281–290 of 422 posts
Learnt a bit about threejs, tonejs. Made using chatgpt in 5 evenings.
After 2 days I shared with friends, it didnt work on their device. Had to rewrite the graphics part correctly. I doesnt look as nice as the original one on my device. but now works on their device.
When I was first learning computer vision, I wrote a program that could tell the time from an image of a clock [1]. I had no purpose for it besides the fact that it seemed like a cool problem to try and solve. Years later, I get an email from a stranger in Korea, asking me how to run my program. Why would he want to use my silly program? Turns out you can adapt the code to read analog pressure gauges which is really…
I think most of the stuff I make falls into this category... My favourites are probably these two: - a tool I made called gif-to-ansi ( https://dom111.github.io/gif-to-ansi/ ) which converts an animated GIF to a stream of ANSI escapes in a shell script. I made this because I wanted to loop a GIF image in terminal when I mistyped a command to train me to do better typing. - a 26 "language" polyglot ( https://codegolf.…
> I made this because I wanted to loop a GIF image in terminal when I mistyped a command to train me to do better typing.
My coworker and I created a GUI application in IDL (similar to FORTRAN), that would allow the user to open up several images of various wavelengths and combine them into a cylindrical map of the planet, showing its entire surface at a given point in time. After working on this for several months and creating a functional, and actually useful program, we realize that there was a blank space in the toolbar and we had no button that needed to be there. So we put in a button with a cat GIF that literally did nothing. We planned on having it do something jokey, but ran out of time.
I will always remember demoing this to my mentor, basically the world expert on all things Jupiter, showing him what the program did, thus justifying why JPL had spent several thousand dollars to have me as a research fellow. The disappointment in his eyes when he saw that dumb, useless, cat button was priceless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems to me it would already be solved by Minesweepers rules, the clock should be stopped.
Also first click is never a mine (if there's one where you click it's moved to the top left corner).
Now that I think about it, the dev strategy of leaving the spot without a mine but moving one there, probably does not affect the probability that there will be a mine there during gameplay.
writing code for the bbc microbot has always been a fun challenge - you have to fit your code inside a toot (formerly a tweet) tho it does have some tricks to help you compress the tokens a bit. Sometimes you'd just use the basic geometrical figures available in bbc basic to put together a picture, like the man in this version of the Vertigo poster: https://bbcmic.ro/?t=7uzei or everything but the letters in this Two Tone label: https://bbcmic.ro/?t=6UNhz
... but even when that gets to need a bit of trickery to fit in enough geometry, like this one, "This is Fine" https://bbcmic.ro/?t=6XGKK it's not that interesting to just have a table of shapes. What I like to do is try to fit 2 or more less obvious ideas into the code as well as the drawing, so with the "This is Fine" piece it's the little bit of maths that makes the piecewise circular curves smooth, in the Vertigo poster it's producing the curve in the same way Saul Bass did (with a pendulum), or the multiple letter sizes and xor plotting in the Two Tone label.
The Dragon in the first link tho seems improbaly complex because there's not a lot of code and none of it is table-driven. The core idea is that repetition makes a good subject for compact code to generate art; the dragon may look complex but the scales repeat so the body is just many identical segments and both the head and body have axial symmetry. The snakelike body needed to be curvy, but if it curves too sharply the segments would be split on one side and crushed on the other. I'd done some code previously working on Dubins Paths (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubins_path) and realised that'd be a good fit - just use a single curvature and flip between curving left and right. I found a good set of random numbers to generate a body with that just by experimentation. The scales I knew the effect I was going for and tried both sine waves and circles in various combinations till I found one that looked scaly; then I just needed to repeat it.
The head proved difficult; I'd tried other things like the fractal I used for the wave in this Hokusai recreation https://bbcmic.ro/?t=aAh0m the "Christmas Tree" fractal used to make this Rudolf https://bbcmic.ro/?t=6TR6f and other things, but none were really working or took too much code. What I landed on was just using sin/cos to vary the radius around a circle, which made a spiky head shape, then wobblying the angle plotted at to make it less uniform. The nose and eyes were just selectively not plotting some pixels, and that accidentally created the glowing rays from the eyes and the wrinkles; serendipity is great.
https://www.thewoofbook.co.uk/
The quirkiest / most impractical aspect was responsive, same-width, stylised dog names.
Some dogs have short names (Pug), some long single-words (Dalmatian), some simply spitefully awkward (Cavalier King Charles Spaniel).
I wanted them all--and any future additions--to look similar, silly, and good.
https://www.thewoofbook.co.uk/testing/pageTitles
The final solution calculated relative weights for each letter then boshed the combined word weight in to a CSS variable. Some weights got (a variety of) word-break approaches and most names had primary and secondary styles with different weights. Took me weeks to work out the approach.
Pure stubborn idiocy; I’m deeply proud.
Completely useless
When I was first learning computer vision, I wrote a program that could tell the time from an image of a clock [1]. I had no purpose for it besides the fact that it seemed like a cool problem to try and solve. Years later, I get an email from a stranger in Korea, asking me how to run my program. Why would he want to use my silly program? Turns out you can adapt the code to read analog pressure gauges which is really…
This is very similar to when I used OpenCV to read the angle of a cardboard knob I pinned on the wall in my office to change the volume on Spotify!