nail saloon parties: laseretched stamping plates, water marbling / hydrographic printing, toner transfer, and magnetic nail polish

nail saloon

I’ve been holding nail saloon parties at my place, the idea being it would be a place where people should feel welcome to ask questions about things they might feel awkward about normally, and also a chance for me to learn about other people’s experiences that I don’t know much of anything about.

Although it turned out to be mostly preaching to the choir, I’ve improved friendships through it, learned about other people’s lives, and also experimented with nail art with folks!

Here’s a few “pieces”. I drew this with the applicators that came on the bottle (and a toothpick, I think)

laser-etched stamping plates

I tried to make stamping plates (lasercut) — here’s how the professional ones look: https://youtu.be/HxIFgvfPC1c?t=1m29s — however, I think, because I was in a hurry, the etch depth was not deep enough

(and also, we were using test tube stoppers instead of soft round stamps that conform to your nail more).

newspaper toner transfer

One person successfully did newspaper transfer, but that was perhaps one successful one try out of ten…

Here’s the instructions, using rubbing alcohol.

And if you’re not having luck, just fake it with sharpie 🙂

ombre

aka, a color gradient. this is a simple technique, just take a cosmetic sponge, put two or three colors next to each other, and then dab away — tada, you have a gradient!

the middle finger is “ombre” here

magnetic nail polish

it works! turns out you need to get the magnet patterns.

the thumb and fourth finger have gold magnetic nail polish applied

Update 8/16/15: For those wondering about MRI compatibility — it so happens I had an MRI done recently with some magnetic nail polish still on my nails. It was totally fine (not even a slight pull), and they also have a nifty device that checks if you have metal things on you before you enter the MRI room.

stickers

these sadly only lasted maybe a few days, even with a topcoat applied on top of the stickers

tools

I hunted around for a local source of things like dotting tools (for making dots) and eventually found them right at Target!

the sticker “masks” above did not work too great, but the dotting tool was handy 🙂

testimonial

“I guess I never noticed how often I take off my socks in the presence of other people until now. An eye-opening find on it’s own! I think I shall paint them from now on. It’s like the personalization of a tattoo without the peril.” — K. S.

water marbling

This is just dropping different colors into a cup of water and dipping your nails in it. I did this successfully (you want solid colors usually, and some nail polishes do not work (just dissolve into the water)). Here’s a friend’s:

Inline image 1

Here’s the coolest water marbling of nails I’ve seen

Here’s the fun technical equivalent at SIGGRAPH

conclusion

Overall, quite a bit of fun 🙂

hack4fem: hack for feminism (conference & hackathon) logo

hack4femlogo hack4femlogoI made a logo for a new project I am starting up. It’s a mashup of a bunch of openclipart files, It combines the feminist logo (fist inside Venus sign) with STEM (wrench for mechanical engineering / hands-on, lightning for electrical engineering, then on the nails, a graph for mathematics, beaker for science, and “</>” for coding). The logo expresses my desire to combine my STEM skills with my feminist / activist passions. I refuse to choose between activism and advancing my technical prowess.

hack4femlogoHere is the SVG sourcehack4femlogo, which I release back into the public domain.

If you’re interested in helping organize the first hack4fem conference, email me! 🙂 It’s set for Nov. 7th & 8th (Sat. and Sun.), 2015, in Boston, MA.

Redmine Backlog Tweaks (via Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey): Highlight My Backlog

My coworkers wrote a script that, via a Chrome/Firefox plugin (Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey respectively), highlights the items on a Redmine backlog that belong to you and also puts in parenthesis at the top how many of the points on the sprint are yours.
Before:Screenshot from 2015-07-30 14:53:50After:Screenshot from 2015-07-30 14:53:27The scripts, written by Tom and Abra, can be found at https://arvados.org/projects/arvados/wiki/Highlight_my_backlog , and my version (combining the two and adding in a strong orange color + larger and different font) can be found as follows:

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Highlight my redmine backlog
// @namespace    https://arvados.org/projects/arvados/wiki/Highlight_my_backlog
// @version      0.1b
// @description  Highlights issues assigned to you in redmine Backlogs view and
//               puts in parens the total point count you have for each sprint.
// @author       Tom Clegg, Abram Connelly
// @match        https://arvados.org/rb/master_backlog/*
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

$.ajax('/my/account', {success: function(data, _, _) {
    var key = $('#api-access-key',data).text();
    var url = '/issues.json?assigned_to_id=me&limit=100';
    var ajaxopts = {
        dataType: 'json',
        headers: {'X-Redmine-API-Key': key},
        success: dopage
    };
    $.ajax(url, ajaxopts);
    function dopage(data, _, _) {

        var my_sprint_info = {};

        for (var i=0; i<data.issues.length; i++) {

            if ("fixed_version" in data.issues[i]) {
              var sprint_id = data.issues[i].fixed_version.id;
              var sprint_name = data.issues[i].fixed_version.name;
              if (!(sprint_id in my_sprint_info)) {
                  my_sprint_info[sprint_id]={"story_points" : 0, "sprint_id" : sprint_id, "sprint_name" : sprint_name };
              }
              if ("story_points" in data.issues[i]) {
                my_sprint_info[sprint_id].story_points += data.issues[i].story_points;
              }
            }

            $('#story_'+data.issues[i].id).css({
                'background':'#F49C54', //orange
                'font-family':'URW Bookman L, serif',
                'font-size':'1.2em',
            });
        }

        if (data.total_count > data.offset + data.limit) {
            $.ajax(url + '&offset=' + (data.offset + data.limit), ajaxopts);
        }

        for (var sprint_id in my_sprint_info) {
            var cur_pnt = $("#sprint_" + sprint_id).children(".fff-right").children(".velocity").text();
            cur_pnt += " (" + my_sprint_info[sprint_id].story_points +")";
            $("#sprint_" + sprint_id).children(".fff-right").children(".velocity").text(cur_pnt);
        }
    }
}});

Step-by-Step Greasemonkey Install

1. Install Greasemonkey: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/

2. Create a file with the contents above ending in “.user.js”

3. Double-click the file and Greasemonkey will install it

For more details, see http://www.orangenarwhals.com/2015/02/step-by-step-greasemonkey-script-to-remove-ui-elements-for-screenshots/ .

Step-by-Step Tampermonkey Install

1. Install Tampermonkey: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tampermonkey/dhdgffkkebhmkfjojejmpbldmpobfkfo?hl=en

2.  Go to the tampermonkey icon and click “Add a new script…”Screenshot from 2015-07-15 05:10:49

3. Copy-and-paste the code in and ctrl-s to save (or click the floppy disk)

Screenshot from 2015-07-15 05:11:31

If you want to edit the script, just go to Dashboard and click the script name to open up the editor.

Screenshot from 2015-07-15 05:11:11

Backstory

At work (Curoverse), we are all Arvados contributors (and open-source data and computation workflow management platform) and use the open-source Redmine to keep track of our open issues, tickets, and bugs.

We chose to use Redmine and merely mirror on Github, instead of using Github Issues, because Github itself is not open-source and we prefer to own our own data. In particular, since we operate in sprints, we use the backlog feature a lot. However, I’d been struggling to adopt Redmine, since it was impossible to use as a to-do list.

But my co-workers made a greasemonkey / tampermonkey browser plugin that highlights your tasks & how many points are assigned to you, which makes the whole system way more usable.

See the original link, https://arvados.org/projects/arvados/wiki/Highlight_my_backlog, for more details about the Redmine API and features you could add  to this script 🙂