Welcome to LukeMcReynolds.com!
This is my place to put stuff online so I won't forget it, show the world that I can make a decent website, and share my thoughts with family and friends. It's also a place for me to share Linux/web development tips and tricks with the world at large, and a place for me to post pictures of my cat. If you don't know me and would like to, please get in touch with me - I'll try to respond right away.
Mugshot Mosaics
While doing research for the the Busted Weekly post from a couple days ago, I came across a whole bunch of mugshots - thousands of them. They’re all taken from the Kent County Inmate Lookup page. At the time, I downloaded a bunch of them, sure that I could find something interesting to do with them in the future.
I have. Using a piece of software called Metapixel, I turned all of those mugshots in to mosaics.
Thinking of possible subjects for a mugshot mosaic, my first thoughts were of crime, punishment, prisons, etc. I made the following mosaic, based on ethomsen‘s Flickr photo of the Salem Jail in Salem, Massachusetts.
Then I realized that prison mosaics were too… tasteless, I guess. It seems like something Busted Weekly would do. After all, the people whose mugshots I used for the jail mosaic weren’t yet convicted of any crimes: they were just arrested. They won’t spend any time in prison until/if they’re actually convicted for the crime they were arrested for.
I decided to use Jesus as the subject for my mugshot mosaics. It makes sense, I think: Jesus was arrested often for preaching the Word, and would have had the 1st century AD equivalent of a police mugshot. As God’s children, we all have a little bit of Jesus inside of us. Also, every single person on Earth, whether we have mugshots or not, was made in God’s image.
Click on the mosaic for a 1/7 scale version. The mosaic directly above is called “Christ In Majesty,” and is taken from a page from the Stavelot Bible page on Wikipedia. The original image is 13,000 pixels tall, and 294 MB. I also have a 3,500 pixel version.
You can download the mugshots that I used in zip format (125MB download) or bzip2 format (122MB download). I used Metapixel on Linux to make these mosaics: iMosaic is supposed to work well on Linux and Windows, although I haven’t tried it.
Let me know what you think about these. This is my first time making mosaics: I haven’t yet tried tweaking the mosaics at all yet for increased clarity or better color.
Posted on Dec 02, 2008 - 02:16 PM Categories: Art, Christianity, Geek, Open Sourced, Photoblogread more | 1 comments
SMOKE CRACK GET BUSTED!!! - Semi Valley Sound LLC, Look Who’s Been Busted, and Personal Privacy
Just to make it clear to everyone who might be confused: I do not publish "Look Who's Been Busted."
EDIT 6:45 12/12/08:
WoodTV 8 did a short segment on this newspaper, based on an interview from a woman who saw this article and called the TV station. It aired at about 6:10 PM on Dec. 12. See the video here: WOOD TV Channel 8 Segment on Look Who's Been Busted.
EDIT 9:02 AM 02/25/09: Here's the news clip.
EDIT 12:49 PM 6/5/09:
Response from the guy who runs Busted: The Guy Who Runs Busted Is Kindof A Dick
I found a newspaper the other day that I had never seen before. It's called "Look Who's Been Busted," and is a compendium of Grand Rapids and Kent County, Michigan arrests. The front page of the newspaper is below. Click on the image for a high-resolution version. Click here for the back page: it's a "Faces of Meth" spread, and has close-ups of meth-rotted teeth. You've been warned.
Busted compiles information from the Kent County Inmate Lookup webpage. It's a twelve page newspaper, filled entirely with mugshots. The newspaper costs one dollar. On every other page or so there's a callout: "SMOKE CRACK GET BUSTED!!!", "SMOKE POT GET BUSTED!!!" or "ASSAULT GET BUSTED!!!" or similar.
Click "Read More" below to read the rest of this article, and to learn more about Semi Valley Sound, Busted Weekly, and what I think about it all.
Posted on Nov 30, 2008 - 05:16 PM Categories: Grand Rapids, Localread more | 19 comments
Dynamic Dependent Dropdowns with ExpressionEngine’s Advanced Search Form
ExpressionEngine, as of version 1.6.6, doesn’t have a way to easily search for weblog entries belonging to a particular subcategory, or child category. Hopefully that’ll be fixed in the upcoming version 2.0.
Anyway, I’ve found a way to work around that.
One of my clients asked me to make a business listings website. Information about the business should be updateable by the person who listed the business. Furthermore, each business had to fit in to one parent category, an industry, and one subcategory, a particular industry segment. As well, each of the listings would need to be searchable, using a drop-down “select” menu to choose the primary industry and the secondary industry segment.
I tried several different ways to do this before I finally found one that worked the way I wanted it to. The other ways involved passing values between pages with PHP, which wasn’t ideal because ExpressionEngine’s very purpose is seemingly to hide query strings from developers and customers alike. There were several other AJAX ways, also, which would work… but they either didn’t play nice with EE’s templating engine, or they wouldn’t easily allow category customization by users through the Control Panel.
The way I did it is to use EE’s exp:weblog:category_archive tag and the “Subcategories” ExpressionEngine plugin to list the primary industry dropdown and all possible secondary dropdowns. All of the secondary dropdowns have a default CSS style of “display: none”, so they don’t appear on the page. Selection of a parent category in the first dropdown calls a jQuery function which changes the CSS of the appropriate dropdown (based on parent category ID) to “display:inline”. With that, the second dropdown box magically appears.
You can find the templates and code I used by clicking on the “Read More” link below. Although I’ve customized the code for my own purposes, the original code came from correspondence I had with Davor Prcovich, a.k.a. “davor” on the ExpressionEngine forums. The original forum postings can be found at http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/85780/.
Posted on Nov 26, 2008 - 12:26 AM Categories: ExpressionEngine, Geekread more | 3 comments
First Snow
Isn’t it gorgeous?
Posted on Nov 24, 2008 - 03:23 PM Categories: Grand Rapids, Local, Photoblogread more | 0 comments
Using the Vacu Vin Wine Vacuum to Keep Coffee Beans Fresh
I had a (retrospectively quite obvious) brain storm the other day that I wish I had had several years ago. You can use the Vacu Vin wine preservation system to keep coffee beans fresh too. It’s awesome.
Basically, Vacu Vin is a Dutch company that came up with an easy to use vacuum apparatus that sucks the air out of partially-empty bottles of wine. The oxygen in air oxidizes and acidifies the wine, and makes it turn sour. With most of the oxygen removed, wine stays fresh for much longer. I’ve had a Vacu Vin vacuum pump thing for a little while now, and it’s great - no longer am I forced to drink a full bottle of wine in one sitting, just so it doesn’t go bad.
My brainstorm was: you can do the same thing with coffee.
- Wash out and dry an empty bottle of wine. The type of wine doesn’t matter, but the color of the bottle does: the darker the glass, the less light can get in to spoil the beans. Alternately, keep your coffee in a dark kitchen cabinet. Make sure the bottle is completely dry on the inside - you don’t want water in there, letting you coffee beens rot.
- Make or find a suitable funnel. If you already have a funnel with a wide-enough mouth for coffee beans to easily fit through, then great. If you don’t, I would advise making one for yourself. The easiest way to do it is to cut the top off of an empty plastic bottle. I used a Coke bottle, and it worked great.
- Using the funnel that you’ve made or bought, pour the coffee beans in to the empty bottle. A regular-sized wine bottle will hold 750ml of coffee beans, or about one pound.
- Use the Vacu Vin pump and stopper to suck all of the air out of the wine bottle. It’ll take a couple strokes, depending on how many beans are in there; you know you’re done when the stopper makes a clicking sound.
That is pretty much it. I had been keeping my coffee beans in a clear semi-airtight plastic jar for a long time, and I think this will keep them a lot more fresh than with my previous system.
Photos
This is the vacuum-sealed bottle, with beans.
This is the funnel I made. I used a steak knife to cut the plastic bottle, so it’s not very nice-looking, but it does work well.
This is the Vacu Vin stopper and pump. You can get them on Amazon or any type of “foodie” store.
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Foosball Tournament
My friend Josh and I entered a foosball tournament Tuesday. It was great fun, but we both got totally smoked. Josh and I were, I think, the best players among our friends in college, but these guys (and one woman) are on a completely different level. Some of them play competitively, in tournaments around the country.
Anyway, here’s a YouTube video of what we were up against: the snake shot. It’s the fastest of the foosball shots, and pros can get it moving at up to 35 miles per hour.
I think between us, we blocked two or three of those shots the whole night.
Posted on Nov 21, 2008 - 05:10 PM Categories: Friends, Personal, Videosread more | 1 comments
After the Wedding
This photo is from a week ago today. My wife’s brother got married, and we went to Pittsburgh, PA for the wedding. I took this photo after the reception, when the bride, Julie, came back to the house to recuperate a little before heading out for the night.
I think it really expresses the joy, the weariness, and the “phew” of the wedding day.
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Pitchfork 0.5.5 MPD Client Mirror
I’ve used Pitchfork MPD Client to listen to music for a long time. It’s a frontend to the media server I keep in the cabinet underneath the TV, and lets Lauren and I control what music is played in the house. It’s nice because it’s easy to use, and web-accessible.
Anyway, I was doing a reinstall recently, and found that the main Pitchfork website, http://pitchfork.remiss.org, was down, and had been down for a little while.
I was able to find a mirrored version of the install package, and so I’m mirroring it here: http://lukemcreynolds.com/files/pitchfork-0.5.5.tar.bz2.
Hopefully this will be useful to someone. If you need some help installing it or have any questions, leave a note in the comments.
Edit Dec. 16, 2010: Pitchfork 0.5.5 has been patched, and forked. It’s called Patchfork now! See my post from November about it.
Posted on Nov 06, 2008 - 10:22 PM Categories: Geekread more | 7 comments
Some Great Engrish
I bought a really cheap outdoor thermometer from Woot a couple weeks ago, and it came in the mail today. The thermometer itself seems like it’ll do the job pretty well, but I loved the Engrish used for the instructions on the back. I scanned the back of the package that it came in: you can check it out below. (Click the picture for a larger version.)
My my favorite lines are in the “Care and maintain” category: “This product is rainproof but don’t put into the pool” and “UV resistance use for a period of time the outlook will little faded”. I also like “No electric wave pollution”, next to the little photo on the right. I really have no idea what that means.
Posted on Nov 06, 2008 - 03:35 AM Categories: Geek, Personalread more | 0 comments
Barack Obama Is The New President of the United States, and I Could Not Be Happier
This is just amazing. This is the type of thing that we’ll be telling our grandchildren about in the years to come. (Especially if you were lucky enough - as I was not - to be in Grant Park, Chicago last night.)
For me, there are three things about this that make me extremely happy, almost giddy.
- America’s international stature: renewed For a long time, when I was overseas, I felt apologetic about being an American. I was embarrassed by my president and ashamed for my country’s actions. At the time, during George W. Bush’s terms in office, my country’s president and actions reflected poorly upon me. I have confidence that that will no longer be the case with an Obama presidency.
- Barack Obama is smart Not only was he the president of the Harvard law Review, but he taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago. As a former law student, I feel I know a little bit about how hard that is to do, but how important it is as well. The man fully understands the Constitution, and he understands the historical importance of the the President in interpreting it. For once, it seems, we’ll have a President and (hopefully) a Cabinet that will respect the Constitution, because they know it, understand it, and love it. That’s amazing.
- Everything else He’s 50-some years old, but he plays basketball like a champ. We’ll have two little kids in the White House again. Children growing up in foreign countries will see the American president on TV and think, “That man looks just like me.” Michelle Obama is one of the classiest ladies I’ve seen, period. He’s an actual, practicing Christian, who believes that God calls us to take care of the poor. The list goes on and on…
Thank you America, and may God bless Barack Obama.
Posted on Nov 05, 2008 - 02:02 PM Categories: Personal, Politicalread more | 0 comments
