The Art Institute of Chicago recently revamped its website and released a searchable database of high-resolution art. Even better, a lot of the art is in the public domain, meaning you can legally use it however you want, even for commercial purposes. (Check the copyright notice on each artwork’s page.) You’ll notice that while you can zoom in on most of the artworks, only the public-domain art will include a full-resolution download link.
For anything in the public domain, like the Monet, you can download the largest version, send it to a service like Framebridge, and have your own framed art print. Well, art print-out. But a classy one.
You could also, theoretically, use the public-domain art in an ad. Imagine the possibilities.
The service lets you see what’s expected to arrive in your mailbox soon. It’s great for knowing that a check or invite you’ve been waiting for is literally in the mail. And f you don’t sign up for it? You’re opening yourself up to someone signing up for the service as you and swiping your important mail before you ever see it.
On November 6th the Secret Service reportedly sent an internal alert to its law enforcement partners warning them of a scam where criminals would sign up for other people’s mailboxes and then steal credit cards from those people’s mailboxes, reports KrebsOnSecurity.
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According to the report, seven people in Michigan used the service to apply for fraudulent credit cards and then steal those cards out of their recipient’s mailboxes. The mailbox owners never knew the cards were even applied for, much less stolen. In that case, the defendants were able to run up nearly $400,000 in charges on the stolen cards.
KrebsOnSecurity notes that any adult that lives at your address can sign up for an account, so if you do want to claim your address you should do so for every eligible person. You can also reportedly opt your address out of the service entirely by emailing eSafe@usps.gov, although the publication did not have any luck getting a response from that address.
It also suggested a credit freeze might help prevent fraudulent signups since USPS uses security questions from Equifax in order to verify accounts. That said, several readers of the site claimed they were able to sign up even though they had credit freezes in place, so your mileage may vary.
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And as always, this a good reminder to sign up for alerts for when your credit report changes. If you have alerts set up you’ll find out about fraudulent cards and loans sooner rather than later.
Iron Man might make flying look easy, but strapping on a jetpack and wings ranks as one of the more dangerous things you could every try. Jetman Yves Rossy and his two protégés (Fred Fugen and Vince Reffet) are bringing you closer to that action with the launch of a documentary called Loft: The Jetman Story.
In a teaser trailer for the film, produced in collaboration with XDubai, the trio show off some formation flying through the Fjords of Norway. It demonstrates the extreme risk (“if something goes wrong you have to react fast,” says Reffet) along with some pretty incredible high-speed visuals. You also get to see the first time the team has launched from a ground-based platform, albeit a high ramp in the mountains, rather than the helicopters or planes they usually use.
The team has performed some terrifying stunts before, flirting with an Airbus A380 super jumbo jet and over landmarks like the Burj Khalifa. They call it the “first step towards autonomous flight,” though autonomous in this sense seems to mean personal, rather than computer control. The documentary is currently in production, with the documentary itself “coming soon,” according to the team’s website.
Pangolin’s Puzzle is a new mobile game that offers a refreshing approach to the puzzle genre — instead of relying solely on spatial manipulation or number-based solves, it serves up written logic problems. Players manipulate patches of the environment on a grid, building landscapes according to descriptions of how each feature relates to one another. It’s tricky, thoughtful and addictive, especially when you add in the adorable main character, an anteater-like animal called a pangolin.
There’s a special section in Pangolin’s Puzzle that doesn’t exist in most games. Tap on “Pangolin’s Extras,” open up the “We <3 Pangolins” tab, and the following message appears:
“We at Hero Factor Games hold a Christian worldview. We believe that ideas and choices have consequences. Each choice we make leaves an eternal impression on our hearts, minds, and souls. For us, the issue of environmental stewardship goes deeper than respecting our beautiful planet; it reflects what we believe about the God who made the heavens and earth.”
Pangolin’s Puzzle comes from Hero Factor Games, a studio based in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and founded by the husband-and-wife team of Tim and Sara Kilpatrick. Their mission at Hero Factor is to build entertaining games that also spread the word of God as they see it. In the case of their latest game, that means introducing players to the pangolin, the world’s most-trafficked animal, and raising money to help save the species from extinction.
“As a Christian, God is everything,” Tim Kilpatrick said. “He is in everything. He is in science. He is in the world. He is in the games that we play. He is, and my whole life is worked around bringing honor and glory to Him. But with games, it’s not a Bible.”
Video games are more interactive than a static, printed book, and they provide new, engaging ways for the Kilpatricks to share their religion and worldview. However, they’re lifelong video game fans, and they always start by thinking about the game, rather than focusing on a message to preach and building a set of rules around that.
“What we’re trying to do is, first thing, build a fun game mechanic,” Kilpatrick said. “We go through and we find a game, build something fun that we want to play, and then we just look at it and say, well what’s the appropriate way that the Christian worldview would make sense in this game? And we just apply it through there.”
Pangolin’s Puzzle represents the tenet of stewardship, or caring for the Earth and all of the creatures in it. It began as a much larger game, featuring 60 of the world’s most overlooked animals — the ones that don’t make it into zoos because they’re too noisy or smelly or unsightly, Kilpatrick explained. Eventually, Sara and Tim Kilpatrick scaled it down to just one animal, the scaly, beady-eyed pangolin, which faces extinction as the most-trafficked mammal in the world. Demand for the pangolin is high in China, where people desire its scales, meat and blood. Pangolin scales are boiled down and used in traditional medicine, their blood is viewed as a healing tonic, and their meat is a delicacy in some regions.
“The big fear is that they’re going to be extinct before anybody even knows they exist,” Kilpatrick said. “And so, we just really felt passionately about the pangolin, fell in love with him, and wanted to make a game that could help him.”
“They’re going to be extinct before anybody even knows they exist.”
The Hero Factor Games team consulted with conservation groups like REST Namibia to ensure Pangolin’s Puzzle got all of the details right and it actually supported positive change. The game has in-app purchases, allowing players to buy hints, and half of the profits from this system benefit conservation efforts around the globe.
“These people are sacrificing everything to try to save these animals,” Kilpatrick said. “And so all of that just kind of went into us — as Christians, we see the environment as God’s creation. We should be taking the best care of it that we possibly can and saving these animals, and not letting them go extinct. We just felt this was the right way to do it for this game.”
Congratulations to Hero Factor Games for winning the first Scissor-Tail Prize, awarded to the best game at XPO made here in Oklahoma! Grab their game, A Pangolin’s Puzzle, available now! pic.twitter.com/iVD168fMmP
Kilpatrick said there are a lot of Christian video game fans out in the wild, and even a handful of Christian-centric games. He called out That Dragon, Cancer by Numinous Games as the most high-profile title — it tells the true story of the Green family as their youngest son, Joel, battles an aggressive form of cancer. That Dragon, Cancer picked up a handful of accolades in 2016, including a SXSW Gaming award, two Games for Change wins and the “Games for Impact” prize at The Game Awards.
Because of their focus on social change and the depth of the human experience, both That Dragon, Cancer and Pangolin’s Puzzle can be shuffled into the category of “games for change” or “socially aware games.” This segment has expanded on the mainstream marketplace in recent years, with popular, award-winning projects like 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, Cart Life and Papers, Please.
Pangolin’s Puzzle may be a Christian game first, but it has a home alongside other socially aware titles and philanthropic studios. Kilpatrick said Hero Factor Games hasn’t encountered any extra challenges as a Christian studio.
“It doesn’t feel any harder or anything,” he said at the Tulsa Pop Culture Expo, where Pangolin’s Puzzle won the Scissor-Tail Prize for the best game from an Oklahoma studio. “We’re here, sitting alongside all these wonderful developers, having a blast integrating and sharing our games with each other. It’s just games. And we’re just in love with games.”
Meet Bubble a bootstrapped startup that has been building a powerful service that lets you create a web application even if you don’t know how to code. Many small and big companies rely on Bubble for their website.
I have to say I was quite skeptical when I first heard about Bubble. Many startups have already tried to make coding as easy as playing with Lego bricks. But it’s always frustratingly limited.
Bubble is more powerful than your average website building service. It recreates all the major pillars of web programming in a visual interface.
It starts with a design tab. You start with a blank canvas and you can create web pages by dragging and dropping visual elements on the screen. You can put elements wherever you want, resize maps, text boxes, images and more. You can click on the preview button to see the development version of your time whenever your want.
In the second tab, you can create the logic behind your site. It works a bit like Automator on the Mac. You add blocks to create a chronological action. You can set some conditions within each block.
In the third tab, you can interact with your database. For instance, you can create a sign up page and store profile information in the database. At any time, you can import and export data.
There are hundreds of plugins that let you accept payments with Stripe, embed a TypeForm, use Intercom for customer support via chat, use Mixpanel, etc. You can also use your Bubble data outside of Bubble. For instance, you can build an iPhone app that relies on your Bubble database.
Many small companies started using Bubble, and it’s been working fine for some of them. For instance, Plato uses Bubble for all its back office. Qoins and Meetaway run on Bubble. Dividend Finance raised $365 million and uses Bubble.
The startup takes care of hosting your application for you. Every time you resize your instance as your application gets bigger, you pay more.
Even though the company never raised any money, it already generates $115,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Bubble is still a small startup, which can be scary for bigger customers. But the company wants to improve the product so that customers don’t see the limitations of Bubble. Now, the challenge is to grow faster than customers’ needs.
USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- Why does anyone need an AR-15? This question came to me, for the second time in recent history, while I was teaching a concealed carry firearms course at a private range surrounded by woods in Central Florida.
To be honest, even though I had heard this question recently, I still stumbled over my answer. I hesitated slightly and half heartily blurted out something about home defense, but why was this question so hard for me to answer? I mean, the first time I was asked, I have to admit I got a little defensive, and it was my own mother who had asked me. I had fumbled my words, became quite frustrated and told her “I would go find my copy of the Constitution for her to read”.
I later realized that I owed my mother an apology, she had genuinely meant no harm, she was merely ignorant of the subject, and asked in curiosity. It was myself I should have been upset with because, in times like these where our guns and rights are always under attack, I just was not prepared with an intelligent response.
You see, I’m a “gun guy.” I’m a proud NRA member, a firearms instructor, a chief range safety officer, and a veteran. I’m registered to vote Republican, and I have been collecting guns since I was a kid. So how is such a little, simple question presenting me with so much frustration? Well after some careful thought, I realized what the problem was. It was the question; it was not so little or straightforward after all. The question itself is misleading, often unbeknown to the asker.
Why do I have to find a reason to justify my need for it?
The truth is my need doesn’t matter. It might be property defense, it might be hunting or competition, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t NEED to NEED it. I have the RIGHT to WANT it. Why does the average American household need 3 TV’s? Why does my wife need 15 pairs of boots? Why do people need to put rims on their vehicles, or what is the need for a microwave oven? Wouldn’t the cars still drive with factory tires? Don’t most kitchens have conventional ovens? So why does anyone need any of these things? The answer to all of these questions is the same! It’s because I WANT them and it’s my RIGHT as an American!
You see, we have this thing called a Constitution, the American Heritage Dictionary defines Constitution as “The system of fundamental laws and principles that prescribes the nature, functions, and limits of a government or another institution. The supreme law of the United States, consisting of the document ratified by the original 13 states and Amendments.”
The question in itself leaves the tart taste of communism in one’s mouth. The fact is, the Second Amendment protects us, the law-abiding American citizen, and it protects the other Amendments of the Constitution, and it is now under blatant attack.
Letters to the AmmoLand Editor: Got something on your mind? Let us know, and you can see it here.
The left tells us they just want to ban the “dangerous assault rifles,” high capacity magazines, and bump stocks, but that is just the beginning. They only say this to win over those, who wonder on the middle ground. What comes next are “permanent protective orders” like the House Bill 2060 that’s making its way to the Pennsylvania state Senate right now. Which would require certain individuals to relinquish all firearms and ammunition within 24 hours. You can be sure it won’t stop there, if the Liberals get their dirty claws in the American people, they will undoubtedly pull us in for the kill, sinking their infecting teeth in the whole Constitution, shredding and destroying all of our freedoms and liberties.
This is it, folks, this is a Civil War, and we must fight not yet with violence but with our voices and our votes. We must resist in any way possible before it’s too late. I urge you to call, or write your Senate, remind your friends to register, and to vote. Let the snowflake Liberals know that, “we will not stand for our freedoms to be stripped away.” The time is upon us, our Constitution was written to protect the people of this great nation, and now it is under attack, and “We the People” must return the favor, and protect the Constitution.
Flickr isn’t going away, but a lot of your photos will be if you don’t follow its new limitations: 1,000 photos, period. These photos can be any size you want, but you only get a thousand of them. The era of the free terabyte of Flickr storage is coming to an end.
Ignore Flickr’s new guidelines, and here’s what you’ll face over the next few months:
Starting Tuesday, January 8, free users over the 1,000-photo limit will be unable to upload new photos to Flickr.
Starting Tuesday, February 5, Flickr will start deleting photos (oldest first) for free users over the 1,000-photo limit. Deletions continue until your account reaches 1,000 photos.
If you don’t want to pay $50 each year for Flickr Pro—which frees you of these limitations and throws in other fun features like ad-free browsing, video uploads of up to 10 minute each, and a bevy of stats—you’re probably going to want to prune your account manually. (That, or maybe it’s time to move all your photos to another service.)
How to download all your photos from Flickr
Previously, you had to turn to some kind of third-party tool to grab all your photos (or manually download batches of photos or individual albums directly from Flickr itself). You can still do this using anynumberofapps, but I recommend grabbing your photos directly from Flickr’s website. It’s not that hard of a process, and it’ll ensure that you don’t miss a thing.
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If you don’t care about keeping your photos organized into albums, you can use Flickr’s “Your Flickr Data” section in its Settings to grab every piece of information the service stores about you—”including account preferences, profile information, and your photos and videos,” Flickr notes. Simply visit your Account page, look in the bottom-right corner for the option to request your data, click the button, and wait a few hours (or many hours) for Flickr to process your request. You’ll get an email when your archive is ready for downloading, and you can always check this page for the link if you’re feeling impatient.
If you relied on Flickr’s albums to keep your many photos organized, you’ll find that Flickr’s archive doesn’t care—it’s a dump of your photos, period. You’ll have to go back and reorganize them yourself, which might be a little annoying. To get around that, you can always eschew Flickr’s all-in-one tool and instead download archives of your photos via their albums.
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Pull up your album listing on Flickr, hover your mouse over an album, and click on the download arrow. Repeat for all of your albums to keep all of your grouped photos together. A warning, though: Any photos that are not in albums won’t get saved when you use this technique.
Now what?
However you get your photos to your computer, you’re left with a big question: What do you do with them? I wouldn’t recommend keeping them on your desktop or laptop forever—not unless you have multiple backup options you use to preserve your data, as one computer catastrophe is all it would take for you to lose years’ worth of precious photos.
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While the cloud isn’t perfect, since Flickr’s big changes show that even popular and seemingly invulnerable sites can go away—or adjust their service offerings dramatically—uploading your photos somewhere else is a great way to protect them from hardware failures, at the very least.
The first and most obvious choice you can switch to is Google Photos. It’s completely free, there aren’t any storage limits, and it supports shots up to 16MP in size and videos up to a 1080p resolution. That should be good enough for most people; if you need to save your original media in its highest-quality format, you’ll need to pay for a Google One storage plan. For $20 cheaper than the cost of an annual Flickr subscription, you can get 200GB of storage for your photos—or for double the cost of Flickr, 2TB.
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You can also just stick with Flickr, so long as you transition to using the site as a portfolio for work you want to show off rather than a permanent storage solution. Make sure you use its Organize tool to delete that which you no longer want before Flickr makes that decision for you.
500px is another good online option, and its base plan (featuring unlimited uploads) starts at $48 annually. That’s not a huge savings compared to Flickr’s Pro plan, but it’s a strong alternative if you’re looking for something new. Don’t bother trying to stick with its free account, however: You’re limited to 2,000 total pictures and a paltry seven uploads per week.
If you’re already paying a small annual fortune for Amazon Prime, this one’s a no-brainer: Dump all your pictures over to Amazon Photos, where you’ll have unlimited space to store your pictures at any size or resolution. Videos, not so much—you get 5GB to play with, which you’ll fill up pretty quickly.
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The downside? If you ever drop Amazon Prime, your unlimited storage goes away. You’ll be able to download your saved photos for around three months or so, but Amazon will eventually start deleting your pictures.
Finally, if you’re feeling crafty, you can always roll your own photo storage setup. Should you enjoy staring danger in the face and prefer to keep your photos on your desktop, an app like Adobe Bridge CC or digiKam will help you stay organized. If you want to self-host your own gallery—and have an available web server with lots of storage space to play with—then consider checking out apps like Lychee, Chevereto (which we’ve previously covered), Piwigo, or any of the other options on this comprehensive list. Get them running on your server, and your pictures can live in your own Flickr-like environment—with no limits whatsoever.
When I was a teen, I spent much of my time fantasizing about and designing my ultimate homestead. I got the Scott and Helen Nearing books, the Foxfire books, the Whole Earth Catalogs, and a book called One Acre and Security. I studied them like DIY bibles. I had an organic garden in our backyard. I raised rabbits. My best friend raised chickens. We fancied ourselves semi-rural homesteaders.
I never built my dream homestead, although I did live on a farming commune for 6 1/2 years and got an opportunity to learn and live all of the homesteading skills. Even in my middle age, I still think about what my hand-built dream house might be like and what I might be able to do with one acre and a mule.
Given this history, I love living vicariously through a friend, Make: contributor, Andrew Lewis, and his Shedlandia project. For the past few years, Andrew and his wife Caroline have been building their own little dream homestead. Andrew has been documenting the process on a website and a YouTube channel.
Here is a sampling of the Shedlandia video content. Andrew also does a live-streamed MakerHour where he chats with fellow makers, discusses the projects he’s working on, and opines on various aspects of homesteading and DIY.
Building a Laravel Translation Package – Wrangling Translations
As we’ve discussed earlier in the series, out of the box, Laravel translations are stored in language files. These can be either PHP array-style syntax or straight up JSON files.
The Laravel Translation package interacts with the files in order to achieve the following:
List all languages
Add a language
List all translations
Add a translation
Update existing translations
The plan for the package is, much like many features of Laravel, to expose multiple drivers to power the translation management. The first driver will utilize Laravel’s existing file-based translations with plans to later add a database driver. With this in mind, we first define a contract to which driver will implement to ensure all the required methods are available to the package.
The file driver needs to interrogate the filesystem in order to return the data in the required format. This involves a lot of filtering, mapping and iterating, so we will lean quite heavily on Laravel’s collections.
Listing languages
To generate a collection of languages, we use the filesystem to get an array of directories from the configured language path, wrapping the result in a collection.
Next, we utilize the mapWithKeys function to iterate over the directories, stripping the language from the path (it will be the last segment) and returning a key => value array.
To create a new language, we need to add a new directory and empty JSON file to the configured language path and name it after the language we’re adding.
Then, to get the translations, we can iterate over all the files in the directory and use the filesystem’s getRequire method to require the file giving us direct access to the array.
[
‘auth’ => [
‘failed’ => ‘These credentials do not match our records’,
],
]
Single
We can get the single translations by using json_decode on the contents of the file.
if ($this->disk->exists($this->languageFilesPath.“/$language.json”)) {
return new Collection(json_decode($this->disk->get($singlePath), true));
}
The result looks something like this:
[
‘hello’ => ‘hello’,
]
Adding/updating translations
Translations are added and updated in largely the same fashion. First, we get the contents of the file the translation should be added to in array format. Then, we check whether or not the key to be added already exists. If it does, we update the value and if not, we append the new key and value to the array. Finally, the whole array is written back to the file.
This driver lays the foundation from which we can build upon. Next time, we’ll build out the user interface which will ship with the package. It utilizes a combination of Tailwind CSS and Vue.js, two frameworks which have been widely adopted by the Laravel community.
