object such as cup and mugs. Making plates requires a wheel throwing, centering, trimming and shaping skill you also need an additional plank to act as a holder on top the throwing wheel ( this is because, plates are have lower ground and harder to lift – so we lift with the plank instead after cutting them lose with the wire that is. ).

And the results is….tada… I made my first collection of  plates!!

Cindy also introduced a technique to hold  the plank straight and firm so that, it will not fly away when forming the clay on top of it. All we need to do is :-

• Center the clay. Once center, press it down flat.
• Then use the cutting/trimming tool, gently make circular marking / gaps on it like how we do our trimming.
• Make a few like 6- 8 rings like the picture above.
• Add a little bit on water on it – The circular marking gaps and moist from the water will create a powerful sticky surface for the plank. Also act as a good suction pad to hold the plank from moving around. – Amazing
• Place the plank on top and moist it with sponge so that is wet a little. We are now ready to make plates!

The 2nd batch of clay cups and mugs I’ve made are all glazed (glaze is a liquid coloring made from raw material from earth e.g. cobalt and other metals of various colors) and ready to do the final burning. It takes a lot of patience in glazing – man they do dry fast…so one have to act fast also. I even  bought my own pump and gears to do my glazing now. These chemical are 80% lighter than it is prior burning. So you have to apply a bit of imagination and take note of the coloring by test firing small mosaic tile to see it’s final outcome.

Exploring various way to optimize my glazing effort like putting masking tape / candle wax on the bottom – to waterproof the area. This is because we aren’t suppose to glaze the bottom part of the clay, the burning will harden the coloring and glazing the bottom will cause the clay to be stucked on the placement board.

You can even re-glaze and fire again (in case you miss a few spot) but, is best to take note of what glazing composition you use prior before reglazing it to recreate the exact coloring. Warning : making mistake in coloring is irreversible and can ruin your creation. Best to make some small test firing on mini tiles of clay before deciding.

2nd Batch of Collection is called : Pieces of ME

Walla, the last of the few surviving pieces.

Happy is the name given to my neighbor’s beagle puppy. Very active dog and will jump to you once, she sees you. So, I had quite a hard time getting still shots with my camera, sometimes I have to hide somewhere to have a candid shot on that little one. The camera I used was Olympus EPL-2 with Zoom Lens to capture the puppy from a far. You may use these photos for your projects and multimedia stuff, but please at least leave a comment or link back to my blog. Thank you.

]]> http://www.isgoodstuff.com/2012/04/11/shots-of-happiness/feed/ 0 http://www.isgoodstuff.com/2012/04/07/free-ebook-windows-phone-development/ http://www.isgoodstuff.com/2012/04/07/free-ebook-windows-phone-development/#comments Sat, 07 Apr 2012 11:51:18 +0000 Alex T. http://www.isgoodstuff.com/?p=2251

Good stuff once again! Free Windows Phone Development ebook by Charles Petzold called : Programming Windows Phone 7. It covers basically  the basics of writing applications for Windows Phone 7 using the C# and some sample codes in VB.Net programming language with the Silverlight and XNA 2D frameworks. Good for starters whom wanting to try development of Windows Phone using Windows Phone SDK. This book is available for free (digital version only) – unless you prefer the printed copy. You can download a PDF here (38.6 MB).

You can download the ebook’s C# sample code here (5.03 MB).

And you can download the sample code in Visual Basic for Chapters 1-18 here (5.21 MB).

Best of Luck and enjoy

 

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This article is the continuation from my previous on in here.

After the era of Archie and friends on the web, came along a new search engine technology called the World Wide Web Wander by Matthew Gray. This was the first web robot with its aim to track the web’s growth by counting web servers. Then it began to count and index url into database as well.

Development of World Wide Web Wanderer inspired a lot of developers out there, to innovate and try out new form of searching. One of the most prominent ones was ALIWEB, a web indexing software that worked like Archie by Martinjn Koster – In fact, ALIWEB stands for “Archie Like of the Web”.

ALIWEB works like known we have today as Online Directory of websites (the first Online Directory of websites) and it’s not a robot like Wanderer. It allows webmasters to post and submit their links and websites.

Then in end of 1993, three new search engines were launched with advance robot inspired by the first Wanderer. They were:-

• JumpStation – indexes as far as reading out header and title of the website. Then introduce ordering.
• World Wide Web Worm – indexes URL and the corresponding web title but lack of ordering
• Repository Based Software Engineering Spider (RBSE) – got around by doing the same and also by introducing the term we know now as relevancy and ranking.

Today, we are covering on how to store some simple data and move on to more complex data structure like an object into HTML5 local storage system. What the heck is local storage? Well in short summary , LocalStorage is a handy API included in the “HTML5” wave that gives web developers an easy to use 5MB store on an users local machine. In other words is way much better than storing app related information in cookies.

We can easily store key and value pair into a localStorage, here is how. In the source code below, context “name” is known as a key, “Hello World” string is our value.

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localStorage.setItem("name", "Hello World!"); //saves to the database, key/value
console.log(localStorage.getItem("name")); //Hello World!

So how do we store a more complex data like object and arrays? Let’s write a prototype extension and name it localStorage.js. This should be loaded before we even use our localStorage command. Code below extend existing localStorage to cater for objects by using JSON.stringify method.

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Storage.prototype.setObject = function(key, value) {
    this.setItem(key, JSON.stringify(value));
}
 
Storage.prototype.getObject = function(key) {
   return JSON.parse(this.getItem(key));
}

Then you can just use the method set/get Object to do like code below. That’s about it for today, happy storing

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var dataObject = new Object();
dataObject.id = 1;
dataObject.name = "Alex";
 
localStorage.setObject("myDataObject", dataObject); 
console.log(localStorage.getObject("myDataObject"));

For today’s localStorage.js and how to use it source code…

Download Here