Josh's Brain Blog

Project in Detail: Fuse Bead Color Matcher

Submitted by Josh on

My daughter's winter break got kind of blown up in 2022 due to some really broken weather patterns and Southwest Airlines' inability to cope with them, so we spent a lot more time at home than we expected. As it sometimes does, that resulted in a couple projects leveraging our big stash of Perler Beads, both in terms of making new designs and in sorting out some of our myriad colors that got mixed together.

Project in Detail: Caves of Narshe 25th Anniversary Logo

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As I've now done for the last fifteen years, I've recently completed another alteration of the logo for my long-running website, Caves of Narshe, to celebrate the site's 25th anniversary. This one, while not altering the form nearly as much as the prior change for the 20th, takes the basic format of the current logo and does something very different with it to stand out from the site's long history.

A Change of Direction

Shifting a Legacy Site to a CDN, Part 1

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In my day job, we've been steadily moving into the cloud for a while now for all the same reasons everyone else does: it gives us less to maintain ourselves in terms of hardware, it allows us to distribute worldwide more efficiently, it saves us money in the long run, and so on. At home, though, it's a different story, though most of the goals are similar. So now that I have some working knowledge of using Amazon Web Services to create a content delivery network (more commonly known as CDN), I decided it was time to apply it to my largest and oldest hobby site too.

A Quick Infrared Photography Primer

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This is a quick cross-post of a short article written for my photography website, explaining false-color infrared photo production. The term "infrared" when applied to photography might make one think of the type of "thermal vision" or "night vision" popularized by movies, but the reality is somehow both more and less dramatic. In the world of art photography, an infrared photograph differentiates itself from typical digital or film photography by way of revealing light that we, as humans, can not see through other means. This light is then interpreted by the artist from something invisible to something that is not quite real.

Sorry, Another Home Improvement Project

Submitted by Josh on
Okay, fine, I’ll do another DIY post, because COVID has me doing more and more of them - like pretty much everyone these days, I guess. I spend way more time in my office at home than I probably should, even before literally everyone started doing the same thing. It is essentially a workspace and I guess almost a “man cave,” though I absolutely loathe that term, insomuch as the office also houses most of my collectibles and dorky things I’ve accumulated over the years.
 

Making a Basic DIY Fountain

Submitted by Josh on
alvies.org is not going to become a DIY blog. Because, really, who would read it? Fewer people than read the content I put out now, for sure. But, with all of us spending so much more time at home over the last couple months, we’ve all needed an outlet, and I’ve been tinkering with things at home. In this case, I pulled out a bush from my front landscaping that had been dying since we bought the place and was left with a big open area. I’d never had a water feature at any home I’ve owned, so I decided this was the time.