Most Popular Side Projects:
Things I'm working on now:
Full(ish) list of side projects and pages I've made for fun and profit over the last 20+ years:
Side projects that never got off the ground:
Some of these domains are for sale if you are interested. Contact me.
Blog / Notes / Links
19 Jan 2023 - Last fall I started using the InvokeAI locally-hosted, stable diffusion artificial intelligence "creative engine" to generate images for real-world use. It's amazingly powerful and can run on my old M1 Mac mini. I've used the image-to-image feature to brainstorm ideas for a silly stand-in (a board with a cutout to stick your face through) for a children's Halloween festival. I'm now using it as a step in my workflow to make plotter drawings with my AxiDraw. The input images are pictures of LEGO. I've already started generating poster and flyer designs with it for next year's Halloween festival. https://github.com/invoke-ai/InvokeAI, https://www.degraeve.com/images/stable-diffusion-halloween-stand-in-head-cut-out.jpg, https://twitter.com/LandscapeArtBot/status/1610334152985038850
6 Apr 2022 - DALL·E 2 is an AI system that generates realistic images and art from a description in natural language. It's so good it makes me sick to my stomach. Why try to make a living as an illustrator or graphic designer when some ding dong can type in a few words and get something usable for their blog post / advertisement / book / article? Star Trek's holodeck is now a reality in 2 dimensions. https://openai.com/dall-e-2/
3 Mar 2022 - When SSHing into dev and production machines I usually set each terminal window to use a different background color to make it obvious which window is dev and which is production. I do this to minimize the likelihood of doing something stupid in production. I've recently been working on a system where dev and production are on the same machine(!) so I had to resort to changing the color of the prompt to make it obvious when I'm working in the production directory. Adding this little function in my .bashrc did the trick. https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-make-my-terminal-have-a-different-background-color-or-color-scheme-if-the-current-working-directory-is-inside-a-certain-directory-or-SSHd-into-a-certain-host
10 Jan 2022 - I'm in the middle of rewriting an algorithm to generate painterly images. This method of determining how "close" one color is to another came in handy. https://dev.to/tejeshreddy/color-difference-between-2-colours-using-python-182b, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_difference#CIEDE2000
19 Dec 2021 - 'Tis the season for old Christmas music. The Internet Archive hosts a number of old Kresge recordings that were played over department store PA systems. https://archive.org/search.php?query=Kresge+music+christmas
10 Dec 2021 - I recently needed to pull 200+ color hex codes from an image. This online color picker was faster than photoshop. Drag the image into the page, click the color, click the 'copy to clipboard' icon. Very fast. https://imagecolorpicker.com/
5 Nov 2021 - I have a number of little utility web pages for my day job. I differentiate them in my pinned browser tabs with brightly colored favicons. This tool makes it easy to drop the favicon into the markup of the page without having to upload an image anywhere by using base64 encoded image data. https://www.base64-image.de/
30 Oct 2021 - Artflow.ai is a service that uses AI to generate DND-style avatars / profile pictures from a text description. Update 12 Dec 2021, an account is now required to create avatars. https://artflow.ai/
30 Oct 2021 - Night Cafe is an impressive AI art generator that takes a text description as input. Adding the word "gouache" leads to more painting-like results. https://creator.nightcafe.studio/
20 Oct 2021 - Interesting. Is this performance the inspiration for the Lapti Nek number in Return of the Jedi? https://youtu.be/hd5ztTz1564?t=343, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV0LD-QAzg0
18 Oct 2021 - A couple of flyers I designed recently needed a QR code. This QR code generator is free and easy and doesn't create an intermediate tracking link. https://www.qrcode-monkey.com/
17 Oct 2021 - I was recently having flashbacks of learning how to program in my university's computer lab full of VT220s. This Amber Theme for VSCode reproduces the emotionless and matter-of-fact appearance of programming on a monochrome phosphor CRT. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=gerane.Theme-Amber
8 Oct 2021 - Generate Normal Maps from Height Maps. This is great if you need to automate the process of generating a normal map without the use of 3D software. I use it to generate normal maps based on the heightmaps generated for landscapes I create for twitter.com/landscapeartbot http://www.pythonstuff.org/glsl/normalmaps_from_heightmaps_2.html
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