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Discoveries of the Month – December/2016

Greetings! The time for that post for the last day of the month. Also the last day of the year, hope you guys have a happy new year!

Web Development

CSS Grid: CSS Grid is going to become supported-by-default in Chrome and Firefox in March of 2017. Checkout the link for more information.

Tech

ShellCheck: Find bugs in your shell scripts.
mdless: A utility that provides a formatted and highlighted view of Markdown files in Terminal.
bropages: Similar to man pages, bro pages are concise examples of using command line programs.
commandlinefu: Command-line snippets repository with rating system.

Music

Wendy Carlos(Walter Carlos): Well known composer of A Clockwork Orange soundtrack. I never took time to listen to her albums. Switched-On Bach and The Well-Tempered Synthesizer are wonderful pieces, a must for classical music and analog synthesizer lovers.
Saturndust: Brazilian Space Doom band.
Isao Tomita: Inspired by Wendy Carlos and with similar work. Another Moog grinder for analog synthesizer lovers, his early works consist on covers of rock artists.

YouTube Channels:

Professor Leonard: This guy is doing for Math (Advanced) what Stephen Hawking did for Physics – Make it accessible to the average person.
Adam Neely: Bass lessons and deep music theory researches.
Grant Thompson: DIY, lifehacks, explosions and useless stuff. Expect anything, he honors his name “The King of Random”.

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Three survival tools for an inhospitable (production) environment

As a web developer, you may need to deal with your client’s production environment. Sometimes it’s not the easiest environment to work with, like in a shared hosting or a limited

I already worked with some clients that I wasn’t able to remote connect to the database. Others didn’t allow me to connect to a regular FTP service, all files had to be transferred one by one via a Web FTP.

Over the years I’ve put together some tools to help me with those situations.Other than small snippets and scripts, here are three of the tools that I must used in the last eight years.

Adminer (formerly phpMinAdmin)

Adminer is a single file database management tool written in PHP that can handle MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MS SQL, Oracle, Firebird, SimpleDB, Elasticsearch and MongoDB. Useful since most of the free database GUI tools doesn’t offer Tunneling connections.

MySQL BigDump

BigDump allows you to import massive and large MySQL dumps. It works well very limited servers.

phpFileManager

phpFileManager can help you when you don’t have FTP access to the hosting. It’s multi-uploader and compress/extract are very convenient.

Conclusion

I know that the use of such hostings are decreasingly over the years. But we, as developers, must be prepared to such sittuations. I hope my tips here can help you someway.

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Modifying my cheap guitar – Part II – The Appearance

Continuing to the first part, I will now tell about how I modified the look of my guitar. I considered doing swirl painting or buying a customized pickguard online, but none of those options got me excited.

The Pickguard

After some time thinking and incubating ideas I started the composition by picking trippy and psychedelic elements, being Alice in Wonderland a huge influence as well as the line “The rabbit is just a monkey in disguise” of the song Organ Grinder by Marilyn Manson.

Unfortunately, visual arts are not part of my skill set. I contacted a friend artist (Daniel de Carvalho) with the ideas and soon he started to present me some sketches. Some months and some drawings later he started to work on the pickguard.

He developed the art using acrylic paint and India ink. Check out more photos of the process and other works on his page, Daniel is a very experienced, talented and passionate professional.

Pickup Selector

While assembling the guitar pickguard with Daniel, we come up with the idea of a mushroom pickup selector. I really liked the concept and resolve to try it out.

I used a recipe of cold porcelain. To my surprise it’s a very cheap and easy to use material, I have some leftover and consider using it on other projects. I regret choosing nail polish for painting, it’s too thin and inconvenient to use.