After playing around a bit, I found that the same theme can work on both Windows 7 and Windows 8. 
 
Notes for Windows 8: New for Win8 is the ability to use a panoramic image-- Windows will span the image across multiple monitors. Really cool! Win8 themes also have the ability to automatically define a color scheme, based on the colors of the wallpaper, and apply the color scheme on the fly.
 
Notes for Windows 7: The theme works best if you have a single monitor, or the wallpaper image is the same size as all monitors. A panoramic wallpaper image will even work on Windows 7 when tilemode is turned on and the image is the same size as the primary display. (It appears to display on the first monitor starting at the upper left corner or the image, and display on the second monitor starting at the upper right corner of the image.)
 
Notes for Windows Vista: The same theme will even work on Windows Vista, with a few caveats.
  • The wallpaper images can't be PNG; export them to JPG and they will work.
  • Vista doesn't have a built-in way to change the wallpaper on a timer. If you want it to change the wallpaper, use a wallpaper changer (aka background switcher), such as http://johnsadventures.com/software/backgroundswitcher/ (this one even has a smooth fade transition).
 
Notes for Windows XP: I didn't try it, but I think XP theme files are totally different.
 
Normally, a theme is designed in the Windows 8 Personalization control panel. When you save it from there, it is packaged into a CAB file with a .deskthemepack extension. So you can rename it to .cab and extract the .theme file from it, for editing. In my case, I am installing parts of this theme to various subfolders of the Windows directory. This places the theme under the "Installed Themes" grouping within the Personalization control panel (i.e. the theme chooser window).
%SystemRoot%\Branding\<BrandLogo>.png (240X80)
%SystemRoot%\Web\Wallpaper\<ThemeName>\*.png
%SystemRoot%\Resources\Themes\<ThemeName>.theme
%ProgramData%\Microsoft\User Account Pictures\*.png (Vista: 128x128)
 
There are a few differences between a Windows Vista/7 and Windows 8 theme. I am just going to show the ones that apply to our task at hand. 
 
[Theme]
; ...snip....
; I'm not sure what this is used for, but commenting it out doesn't seem to do any harm
;ThemeId={74DCED71-1D8E-44CE-9422-4713809E000C}
 
[Control Panel\Desktop]
; ...snip....
; Windows 7
TileWallpaper=0
WallpaperStyle=10
; Windows 8
MultimonBackgrounds=0
PicturePosition=4
 
[VisualStyles]
; ...snip....
; Windows 8
AutoColorization=1
 
[MasterThemeSelector]
; Windows 7 (themes with this identifier still work on Windows 8)
MTSM=DABJDKT
; Windows 8 (themes with this idendifier do NOT work on Win7, so we'll comment it out
;MTSM=RJSPBS
 
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Selecting PHP command line version on HostGator shared host

This took me a while to find, so I'm saving it somewhere I can find it again.

The easy way to select the PHP version used for web applications is to use the CPanel configuration tool. However, that doesn't work if you're using SSH and need PHP on the command line. Also, on HostGator, you can't create a symlink outside of your directory (such as to the global php).

You can find out what version you have with

$ php --version

If that's not the version you want, try a specific version like this (php55 is 5.5, etc):

Book Scanning Process

 

Just to document this for next time. For reference, my books are 8 x 10.75 inches and other dimension below work for this. For approximately 100 pages, It takes me about 45 minutes to scan, an hour to crop and rotate, and 30 minutes to organize and generate the PDF.

Fixing features for hotfolder

Here is some documentation about the process I used to solve some issues with hotfolder and the features module. I was doing this partly through the web interface and partly through a console, so this is a reconstruction of what I remember and the console log. 

 

I was getting the following error message when I tried to check hotfolder watches (see https://www.drupal.org/node/2453659):

Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$field_watch_config_scheme

 

GIMP for Kids

 

My daughter likes to draw on the computer. I don't remember exactly how it started, but she draws in GIMP using my Genius pen tablet, on my secondary monitor. I used to have Linux running in a VirtualBox with GIMP running on my second monitor for her, but VB doesn't completely work in Windows 10 yet. A while back I tried running GIMP on one of my Raspberry Pi's but it was just too sluggish to be useful, frustratingly slow for a (then) 3-year-old. It runs much better on a Raspberry Pi 2. It still lags if she goes crazy with a big brush, but it works.

Die Fly: Designing a better fly swatter

I was looking through some of my old stuff for something and ran across this gem. If you need to put together a quick flyswatter, try this one I designed for a class in college (the famous Rube Goldberg project).

Here are a few excerpts from the attached PDF. If this doesn't convince you to build one (perhaps with several improvements as noted in the document), I don't know what will.