Megan and I launched our first online business this week, Baby Tattle e-mail birth announcements. For $49.95, you can send a classy custom e-mail to as many contacts as you’d like with photos of your newborn. At the moment we have eight designs available and I will be adding two a week for the next five weeks.
Please take a look and let me know what you think!
How to send e-mail birth announcements
Unique online birth announcements
This took up a good chunk of my afternoon. I have a client who wants to upload JPEG images to his website and have them automatically resized and watermarked with copyright information to discourage image theft. Resizing is a piece of cake — I’ve done that before — but getting the alpha transparency of a 24-bit PNG to overlay correctly was maddening.
It turns out that the solution is actually really simple. The code is below:
$photo = imagecreatefromjpeg("original.jpg");
$watermark = imagecreatefrompng("watermark.png");
// This is the key. Without ImageAlphaBlending on, the PNG won't render correctly.
imagealphablending($photo, true);
// Copy the watermark onto the master, $offset px from the bottom right corner.
$offset = 10;
imagecopy($photo, $watermark, imagesx($photo) - imagesx($watermark) - $offset, imagesy($photo) - imagesy($watermark) - $offset, 0, 0, imagesx($watermark), imagesy($watermark));
// Output to the browser - please note you should save the image once and serve that instead on a production website.
header("Content-Type: image/jpeg");
imagejpeg($photo);
Note: It’s a bad idea to do this on the fly for each visitor. I strongly recommend watermarking an image once and then using that image for your website.
So occasionally I pick up an arcane hobby and run with it. This week: alcohol stoves. I was reading about ultralight backpacking strategies and researching how people eliminate weight from their backpacks and ran across these little gems and an entire subculture of backpackers who build them and use them. So far I’ve built about half a dozen and finally found a design that works consistently.
The beauty of these stoves is how light and simple they are. Most people construct them out of aluminum cans, cut, sanded, and drilled into the correct shape. It only takes me 20 minutes and two pop cans to build a fully functional stove, one that can boil a quart of water. The fuel is simple — alcohols such as methanol or ethanol — and is generally safer than white gas or other fuels.
To be honest, I’ve grown tired of my Optimus stove breaking on trips. I’ve had more problems with that stove than any other, and though it works very well when it’s working, I’m ready for something simple.
For the curious:
The Art of the Alcohol Stove
Penny Alcohol Stove
Pepsi Can Alcohol Stove
Penny Stove Construction
