Radiator enclosures – dental office

Enclosures out of 3/4 ply with internal structure of metal studs and track, removable covers attached with magnets to studs, access panels for valves.

Start:

Design was by the architecture firm but there’s always a few things I have to figure out.

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Built-in shelving with LED strip lighting

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Bathroom sink and vanity with laundry

How do you fit a washer-dryer into a tiny Manhattan bathroom? Once piece at a time.

I poured a custom concrete trough sink with the drain in the back corner so as to open up the room for the washer-dryer to fit underneath. Which then necessitated a custom cabinet to match underneath.

Removing the plywood mold. Concrete mix was white Portland cement with white sand. The trickiest part was cutting things on the angle so the sink would drain properly, and then getting all those subtle angles to line up smoothly.

Patching, sanding, sealing.

Now for the cabinet…

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Adult Trike Kiddie Cab

And now for something completely different…

The idea for this emerged from the repeated dilemma of needing to transport two kids, which the trail-a-bike simply can’t accommodate. I started looking at cargo bikes, or “bakfietsen” which I had seen all over Amsterdam, but found the cost prohibitive. Trikes on the other hand, are roughly the same price as two-wheelers. I found what I was after on Craig’s list, gave the bike some TLC, built a custom bench out of some pine support slats I rescued from a bed being thrown out, et voilà:

What I started with:

Designing the bench:

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Classroom Cubbies

2019

It was only a passing request from my daughter’s first grade teacher – whether I had any ideas for improving the book storage above the coat cubbies, which was admittedly an eyesore. Upon some examination of the alcove, I told him he should rethink the entire situation, and via my own pushy compulsion, somehow volunteered to rectify the situation. What I peeled away during demolition was an unused legacy cubby system of hooks mounted on a long shelf, which sat unused behind the existing milk crates housing the kids’ stuff. The milk crates rested on top of a couple of unused shelves fashioned out of the doors that once rendered the alcove a large closet. Above all of this nonsense was a shelf, also made of the doors, housing a few hundred pounds of hidden books (yes, above where the kids retrieved their coats), covered with a few pieces of 1/2″ plywood, held vertically in place by small bolted slats that he would turn to remove the wood in order to get access.

Some remnants of what I ripped out:

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SPARK Mobile App Contest

Spectrum News

Simons Foundation

html5 banners, various clients

2016

html/css/js, animation with Greensock libraries.

replay

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Brightcove videoplayer accessibility plugin

Q2 2014
Javascript/Actionscript solution to Brightcove player accessibility problems

DOWNLOAD SRC

When I wrote this, Brightcove did have an “Accessible” template – which was not even remotely accessible. Accessible means I should be able to navigate the web page/application with my eyes closed, using only the keyboard, and access the same content in as smooth and efficient an experience as a visually-equipped user.

This solution isn’t perfect – I still received complaints from users about tab-accessibility inconsistency and video control button labels not changing on toggle, which I couldn’t control without access to the video src. Ultimately, we decided to move off of Brightcove as a video solution, but if you’re stuck with it, this will help significantly.

Tabbing into and out of Flash objects embedded on an HTML page is a common problem — if you can’t tab into an embedded application, it doesn’t exist to any user using a screenreader. The solution I stitched together uses a Class from Adobe to setup the tab ordering of clickable elements within the swf, in combination with some javascript by Richard England to handle focus into and out of the swf.

1. Create the swf that will become your custom Brightcove plugin. This is an empty .swf which, upon being added to the stage, will explore the heirarchy of the swf into which is has been imported, find the video controls, will pass those to the SWFFocus class. Below isthe Document class of your .fla.

package {
	import com.adobe.swffocus.SWFFocus;

	import flash.accessibility.AccessibilityProperties;
	import flash.accessibility.Accessibility;
	import flash.display.Sprite;
	import flash.events.Event;
//	import com.richardengland.utils.Tabbing;
	import flash.display.DisplayObjectContainer;
	import flash.display.DisplayObject;
	import flash.utils.getDefinitionByName;
	import flash.utils.getQualifiedClassName;


	public class SWFFocusFix extends Sprite {
		public function SWFFocusFix() {
			if (stage) {
				init();
			} else {
				addEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, init);
			}
		}

		private function init(event:Event = null):void {
			trace("SWFFocusFix.init");

			var player:Object = parent;
			var counter:Number = 0;

			var buttonContainer:Object;

			while (player.parent) {
				for (var i:uint = 0; i < player.numChildren; i++) {
					var child:DisplayObject = player.getChildAt(i);
					var childClass = getQualifiedClassName(child);

					if (childClass.indexOf("BEMLContainer") != -1) {
						//then this is where we want the tabbing focus to be
						buttonContainer = child;
					}

				}

				player = player.parent;
				counter++;

				if (buttonContainer) {
					break;
				}
			}

			traceDisplayList(DisplayObjectContainer(player));

			if (player) {
				trace("Found player.stage! | " + player.stage);
				if (player.stage) {
					if (hasEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE)) {
						removeEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, init);
					}
					/*
					if (buttonContainer) {
					var tabbing = new Tabbing(DisplayObjectContainer(buttonContainer));
					}
					*/
					if (buttonContainer) {
						
							SWFFocus.init(buttonContainer.stage);
					}
				}
			} else {
				if (stage) {
					trace("Using local stage.");
					SWFFocus.init(stage);
				}
			}
		}

		private function traceDisplayList(container:DisplayObjectContainer, indentString:String = ""):void {
			var child:DisplayObject;
			for (var i:uint=0; i < container.numChildren; i++) {
				child = container.getChildAt(i);
				if (child.accessibilityProperties) {
					trace(child.accessibilityProperties.name, child.accessibilityProperties.description );
				}
				trace(indentString, child, child.name);


				if (container.getChildAt(i) is DisplayObjectContainer) {
					traceDisplayList(DisplayObjectContainer(child), indentString + "    ");
				}
				
				
				var childClass = getQualifiedClassName(child);
				//adjustment for the closedCaptions BG
				//if (child.name == "instance137" && childClass.indexOf("GlowingButton") != -1) {
					if (childClass.indexOf("GlowingButton") != -1){
						if (getQualifiedClassName(child.parent.parent.parent).indexOf("CaptionControls") != -1){
							trace("******* removed child " + child.name);
							//child.parent.removeChild(child);
							child.alpha = 0;
							
						}
				}

			}
		}

	}
}

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Auth fail on image stream when generating PDF’s with PHP

The error:
PHP Warning: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized

…and you either get blanks where there should be images in your PDF, or you get no PDF at all. I encountered this problem while using wp-post-to-pdf-enhanced and Kalin’s PDF Creation Station for WordPress.

The methods throwing the warning:
getimagesize()
imagecreatefromjpeg()

The cause:
This appears to happen under 2 conditions: Apache authentication is required on the directory, AND the path to the image file contains directories named with numbers.

The fix:
You need to change just one of these conditions for it to work. Either rename the image directories to NOT begin with numbers, OR remove the apache authentication.

animated web banner in html5

2010
[No client]

OH, Advertising. What can I say, banners are still bread and butter at a lot of places, though even now (years after I wrote this banner) it seems we haven’t really gotten away from Flash as the primary IDE. No jQuery here (which makes the total load less than 20K), just intervals with calculated easing, and an event class to handle execution upon the doc becoming ready. Background is Canvas, copy is divs, cta is a png. This is where I found out you can’t layer multiple canvas divs on top of each other and expect what you are undoubtedly expecting.

REPLAY

THINK Academy – IBM

Think Academy is a desktop and mobile MOOC application written in HTML/CSS/JS, using IBM Connections’ social API and Brightcove video. Monthly topic deployments to the global IBM community make it highly agile project Read more here.

Role: HTML/CSS/JS, PHP/MySQL, Grunt, Brightcove video, Dotsub closed captions, Accessibility standards