Things I'm working on now:
Most Popular Side Projects From Years Past:
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
13 Sep 2023 - L'Impératrice — Anomalie bleue
28 Aug 2023 - There have been a few times this summer when I've needed supplemental electrolytes. Here's the recipe for making an electrolyte drink at home (DIY Gatorade): In a large drinking cup: 4 cups room temp water + 2 teaspoons of honey + 1/4 cup lemon juice + a few grinds of pink Himalayan salt. Don't worry about measuring exactly. It tastes just like Gatorade.
5 Aug 2023 - I had no idea that the Newton's Apple theme song was by Kraftwerk
1 Aug 2023 - This is old news, but holy smokes: watch turntablist Destruction mix and cut and scratch
1 Aug 2023 - Maki Ueda (マキ上田) - Aitsu Wa Invader (あいつはインベーダー) - A catchy 1979 song about having a space invader boyfriend and riding UFOs, backed by video game music sound effects
31 Jul 2023 - A basic Maze Generator was added today. This is another tool I wrote for the free puzzle newsletter that failed to gain traction. It supports taking a black and white image as input to create the shape of the maze.
24 Jul 2023 - I put some puzzle generators online today: Word Search Generator, Sudoku Generator (easy), Sudoku Generator (difficult). A few years ago I started a free weekly puzzle newsletter for teachers. Each issue contained a printable PDF of puzzles, word search, sudoku, mazes, quick facts, and a coloring page all centered around a weekly theme. The idea was to build up a subscriber base and advertise my own projects in the footer of the weekly emails. The newsletter failed to gain traction so I'm making the internal tools I built to generate the newsletters available for anyone to use.
24 Jul 2023 - Toshiko Yonekawa, Kiyoshi Yamaya – Tapestry Koto & The Occident Sea (1976)
5 Jul 2023 - '90s UK Jazzy Trip-hop with Nina Yamada
4 Jul 2023 - We really used to know how to do it. We used to really know how to do it. We used to know how to really do it. Boston Pops 4th of July 1985, John Williams
4 Jul 2023 - Steve Cobby - Saddlebags
27 Jun 2023 - Project 2000 - Parallax
19 Jun 2023 - Home - Climbing Out
13 Jun 2023 - Ryo Fukui - Scenery 1976
13 Jun 2023 - Phương Tâm: Magical Nights - Saigon Surf Twist & Soul (1964-1966)
9 Jun 2023 - Heure d'Or - Steve Cobby
6 Jun 2023 - YĪN YĪN - Dis kô Dis kô
5 Jun 2023 - Speaker Sweat - All Good Funk Alliance
4 Jun 2023 - Summer 1989 - Noizz Factor
3 Jun 2023 - I'm The President - KNOWER
3 Jun 2023 - Jazz Brothers - Metti una Sera a Cena (Jazz Brothers mix)
3 Jun 2023 - Os Diagonais - Não Vou Chorar (1971)
25 Apr 2023 - Masayoshi Takanaka - Star Wars Samba (1978)
25 Apr 2023 - I back up my iphone photos on my computer by exporting them using Image Capture. This stopped working recently after the number of photos on my iphone exceeded 100,000. I tried airdropping the photos and that frequently failed. What ended up working: Set my Mac up as a server. Use the "Files" app on the iphone to connect to a shared folder on the Mac. Select photos in ios Photos app and choose "save to files". Finally browse to the shared folder in the Files app and select "Save". It's way more complicated but it works and maintains the file type (HEIC) and more importantly, the created date and time.
3 Apr 2023 - Masayoshi Takanaka - Brasilian Skies (1978)
3 Apr 2023 - わたしの広告 - Junko Sakurada (1976)
3 Apr 2023 - 佐藤博 (Hiroshi Satō) - ドンカマ (Donkama) (1979)
24 Feb 2023 - I keep coming back to these very physical musical performances. "Rough and Ready" Joe Rinaudo at the American Fotoplayer, Flight of the Bumblebee - Jenö Lisztes & Roby Lakatos ensemble, 林英哲 ／ 海の豊饒（和太鼓アンサンブル）Eitetsu Hayashi // Fertility of the Sea (Taiko), 林 英哲／洗足田楽絵図, BBC Proms 2017 Hiromi Uehara I Got Rhythm
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.
18 May 2022 - Oriental Funk - จิงโจ้
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.
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.
10 Jan 2022 - I'm in the middle of rewriting an algorithm to generate painterly images. This method of of determining how "close" one color is to another came in handy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
20 Oct 2021 - Interesting. Is this performance the inspiration for the Lapti Nek number in Return of the Jedi?
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.
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.
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