Tutorials

If you are working on many sites on a localhost, you might want to assign “Fake Domains” to each of those sites. Or if you need to point to a site instead of the file path, this tutorial will help you.

First, you need to have Apache installed, this can be installed using software packages such as XAMPP.

Go to your Apache Configuration File, which is located under C:\xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf

This location will vary on where you installed XAMPP.

Inspect Element in Google Chrome, possibly known as Developer Tools is an amazing tool that lets you modify CSS and HTML on the fly, and see what it affects. Any web developer, or anyone interested on seeing how the front end of websites are coded should use this tool. Some features Developer Tools provide are CSS Editing, Network Activity Viewing, HTML Editing, Javascript Console, Website Audits and more.

With all of these tools, you won’t have to keep adding debugging code to find out why Javascript isn’t working, or keep messing with CSS to fix an issue, you have a visual view of what everything is doing.

Now with a few SketchUp tutorials out, we need to start getting to the more complex stuff, mechanical and hardware designs.

David from GeekThis is going to show you how to draw a spring in SketchUp. And with the skills shown in this video, you will be able to draw a various amount of springs. The one shown in this tutorial is a normal compression spring.

I would also like to note, if you are having trouble getting a perfect circle for your spring, make sure you don’t have many items in your sketch, because SketchUp will try to “lock” onto those other items. I suggest drawing springs in blank documents so you can easily draw the first arc the correct way.

David takes some pictures, and gets creative. He will teach you how to import pictures and use them as textures (paint bucket tool) in SketchUp. He also uses images he created in Photoshop.

You are no longer limited to using plain colors, and default textures. You can now create your own texture library that you can use with all of your future designs to make them stand out and be more realistic.

David is back with another tutorial for SketchUp 8, this time using an extension to help draw terrain. You will no longer be limited to drawing on flat land.

The Extension is called “Sandbox” and comes packaged with SketchUp by default, but is not enabled. Enabling it is simple, and explained in the video also.

There is so much you can do with the Sandbox tool, other than just drawing terrain. It can be used to model humans, oceans, faces, and much more.