Bounding forward with our tutorial, in this installment we're going to add the ability to tether the end of a Stretchy object to a local point within the target object. That way, if the object is scaled or rotated, the anchor point will move and rotate appropriately. While we're at it, we'll also add distance margins. Our stretchy classes are becoming more interesting and powerful, so we'll need to take some time out along the way to reorganize the code more smartly, both to appease the code gods and to satisfy the modular Unity paradigm.

A common problem in graphics is drawing a line from one point to another. In games and simulations we often need to do the same thing using a 3D object. In this article I'll walk through the code you need to stretch a GameObject in Unity3D along a single axis so that its ends remain tethered to two objects as they move around in 3D space. A demo project is included!

One of the annoying things about the XCode requirement for Unity3D's "Build for iOS" capability is that with each new version of XCode (and sometimes OS X) Unity loses its ability to command XCode to build and run the project. In this article I summarize two solutions: First, a simple patch to make the XCode plugin load. And a "Build for iOS" script that can create an iOS XCode project even when Unity and XCode are having the worst of days. The "Enable Bitcode" error is also covered.

All 3D printers require on-board code to translate textual commands (called GCODE) into movement and molten plastic. For this job, most RepRaps (and many commercial 3D printers) rely on Marlin, a compact, adaptable, and streamlined firmware. Marlin's flexibility comes from having a huge number of configurable options. In this article (and accompanying video) I'll be discussing the challenges of building a configurator to help wrangle Marlin's many options, and I'll be showing off some cool Javascript tricks in the process.

Drupal sites are great looking and perform well due to smart caching. But out of the box they still rely on reloading whole pages for site navigation. There are a few modules for applying AJAX to different elements, but none of them fully serve the needs of thinkyhead.com so I rolled my own solution. Here's the code we use to make our Drupal-style menus load their content into the content region, which should be adaptable to any site. In the future we'll look at building a module out of this code.

Making one Javascript to support many versions of Drupal can be a real chore. Each release of Drupal uses different versions of jQuery, for one thing. Drupal behaviors haven't changed much between D7 and D8, but D6 is different, and D5 doesn't even have them. How can writers of Javascript libraries deal with all this diversity? Here are some snippets to help build scripts that can support D5 through D8. Why Drupal 5? Why not?!

Tabbed windows make it a lot easier to manage multiple fullscreen terminal sessions, but it isn't always easy to remember which tab is which. Here's a little Perl script that will set your Terminal background to a random color. Add it to your .login or .profile to make OS X Terminal just a little better!

Now that I'm thinking more like a geek I might as well blog like one. So this is my test of "code" blocks. But not just any code block. An essential piece of Drupal that every Javascript library glue writer should adopt.

Sorry if www.thinkyhead.com has been a little unstable lately! I've been making updates to the site but my day job leaves me less time to stress-test my improvements. Parts of the site have been displaying the wrong page content, but it's fixed now! Read further for more timely announcements and a little personalized blogging for a change.

Bored, confused, caffeinated, and feeling the need to rock classically, I decided to pen a parody of "I Write the Songs" which voices the life history of the digital age through the vocal stylings of Barry Manilow. Read on and sing along!