Little Package Blog

A Code comment is not a Sentence
2022.02.20
WordPress Plugins
Full stop. Does anyone remember the guy who floated around Portland, Oregon in the 1990s with a salmon effigy on his head? The “Save the Salmon” guy? I do. I once had a conversation with him which started at the Lloyd Center MAX stop and carried on until he got off under the Burnside Bridge. That day his point was clear: if everyone stopped towing around the added weight of license plate frames, the cumulative savings in tailpipe gases would save salmon. His message was so simple it was elegant. He had chosen to tackle an enormous problem with a small, approachable solution. Assuming people have common hand tools and the desire to help fish and other living things (such as themselves), they would gladly take part. […]

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High Sierra Pack Tripper
2021.08.08
Hiking, Latergram
This summer I had the privilege of working with Reds Meadow as a backcountry cook, which meant occasionally bumping into a 12 year-old packer named Bo. I first met Bo in 2013 when hiking the PCT. He was eating candy outside the Reds public restrooms, looking cute. Bo spends each summer in the Sierra with his sweet family on extended National Forest permit at Reds, surrounded by pack animals and thousands of tourists and backpackers. What a life, and what a little man, charming as ever! We had some bumpy interactions at first where he would say strange, sorta bossy things like, “Hi we are your guides on this trip, best get crackin’ on dinner ok?” 🤣 I was puzzled, thinking, “What a little asshole!” They weren’t […]

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PNS sounds a lot like a “Pain in the Ass”
2021.05.27
Blog
I recently wrote about “What It’s Like to Live In a Dying Forest.” So — update from the forest! I’m still battling the tiny green beasties! They’re still unhatched but not for much longer. Soon they’ll turn into their crusty brown pinyon needle sap-sucking selves. Until then there’s a window to prolong some trees lives by destroying eggs. After they hatched the “solution” becomes to spray the trees with poisons. I’d rather not, but I’m ready for that too. Falling back on “safer” things like neem oil and mineral oil and diatomaceous earth. I’ve been spending a lot of time hunched under these wild trees, my hat brim pushed down into my eyes and my back getting bitten to bits by no-seeums. Lots of time to ponder […]

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What it’s like to live in a dying forest
2021.05.01
Blog
A few weeks ago my friend pointed to a tall thin piñon (pinyon) pine near the road and remarked, “hm, it’s dying.” Its needles had mostly all turned shades of gold; it was definitely dying. Poor little thing. It made a good go of it! Not satisfied with that cheap sentiment, the next day I returned to it to figure out why the pine was dying. On a closer look I could see many hundreds of what appeared to be chia seeds attached to the needles. A quick search of the Internet suggested we had “piñon scale,” which is a type of aphid. A quick look over the horizon suggested that the millions of acres of trees surrounding us also have piñon scale. Last year they seemed […]

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Nurse -> WFR
2021.04.17
Latergram, Nursing
I’ve been retired from nursing for 12 years now, so I’m a bit rusty with all this stuff. For some reason I thought my nursing background would help my Wilderness First Responder (WFR) course feel easy. But since the WFR works on totally different algorithms than licensed clinical medical care, it was pretty challenging. I had to set aside everything I knew and do it a different way. Of course my understanding of physiology and pathophysiology was a leg-up, but I really had to back out of my nursie head and enter a new headspace. Ultimately this course was geared toward training anyone who wanted to be helpful in the outdoors in a way they wouldn’t get sued and have to sell a kidney in the end. […]

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Creating your Own Watermarking Shortcodes for WooCommerce
2021.02.15
WordPress Plugins
You can add your own shortcodes to WaterWoo PDF Premium for on-the-fly customized watermarks. In this simple example we are going to create a shortcode to reflect a customer’s order total (price) in the watermark, when using a shortcode: [TOTAL_PRICE] function fetch_woo_order_data_as_shortcode( $input, $order_id, $product_id ) { // first we need to get the order object from the order id // you can get a lot of info from the order object ( $order in this case) $order = wc_get_order( $order_id ); // now let's get the order data from the order object $order_data = $order->get_data(); $order_total = $order_data['total']; // BINGO! // there is a ton of other data you can get from the WC order object data, check out // https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39401393/how-to-get-woocommerce-order-details // and substitute in what […]

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Baking Sourdough
2020.12.06
Latergram
Just like everyone else I’m baking bread during the pandemic! Except I’m doing it at 6300 feet and sometimes even off grid at 7500 feet 🤪 No trick to it, really. I’ve just been following Ken Forkish’s recipes and using the gear he recommends (except I don’t have a proofing oven). I have a nice dutch oven and some bannetons, and some big proofing buckets. This loaf has rosemary, which my mother harvested and dried, in it. It will be gone by tomorrow.

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Flu and The Trail, part 2
2020.10.18
Hayduke, Hiking, Nursing, Pacific Crest Trail
This post is an update to my March 16 post, Flu and the Trail. It turns out you can thru-hike during a pandemic, but if you’re not still asking yourself “should I?” and considering your impacts on other people, I hope you’ll keep reading and hear me out. After volunteering several months of my life over several years to help thru-hikers on the PCT, I left with a bad taste in my mouth. I met several burned out trail angels who felt similarly, and noticed quite a few hikers themselves abandoning the trail shaking their heads. Why? Because thru-hikers are generally privileged, and often self-involved and entitled. It’s not exactly “rewarding” work to help people who don’t really need help. Bear with me when I explain how […]

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The Curse is Lifted
2020.09.06
Hiking, Latergram
In 2013 I started an annual tradition of sleeping on top of the tallest mountain. I don’t know why, but year after year I went up. Pressure built to go up again the next year, and so on. These extended 14er summits were not easy for the obvious reasons, but almost every time it ended up being harder than hard because of surprises at the top. 2013: I had no idea what I was doing. It was very hard to get up that strange hill, especially since the notorious PCT clown Guino had dosed me with 200mg caffeine that morning (I’m caffeine-free). But it turned out to be bizarre and romantic, with a sunset and a sunrise akin to something you’d see on Star Trek. Kitten, King […]

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Escape to Yosemite
2020.07.28
Hiking
Yosemite now has a permit system which limits traffic somewhat*. We heard maybe we could get more of the Park to ourselves, and headed out on our first venture to a public place since February. We enjoyed a few slightly-more-serene days in the park. For me it still felt like a zoo, but maybe that’s because I’ve been living with 1-2 people surrounded by millions of acres of untouched forest for five months. We went for a hike, and the next day for a climb, and for about 48 hours almost forgot that it’s been a difficult year. I hadn’t seen Tuolumne from up high since 2013 (and I didn’t see much then because I was running from a lightning storm off Clouds Rest). These views floored […]

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Printing a barcode or QR Code on a PDF
2020.06.09
WordPress Plugins
Update May 2025: This blog post is no longer valid. PDF Ink has replaced WaterWoo and EDDiMark, and has an easier settings panel interface for adding barcodes more easily to PDF files. If you are or even if you are not using WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads but are still programming in PHP, it can be done using PDF Ink.   The WaterWoo PDF Premium and EDDiMark PDF plugins can add barcodes and QR codes to PDFs dynamically upon download request via WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads. This is because both WordPress plugins use TCPDF to write PDF content, and TCPDF allows for barcode creation. Though this blog post might also be helpful for someone just trying to figure out how to write a barcode with TCPDF […]

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A Juniper
2020.05.31
Latergram
Funny that the Bureau of Land Management feels like Piñon Juniper forests have taken over most the West, so they want to burn and poison plants and soil (and the living beings on them) over 223 million acres in the Great Basin over six western states to build fire breaks which are not scientifically proven to work. There’s an ulterior motive. Aside from “kowtowing” to cattle ranchers and stealthily turning ancient sagebrush seas into seas of cheat grass and other prickly invasives, the administrators of our public land feel like there are too many PJ forests. In fact the forests are smaller than they were 200 years ago before miners started cutting them down for cabins and railroad ties. But – less forests mean more grazing. I […]

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Custom Fonts with WooStamper (SetaStamper)
2020.03.21
WordPress Plugins
The SetaPDF library which PDF Stamper is built on allows quite a bit of font customization to be done. More on SetaPDF and font manipulations. For the meantime, a quick tutorial on how to get other fonts beyond the three packaged with the plugin (Times, Courier, and Helvetica). Start by finding a TrueType font (.ttf) file which suits your needs. Try to keep the file size small, subsetting if necessary so that your server isn’t bogged down managing a large font file while trying to manipulate your PDF. Upload the file to your wp-content/uploads directory, somewhere it won’t get overwritten. It makes sense to use the woostamper folder, so we’ve gone ahead and done that below. Arimo is a TrueType font which works for our purposes, so […]

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Adding Custom Fonts to EDDiStamper
2020.03.20
WordPress Plugins
All three new Stamper plugins (EDDiStamper, PDF Stamper, and Download Monitor Stamper) come with the three standard PDF fonts: Helvetica, Times New Roman, and Courier. Not much to get excited about, I know. Whereas EDDiMark and WaterWoo (plugins based on TCPDF, not SetaPDF-Stamper) have built-in font uploaders with more instant gratification, the integration with Seta is a bit more complicated, and so you’ll need to use a little code. Whether you add the code into a custom plugin, your child theme functions.php file, or by using the more plug-n-play Code Snippets plugin doesn’t matter. Before using the following example code, we have started by creating a “fonts” folder inside the wp-content/uploads/eddistamper/ folder. We put our Comic Sans (yes!) TTF file inside the fonts folder. You can see […]

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Flu and the Trail
2020.03.16
Hayduke, Hiking, Pacific Crest Trail
We’re now at least a couple months into the surreal shitshow called “COVID-19” (a coronavirus). I’ve spent the past week and a half-sequestered very remotely, not just because of the misanthropy I’ve felt more and more while scanning the news and social media, but to enjoy the wild, help build an off-grid house, and perhaps survive (and help others survive) the pandemic I’ve been warning friends about since I was a nurse in Portland in the oughties. This type of thing was bound to happen, and it’s too bad more people aren’t more prepared. (That said, not many of us have the resources to be prepared.) While cutting wood, plastering, and painting over the past week, various unrelated COVID-19 impacts have come to mind. Having gotten more […]

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