So we’re going as Han Solo and Princess Leia. I have a costume on order, but since it comes with a holster (a badass one), I needed a blaster. Instead of paying through the nose for a replica (on eBay, no less), I figured I could make this toy a little more authentic. (It looked like this when I got it.) The results:

I think it turned out pretty well. I used the replica as a guide, and the only part I’m not really happy with is the grip. I need to darken the brown, which I may be able to do by wearing away at the brown paint (there’s black underneath). If that doesn’t work, I’ll get darker brown spray paint and use the leftover black to try to give it a bit of a gradient.

Here’s a hint. Make sure you do the “hover” bonus joke.

Now let’s see if I can keep myself from PubMedding my name all day.

Well, okay, it’ll look better when I go through and add tags to all my old posts.

I was trying to type my previous entry, about getting Fotobook working, especially the second bit about getting the update script running automatically through my crontab. The problem was… I couldn’t type wget!

It’s kind of an important part of the crontab line; that’s the command that has Unix load the given page. But for some reason, every time the word wget was in the post, I got an error when I tried to publish my edits. I’m guessing that Wordpress tries to execute wget when it finds it (for reasons unknown; a bug?). So I spent longer than I care to recount trying to figure out how to disguise wget in my code, but have it appear normally on the entry so it could be copy-pasted into Terminal.

The first solution I looked for was an HTML tag like to make it not interpreted, and just presented literally. Didn’t work. And my search for a better tag was fruitless, though CDATA looked good for a while. (Guess it doesn’t interpret in XML.)

Then I tried inserting things inside wget. Putting a “|” in the middle obviously worked, but it’s ugly, and I’d have to explain it. So I looked for some latin-1 character that would be invisible.  was close, but for some reason, when it copy-pasted into Terminal, it eliminated the “g“. A 0×0 .gif image would’ve worked, but my stylesheet gives every image padding plus a border, so it looked like a white box in the middle.

Then the lightbulb— any HTML tag that wouldn’t get rendered into something visible would work. I tried <>. That showed up as <> (weird). </> was invisible, but when I went back to edit, WP had gotten rid of it as obviously useless. So then I just used bold tags.

wg<b></b>et worked. Hurrah.

Kludgy, but it works. If you have a better, more elegant solution, I would love to hear it.

Also, Randall Munroe owes every introvert male in the world royalties for today’s comic.