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thedeadone gaming dice?


new-fudge-dice-001 I came across dicecreator via twitter. He makes these exceptional custom dice for gaming such as these amazing Fudge dice (image on the right). And during some testing of his equipment he decided to use my twitter icon as a test for some dice:

thedeadone_twitter_dice

Which, to use the American vernacular, is awesome!

Anyway, he recently ran a competition and guess who won? Me!

So now I get to design my own dice, one black and one red both six-sided. My first thought was to use some of the “icons” I created for Lost Heroes, but these might be too complicated to fit nicely on a dice. Also, they wouldn’t be very practical in a game.

So my thinking turned to Fudge dice, perhaps with one of the “+” symbols is replaced, one would be the Lost Heroes main icon and on the other dice, a slightly modified version of my twitter icon. The actual + and – symbols I’d customise too, thinking for one a stark pointy sword shapes and for the other tentacle like. Hopefully over the next few days I’ll get down to do some drawing and see what comes out.

I’ll post the results here anyway. Also means I need to game in the next while!

The answer to my question: WordPress “Press It” feature


I asked, not too long ago, if anyone had suggestions on sharing stuff from google reader in a nice way into WordPress. No-one answered and I didn’t find any solutions myself.

However, I did come across this plugin for WordPress: Quick Post. It didn’t install properly when I tried it, but I played with it and bit and got it to work. What it does is add a little “Bookmarklet” (works in Chrome and Firefox at least) which you can click on when you’re on a webpage and it’ll pop up a window with some details of the page you’re on already embedded in the post. What is nice about it, is that you can select a portion of the page, click the bookmarklet, and it’ll pop up a post with that text in it. It can also embed videos and images.

How does this solve my problem? I can’t get Google Reader to automatically create a draft post. But that’s not a big deal. I don’t want to be sharing loads of stuff here, so doing a little bit of manual work is fine. I just go to the link, select a summary or an image and I can use Quick Post to generate an entry. I’ll have to copy over my comment, but that’s fine. It forces me to write a blog post instead of just dumping a link compared to say doing it on Facebook or Twitter.

I did some digging, planning on forwarding my fixes to the author, and found that it is no longer supported! Not only that, it’s already supported in WordPress 2.6 (the latest version is 2.9). It seems if you go under the Tools menu, you’ll find a link called “Press It”, which you can drag to your Browser’s bookmarks. This little bookmarklet does something similar to Quick Post. Go to a webpage, select the text from the page, click the bookmarklet and you get a simple post screen with the link and title plus your summary. It’s pretty funky.

My one complaint is that if you want to use an image from a website, it only allows you to use the URL as the image (i.e. hotlinking). It doesn’t automatically download the image, which would make it the ultimate solution.

So there you go, that’s my wordpress tip for the month. Now you shouldn’t have any excuse for automated regurgitated content. :)

Okay, no more automated content here!


I never enjoy reading a blog post of someone’s tweets or what they shared on Google Reader. If I want to read your tweets, I’ll follow you on twitter. If I want to see your shared items, I’ll follow you on Google Reader right?

So I’ve disabled the auto-generated post of tweets and shared items and have scrubbed the existing ones from my database. A dead blog with automated posts looks worse than a dead blog right?

Going on holidays tomorrow! :)


So I’m going on holidays tomorrow, for a goodly period of time (but not too long). Can’t wait to get out of here and stop worrying about the recession, work, weather and everything else for a little bit.

I’m looking forward to it, not least because it’s time with my family but also because it’s time I get to indulge my creative hobbies, normally my drawing, writing and coding. No deadlines, no plans. In fact I finished off my One Month Fudge Adventure Challenge early because having a deadline was definitely focusing me but to the exclusion of all my other creative interests. Of course my family takes first place in practically everything (and I can’t wait to see my daughter again as she went ahead to spend a week or two with her French granny), but there generally enough time to get into stuff I don’t do at home.

I’m bringing my trusty/quirky 10-years-old laptop with me, but I won’t have internet access or even local TV. That’s fine for me. I’ll have a local webserver installed, so if I feel like it, I may work on TDO-Mini-Forms WordPress plugin (not bug fixes though, but additional features and refactoring). I’ll have my sketchpad, pencils, paints and bright clear weather to work by. I already have a number of projects I’d love to attempt. And my old laptop with OpenOffice and an install of Bazaar allows me to write away with few worries (and I have a score of ideas and projects just waiting to be cracked open). I’ll even have the time to read tens of books, compared to the measly one or two books every few months I do the rest of the year.

I’ve also been recently getting into twitter (@thedeadone) and using it quite a bit, more so then I blog. But I’ve found I can twitter from my underpowered non-iPhone mobile so I may be sending some tweets and pics from my holidays. I’ve even setup my WordPress blog (so that I can post from my phone too (thanks to a cool plugin called postie), so possible expect some short updates and photos here.

See you in a while! :)

Learning to not drown in the sea of social networking


I’ve finally converted. I’ve seen the light. I’ve jumped into those “whats the point?” and “timewasting” websites that have heralded in a multitude of buzzwords, Internet jokes and memes…

How the winds of fashion seemed to affect my friends

How the winds of fashion seemed to affect my friends

Yep. I’ve given in and followed my friends into Facebook and Twitter.  A bit late in the game as people seem to be already not bothering with facebook and moving solely towards twitter. But as someone I know says, “people vote with their feet” (and yes, that’s meant to be footprints in the diagram).

None of the new platforms are perfect though and I have gripes with each, but they are all useful in their own ways. I’ve actually had a Facebook account for a while, connected with several old friends, sent “pokes” and started to get really annoyed by them and then quietly stopped using it. 

How I currently use Social Networking sites

How I currently use Social Networking sites

But then my wife joined Facebook. For her it’s a way to keep connected with her friends in France and the US, so I went back to Facebook and started to enjoy it, seeing some friends still actively using it. It’s great to be able to connect to them and being modern-day parents, it’s often hard to keep track of or in contact with friends.When you do make the effort it can sometimes feel forced. With Facebook there is a flow there that’s natural.

But even now, some of the more tech-forward people I know have moved to twitter, ditching facebook in the process. I’ve been playing with twitter for a week now and I can see it’s fun, though Facebook’s status updates and News Feed have a very similar feel to Twitters feed. 

So I’m playing an experiment, Facebook to connect to friends and Twitter to connect to everyone (follow @thedeadone). If you want to know how it’s going, then you know what to do.

And no, I’m not deserting blogging. :)

Grab a beta release of TDO Mini Forms, if you dare!


I’ve been testing TDO Mini Forms (a WordPress plugin) on a live server for a few days now. Spam protection seems to work, which is great. I only have two things left to do before I do an official release: update the readme.txt and update the ReCapatcha widget to work with the editing form.

But to get people going, you can download a beta now from the development branch.

I’ve also been sucked into twitter! @thedeadone – I will be “tweeting” (is that the right verb?) using the hashtag #tdomf anything relevant to TDO Mini Forms. (‘tdomf’ is the tag I’ve always used to tag stuff relevant to TDO Mini Forms online).

Any comments and feedback welcome, but don’t expect major changes before the next release (which should be very soon!). Thank you.

Please keep in mind that this plugin is free and any support I provide is also free. If you found it useful you can show your appreciation via a small donation or buying me a book!