Life According to Duck » The Great To-Do List

Needing a little break from painting miniatures, I decided to resume work on CoHLCD. While I'm fairly certain v2.0 is almost ready to come out of Beta, I still need to get a decent up and running to support it.

For the third time now, I've scrapped a code-from-scratch web project and elected to use WordPress instead. For CoHLCD's site, I'm building the entire Theme from scratch, rather than using an existing Theme to template from. I think this is actually turning out to be a faster approach than restyling an already-designed template. With a little .htaccess tweak, I was even able to use my PHP-based Stylesheet.

I'll likely write a tutorial soon about creating WordPress Themes - it's honestly easier than I expected it to be, and hopefully I can help someone else discover the same.

Filed Under: A Duck's Life, The Great To-Do List, WordPress
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Well, my G15 Refinishing is now on hold indefinitely. Somehow, the Numpad Enter key, which was (along with every other key) soaking in a jar of water to release the paint thinner, turned into jelly and puffed up. The other keys, which all had the identical treatment, remain unaffected.

I'll probably look for a used/broken G15 or G11, and just swipe the keytops from it. However, this definitely pushed this to the end of the project list.

Sheeb's Tau Battlesuits are nearly completed, as is the Necron 'Hand of Despair' Terrain piece. I'll be making some related terrain pieces soon, and creating templates so others can make the same Hand.

I'm going to be out of town all weekend, so the list itself won't really get knocked down all that much for a while. Ah well, I deserve a *few* days off

Filed Under: A Duck's Life, The Great To-Do List, Warhammer 40K
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HexGirl.ca is now moved over to its new home at HotBodSquads.com. To be fair, this was a really minor task, and only took about 15 minutes - creating the new header graphic was actually more time-consuming (and wasn't actually on my list).

I repaired The Nightbringer, and also gave it a coat of Matte Varnish - hopefully that'll negate any minor scratch repairs for the near future.

The core of the G15 is essentially completed - I just have to resurface the Memory keys and the Mute/Backlight keys, and then the main Keyboard assembly can be put back together. I've already reattached the LCD. The keytops are still proving fairly resilient to my common methods of chemical paint stripping - I'm pretty sure it's going to come down to manually sanding each key, which is a pretty daunting task on a 122+ key Keyboard.

The Necron Hand of Despair is basically complete. It needs a little more paint, and some texturing on the base, but other than that it's tabletop-ready. I'll produce a PDF of the final plans hopefully in the next week or two, and I'll take construction photos whenever I get around to building a second one.

And that's about it so far. The last few days haven't been quite as eventful, list-wise. I blame our weekly D&D night

Filed Under: A Duck's Life, The Great To-Do List, Warhammer 40K
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After soaking the Keys in Brake Fluid all night, and giving them a vigorous scrubbing this morning, maybe 30% of the paint has come loose - and that's being very generous. I'm back to looking for another method of paint stripping to get the Keys down to their transparent plastic bases.

On top of that, I had the brilliant idea of giving the main plastic pieces (which were spraypainted with Krylon Fusion yesterday) a quick Clear Coat. Bad idea. It caused a fair bit of the Krylon Fusion to bubble up, and now I have to strip the paint off these as well.

So basically, the only part that's gone right in this whole project has been replacing the Blue LEDs with Red Ones - assuming you don't count the small soldering iron burn I self-inflicted. Hopefully this project turns around soon!

Filed Under: A Duck's Life, The Great To-Do List
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After a few hours of humming and hawing over Wordpress Themes and Plugins, Our Home Cookbook is now online. Though I did manipulate the theme a fair bit (and intend to do so more later), credit for the original design still needs to be given to BrightCherry Web Design.

Now I just need to give my mom a quick tutorial on blogging with WordPress!

As an interesting side note, I found a small bug in my 'Display Category Children' sidebar widget, which I resolved as well. I may end up releasing this Widget soon, since it can be rather helpful, despite being really simple.

Filed Under: A Duck's Life, The Great To-Do List, Web Dev & Design
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