How to create banners for your sports team

Many high-schools in our area create banners for their sports team to display in the gym during the season. Sometimes the photographer that does your official team photos will offer to make such banners, but that may cost $40 or more per player. Here is how to do it for about half the price and with more flexibility.

Varsity Banner Photos
Photos we took for the varsity volleyball team this year. Taken with Nikon D500 camera and 50mm f/1.4G lens at ISO 100, 1/250s shutter speed, f4. Used Yongnuo YN560 flash for fill-in light.

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Sphinx Search 0.7 for MediaWiki Released

After over a year of on-and-off tweaks and updates, I have finally released version 0.7 of SphinxSearch Extension for MediaWiki. There are several new options, support for latest version of sphinx, initial support for MW search API, and the extension now follows the usual MW conventions for localizations, autoload, etc.

Download PECL Extensions for Windows

UPDATE: I removed my previous content from here because someone copy-pasted it into StackOverflow. Google “thought” I stole it from there and “accused” me of hosting scrapped content… StackOverflow removed the offending content as soon as I reported it, but I did not want to risk Google comparing my site to some cached version they may have, and it was all outdated anyway.

The current state of affairs for downloading PECL extensions for Windows is still suprisingly bad. The only way I found (other than building your own) was to browse this list. Some of the extensions there will have zip files with compiled dll extensions. The substring “ts” in the name means “thread safe” and you can figure out “nts” on your own 🙂

A List Apart

This is a classic, of course, but I decided to post something about each site I link to. This is probably the first article I read on ALA site:

The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters)

And for the reference, some of the character codes from the article:

  • – (– en dash is used to indicate a range of just about anything, etc.)
  • — (— em dash is used to indicate a sudden break in thought, etc.)
  • ‘ (‘ opening single quote)
  • ’ (’ closing single quote or an apostrophe)
  • “ (“ opening double quote)
  • ” (” closing double quote)

The first version of this post had a silly statement about WordPress needing some tool to help with entering the proper codes for some of these special characters. Well, thanks to a comment from Matt, I know better now 🙂