Happy Birthday to That Hobo Who Works in Our Backyard Playhouse

There is a bit of a running family joke that there is a hobo squatting in our daughter's playhouse. I have been using the playhouse as a work space lately in the afternoons when the sun is out. It is nice and quiet there, without any of the distractions that are typical within a 5-person home. Today was my birthday, so unbeknownst to me, Kelly went out in the morning to decorate it before my afternoon work session:

Much of this past week has been spent re-writing the graphics code for the new version of the desktop BoatCaptain software. I eventually figured out the methodology required for creating graphics in the application's map that will also show up the same way in a version of the map stored on the web. Saving simple symbols was fairly straightforward, but getting custom image icons (using the "PictureMarkerSymbol" .Net ArcGIS class) to save properly in the version stored on the web took me hours to figure out. It turns out that you need to explicitly define the dimensions of the PictureMarkerSymbol, otherwise it won't display at all on the web.

For example:

    
      PictureMarkerSymbol crossMarker = new PictureMarkerSymbol(new Uri(sImagePath));
      crossMarker.Height = 20;
      crossMarker.Width = 20;
      

Kelly happened to notice a Facebook post about a boy that had 3D-printed a number of "ear guards" that help to ease some of the pressure on the ears of hospital workers wearing masks with elastic straps that hook behind the ears. The model of the part can be found here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4249113. She wondered if I could make any on my printer, and I wasn't sure; I usually have trouble printing things with small details over a large surface area. After a bunch of tweaks and a few failed prints I was able to find some settings I had never tried before that worked really well. I made 3, which she gave to a nurse she knows, so we'll see if they're actually useful or not. The new 3D printing configuration also worked really well for this pH probe holder that I just made today: