Modern CSS Solutions for Old CSS Problems

Science Fiction Movie Lettering

Hacking the original xbox controller for fun and no profit

How Video Games Lie To You

It might come as a surprise to some of you, but your favorite games [...] use some pretty clever lies to invisibly balance their gameplay experience behind the scenes.

I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD!

Though actually I'm happy to see Daft Punk come up on my New Releases playlist this week.

Mo LaBorde is a reporter who has been collecting safety cards for almost ten years, and one day she started wondering how the modern safety card came about.

Four-Byte Burger

What Color is Player 1?

DOOM maps to SVG to laser cutter

Sega 3-D Glasses: How did they work?

That's pretty cool!

Normally, submitting an app to app stores requires a lot of work, including writing code in languages web developers may not necessarily be familiar with, creating app icons, configuring various settings, and testing the app across different devices and operating systems. PWABuilder takes care of many of these tasks automatically, reducing the amount of time and effort required to publish apps.

Espresso and open source hardware?

Making an espresso machine from (almost) scratch.

The majority of internet users aren't developers, so outputting the HTTP error code and its name (503 Service Unavailable) isn't good enough.

System font stack CSS organized by typeface classification for every modern OS

WebGL2 from the ground up. No magic.

This is a really impressive feat, and the ultimate asymmetrical VR experience!

The process of making a multiplayer-cross-platform video game that has parts that run on everything from a tiny microcontroller to a high end VR setup

This is how the cover art of Defender of the Crown (1986) was made

I've posted a short blog post about shutting down Dingoonity.org after 14 years https://blog.omgmog.net/post/saying-goodbye-to-dingoonity/

I've jumped on the ChatGPT bandwagon lately. Using Open AIs implementation. I can see how conversational interfaces are going to revolutionize the way we use search.

Take my example from today - I wanted to batch convert a directory of PDF files to PNG:

Me:

How can I easily convert a directory of pdf files to png

AI:

You can use an open-source command-line tool called "ImageMagick" to easily convert a directory of PDF files to PNG images. Here's how to do it:

Install ImageMagick: You can download ImageMagick from their official website and install it on your computer.

Open a command prompt or terminal: Navigate to the directory where your PDF files are located.

Run the following command: magick mogrify -format png *.pdf

This command will convert all the PDF files in the current directory to PNG format. The converted PNG files will have the same name as the original PDF files, but with the .png extension.

If you want to convert the PDF files to a different image format, such as JPEG, you can simply replace "png" in the command with "jpg" or the desired image format.

Note that ImageMagick can also be used to convert individual PDF files to PNG images by using the "convert" command. Here's an example:

magick convert example.pdf example.png

This will convert the file "example.pdf" to a PNG image called "example.png".

Me:

how would I set the output resolution?

AI:

To set the output resolution for the converted PNG files, you can add the -density option to the ImageMagick command. The -density option specifies the number of pixels per inch (PPI) for the output image. Here's how to set the output resolution to 300 PPI:

magick mogrify -density 300 -format png *.pdf

This command will convert all the PDF files in the current directory to PNG images with a resolution of 300 PPI. You can adjust the resolution to a different value by changing the number after the -density option.

Note that the output image size will depend on the original PDF file's dimensions and the resolution you set. If the PDF file is large, the output PNG file may also be large in size. You can also use the -resize option to resize the output image to a specific size after converting it.

Me:

How would I make the transparent areas of the converted images be white?

AI:

To make the transparent areas of the converted images be white, you can use the -background and -alpha options in the ImageMagick command. Here's an example command that sets the transparent areas to white:

magick mogrify -background white -alpha background -flatten -density 300 -format png *.pdf

This command does the following:

-background white: sets the background color of the image to white. -alpha background: tells ImageMagick to treat transparent areas as background. -flatten: merges the alpha channel with the background color to create a fully opaque image. -density 300: sets the resolution of the output image to 300 PPI. -format png: sets the output format to PNG. *.pdf: specifies the input PDF files to convert. This command will convert all PDF files in the current directory to PNG images with transparent areas set to white. The output images will have a resolution of 300 PPI and will be saved as PNG files.

Visual design rules you can safely follow every time

I finally got around to publishing a blog post about the movies I watched in 2022.

Open UI: The missing industry standard definition of UI

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games