Station in the Metro

Django MultiRangeField and MultiRangeFormField

Jun 1, 2014 geek, howto
I’m building a website, and needed a way to save a list of pages and page ranges from a book or magazine. I wanted to to be a little more strict than just saving it as a string without any cleanup or validation, so I wrote a custom Django model field (and accompanying form field).

It either just validates and cleans so that
```
4-33, 43, 45, 60-65, 44, 59
```
becomes the tidy
```
4-33, 43-45, 59-65
```
…or, if you comment out the raising of the ValidationError in the form field’s validate() method, it will actually clean up any junk characters for you, so even this horrible mess:
```
;4-33, 46a fads i44 ,p45o
```
gets cleaned to
```
4-33, 44-46
```
Enjoy!
3D Printer Re-calibration

Feb 22, 2014 geek

It’s been six months since we moved to Seattle, so I thought it was finally time to get my 3D printer out of mothballs. Well, at least that giant box full of Styrofoam peanuts.

I hadn’t left it in a great state the last time I used it. ABS plastic had gotten stuck in the […]
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Renaissance 2014 — How to App Video

Jan 31, 2014 editing, geek, howto

These are the “show notes” from my half of the Master Video talk at Renaissance 2014, on January 21, 2014 at 10:30 am.
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2014 SF Tiki Crawl

Jan 24, 2014 ramblings

This coming Tuesday, 2014-01-28, is the Bobtiki Crawl!

If you’re native to San Francisco, or just in town for Renaissance 2014 (like I am), I’d love to have you along. The generous and lovely Jen Tiki (part of the Tiki Oasis crew) will be leading us on a journey from the Tonga Room to […]
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Vertical Horizon

Jan 22, 2014 editing, rants

Ever since the iPhone first started shooting video, people have decried the use of the vertical orientation. Why would you do that? It looks so horrible! It’s unnatural! Hang on a moment while I pass judgement on you.

Stop it.

Let’s take a look at the history of film aspect ratios for a moment. […]
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FeedPress Subscribers for Panic Status Board

Jan 19, 2014 geek, howto

Since the launch of my new podcast, I’ve been trying to keep track of stats on podcast downloads and subscribers. FeedPress has been my feed tracker of choice recently, and seems to work very smoothly (even if they only update stats once a day).

I’m also a big fan of Panic’s Status Board iPad […]
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The Optical

Jan 10, 2014 flicks, linkage

I find it hard to believe than anyone who follows me here doesn’t also follow me on Twitter or Facebook or somesuch, so you’ve probably already heard way too much about this, but just in case…

I’ve been blogging at a Tumblr site called The Optical for the last three months or so, posting cool movie-related items every day: mostly behind-the-scenes stuff, but also videos, photos, art, and links to interesting movie articles.

Just a couple of days ago, I launched The Optical podcast, which has been 9 months in the making. In the monthly podcast, we’re revisiting the very first issues of Cinefex magazine, talking about the movies and topics they covered 30+ years ago, one issue per episode. We talk to people involved in the films, people who make movies, and people who love movies, and try to have a fun time doing it.

In our premiere episode, we talk about Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Alien with my good friends AAl and Matt from the Post Atomic Horror podcast, chat with Daren Dochterman, VFX Supervisor on Star Trek: The Motion Picture — Director’s Edition, I admit my 2001 shame, and we ask: just what is an “optical,” anyway?

If revisiting old effects movies from the ’80s sounds like a cool idea to you, I hope that you’ll join us on the journey and give the podcast a listen.

Mark Boszko

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