Max Glenister

Fiddling around with a convoluted method of setting up macro keys on Mac OS. I'm using the old faithful Pimoroni RGB Keypad with a Pico, some basic CircuitPython keyboard stuff, and these two nifty apps:

switchaudio-osx: CLI utility to switch audio source https://github.com/deweller/switchaudio-osx icanhazshortcut: shortcut manager to bind any keyboard combo to any command https://github.com/deseven/icanhazshortcut

Anyway it's working nicely for me right now! So far I've got headphone/speaker output toggles and volume control sorted. Just 12 more keys to assign 🤔

A good explainer and diagrams of how UTF-8 works with emoji

https://sethmlarson.dev/utf-8

History, data and alcohol. Super interesting!

When did people stop being drunk all the time?

https://lefineder.substack.com/p/when-did-people-stop-being-drunk

AI-Generated South Park Episodes

In this work we present our approach to generating high-quality episodic content for IP's (Intellectual Property) using large language models (LLMs), custom state-of-the art diffusion models and our multi-agent simulation for contextualization, story progression and behavioral control.

https://fablestudio.github.io/showrunner-agents/ https://vimeo.com/830748401

This is a really nice interactive tool for learning how SVG paths are drawn

Understanding SVG Paths

If you've ever looked at the SVG code for an icon before, you might have noticed that they're usually made up of a bunch of path elements, each with a cryptic d attribute.

https://www.nan.fyi/svg-paths

Analyzing PACIFIC STATE

https://youtu.be/qJ4eDTrNFtc

🧠 Cognitive Load Developer's Handbook

https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load

👏🎉

Raspberry Pi Pico W now has Bluetooth support.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/new-functionality-bluetooth-for-pico-w/

https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-sdk/releases/tag/1.5.1

🙌

Let’s look at 5 new CSS things that really matter to real-world development.

https://chriscoyier.net/2023/06/06/modern-css-in-real-life/

🧸 Tiny is a lightweight 2D game engine that allows developers to easily create games using the Lua programming language.

https://minigdx.github.io/tiny/

Modding Age of Empires II with a Sprite-Diffuser

https://www.engine.study/blog/modding-age-of-empires-ii-with-a-sprite-diffuser/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PawTU9Dip2Q

A great summary/recap of Breath of the Wild.

Should have my copy of Tears of the Kingdom before the end of the day. That's my weekend plans sorted!

Modern CSS Solutions for Old CSS Problems

https://moderncss.dev

Science Fiction Movie Lettering

https://reaganray.com/2020/05/12/sci-fi-movie-lettering.html

Hacking the original xbox controller for fun and no profit

https://wheybags.com/blog/xbox.html

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl2u72LzurU

I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD!

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiZfLvLU5Jc

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.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/in-the-unlikely-event/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIhXQzy1HQM

Four-Byte Burger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4

What Color is Player 1?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ4GX974KWo

DOOM maps to SVG to laser cutter

https://theor.xyz/doom-maps-laser-cut/

Sega 3-D Glasses: How did they work?

https://nicole.express/2023/the-third-dimension-and-the-eight-bits.html

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.

https://www.pwabuilder.com

https://web.dev/pwas-in-app-stores/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnJtvMvN2fw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q

Espresso and open source hardware?

Making an espresso machine from (almost) scratch.

https://sohl.substack.com/p/espresso-and-open-source-hardware

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

https://onlineornot.com/write-better-error-messages

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

https://modernfontstacks.com

WebGL2 from the ground up. No magic.

https://webgl2fundamentals.org

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnZac6lA1_k

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

https://spelpappan.se/2013/08/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

https://anthonyhobday.com/sideprojects/saferules/

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

https://blog.omgmog.net/post/the-movies-i-watched-in-2022/

Open UI: The missing industry standard definition of UI

https://open-ui.org

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d

The Mystery of the Dune Font

Putting a name to the typeface that defined the visual identity of the science fiction series and its author, Frank Herbert

https://fontsinuse.com/uses/43515/the-mystery-of-the-dune-font

This seems like a useful tool. Lots of information that is usually a pain to compare!

Carsized: Compare car design and dimensions in a Virtual Showroom

https://www.carsized.com/en/

I spent some time this evening fiddling with the UX of VR website. Pruned some dead links, de-Twittered the site, and added some multi-column goodness for wider screens.

I really wish I had the time/energy to add more content these days, but alas.

Anyway, check it out here: https://www.uxofvr.com

💯

Create better designed games with these comprehensive guidelines that feature classic design principles combined with modern accessibility standards.

https://accessiblegamedesign.com

This really does seem handy!

Shopify/handy: The eastiest way to mocap your hands! We developed this tool in order to streamline the process of capturing hand movements from Meta Quest headsets and bringing them into Blender for use in animations.

https://github.com/Shopify/handy https://diegomacario.github.io/Hands-In-The-Web/public/index.html

Remaking Old Computer Graphics With AI Image Generation Can AI Image generation tools make re-imagined, higher-resolution versions of old video game graphics?

https://jalammar.github.io/ai-image-generation-tools/

How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2023/01/01/state-of-the-windows-how-many-layers-of-ui-inconsistencies...

When to hold ’em and when to fold ’em: Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended

https://posts.decontextualize.com/pocket-sp/

Over 16,000 people still using their Pebble watches! I still go back to my Pebble Time from time to time 🥁

https://rebble.io/2022/11/02/rebble-hackathon.html

Some great points! 👍👍

Why is VR more restrictive than my 27” monitor? Doesn’t that defeat the entire point?

Being able to manipulate and configure the environment in a way that is comfortable and bespoke to a user is probably the best end goal. Once we've gotten over the novelty of the new interaction paradigms, maybe this will become the norm.

We should be looking to VR headsets as an alternative to standard displays. The default for an experience should not be a full body workout.

One of the most limiting factors for me as a healthy type-1 diabetic is having a blood sugar crash after 30 minutes of using my full body as a controller in a game.

https://www.owlbynight.com/blog/missing-the-point-of-vr/

Monocraft A programming font based on the typeface used in Minecraft

https://github.com/IdreesInc/Monocraft

DOOM as you didn't realise you needed it!

Voxel DOOM: A mod that replaces 2d characters and props from Doom with fully 3d voxel-based models.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/doom-voxel-project

These are all amazing game UI/UX resources.

The best collection of the most beautiful, exceptional and inspiring video game interfaces and screenshots.

https://videogameinterfaces.com

Explore a collection of video games interfaces, screenshots, and clips. Take a look at all the fragments that make up a video game, and find inspiration for your designs.

https://interfaceingame.com

The Game UI Database was created as a free resource for UI/UX Designers in the games industry. It was built to aid in the discovery of new inspiration, and to provide a fast and efficient way of searching for reference materials.

https://www.gameuidatabase.com

Following on from the essential games user reading list; this post is an introduction to some of the fantastic video resources available online. Ranging from 101 introductions to in-depth guides, ‘day in the life’ and more – video resources are a useful for learning about UX and games user research (GUR) alongside books, articles, and classes.

https://gamesuserresearch.com/2022/02/01/essential-videos-and-talks-for-new-games-user-researchers/

Open Source Game Clones

Open-source or source-available remakes of great old games in one place

https://osgameclones.com

Making a Video of a Single Window

#ffmpeg #x11

https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2022/making_a_video_of_a_single_window.html

PHONK is a coding playground for new and old Android devices.

Create scripts rapidly from your phone or using the remote Web Editor on your computer using Javascript. The API is simple and extensive. GUI, audio, graphics, Bluetooth BLE, Arduino, OSC, MIDI, and much more.

https://phonk.app https://github.com/victordiaz/PHONK

Cramming 'Papers, Please' Onto Phones

https://dukope.com/devlogs/papers-please/mobile/

Peter Howell of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop demonstrates how he reimagined Ron Grainer's classic Doctor Who theme [using] modern polyphonic analogue synthesisers like the Yamaha CS-80, an ARP Odyssey Mk3 and a Roland Jupiter-4, a vocoder and an old, malfunctioning phase shifter unit he found in the back of the Workshop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZuf0LIU-2A

So, here’s a bit of a mystery: Why does TeamViewer – the popular remote desktop program – install a font it doesn’t use on your computer?

https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/teamviewer-font-privacy.html

Where Browsers Come From The economics around browsers, and what we should think about as we move forward.

https://bkardell.com/blog/WhereBrowsersComeFrom.html

One of many default browser styles that I always change!

All browsers add an 8px margin on the body element – it’s part of the w3c-recommended default stylesheet which browsers generally use as a starting point for their own ‘user agent’ styles. But why 8px? Where does that come from?

https://www.miriamsuzanne.com/2022/07/04/body-margin-8px/

Nifty.

MacintoshPi is a small project that allows running full-screen versions of Apple's Mac OS 7, Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 with sound, active Internet connection and modem emulation under Raspberry Pi.

https://github.com/jaromaz/MacintoshPi https://jm.iq.pl/macintoshpi-mac-os-7-8-and-9-for-raspberry-pi/

Defensive CSS Practical CSS and design tips that helps in building future-proof user interfaces.

https://defensivecss.dev

A small tool (rsspls) to generate RSS feeds from web pages that lack them. It runs on BSD, Linux, macOS, and more.

https://github.com/wezm/rsspls

🙈 I do not need more tech. I do not need more tech!

Pocket Reform is a 7 inch mini laptop from MNT Research. We condensed the best features of MNT Reform into a smaller, lighter, and more affordable device while adding some new exciting details.

https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2022-06-20-introducing-mnt-pocket-reform.html

What would a Chromium-only Web look like?

https://www.mnot.net/blog/2022/06/22/chromium-only

Computing in Crip Time

https://logicmag.io/clouds/computing-in-crip-time/

🥳 though I can't help feeling uncomfortable by how smooth Clarus is.

Did you know that with macOS Ventura, Clarus the Dogcow has at long last returned home?

https://shadowfacts.net/2022/clarus/

Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened To Game Design?)

https://blog.kylekukshtel.com/game-design-mimetics

For my own reference, to find/replace the linked mastodon post for a post on Known in MySQL:

update entities set contents = replace(contents, 'old-post-id', 'new-post-id');

I might want to add the mastodon link to the post edit UI to be a bit more robust...

Love the pixel art on this. The technical side of things is super interesting too!

https://atrailtale.com

Discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31701026

New episodes of Airquotes the Podcast Airquotes from the May 2022 #RemoteHack are up!

https://remotehack.space/live/

Hamburger Footer: Reaching the Bottom of Infinite Scroll https://prototypr.io/post/hamburger-footers-in-headers-infinite-scroll-techniques

10 Surprising Things You Didn't Know About HTTP https://webdevguild.com/blog/10-things-http/

More than you ever wanted to know about font loading on the web https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/high-performance-web-font-loading/

How classic Sierra game graphics worked (and an attempt to upscale them) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sclZDCjUVvI https://github.com/eviltrout/agi-upscale

That little Sega CD add-on is the cutest thing ever.

https://sega.jp/mdmini2/mdtowermini2.html https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/06/adorable-japan-only-sega-mega-drive-mini-2-faithfully-recreat...

I love everything about this. 😍

Electronic Catan LCD Tiles: A collection of hexagon tiles that magnetically snap together to create a Settlers of Catan board of any shape or size. Each tile features a large round LCD and a custom magnetic pogo connector on each edge. Linking up a bunch of tiles creates a position-aware partial mesh network.

https://coliniuliano.ca/projects/catan-tiles/

I make web stuff all day every day. This is refreshing! 👏

Intro to the Web Revival #1: What is the Web Revival? https://thoughts.melonking.net/guides/introduction-to-the-web-revival-1-what-is-the-web-revival

📅 Tomorrow it's #RemoteHack from 9:30 AM BST

🫂 Join in from wherever you are! 👉http://remotehack.space

📢 There might be new periodic Airquotes The Podcast Airquotes recordings: https://remotehack.space/live/

📣 A new blog post: Using a Raspberry Pi to Host a local Visual Studio Code Server

https://blog.omgmog.net/post/raspberry-pi-local-dev-vscode-remote/

The forgotten benefits of “low tech” user interfaces https://uxdesign.cc/the-forgotten-benefits-of-low-tech-user-interfaces-57fdbb6ac83

Man, 90s appliance UIs were a ride!

About the Dual MN 8010, the remarkable retro stereo set you've never heard of, that has a GUI (Graphical User Interface).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckiZf9X8GrY

The Nightmare Of Getting DOOM Running On A Serious Business Machine ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzhCGSE7KKw

"Using alt text properly" (2013) https://www.a11yproject.com/posts/alt-text/

"When should alt text be blank?" (2012) https://osric.com/chris/accidental-developer/2012/01/when-should-alt-text-be-blank/

Well this DALL-E 2 is insane! Going to have to be even more critical/sceptical when consuming content...

"My deepfake DALL-E 2 vacation photos passed the Turing Test"

https://www.mattbell.us/my-fake-dall-e-2-vacation-photos-passed-the-turing-test/

This is a great build log for converting a garage to a habitable workshop space.

Feeling bad that I've not done anything close to this with my garage yet!

https://michd.me/blog/diy-garage-to-workshop-conversion/

Portal64: A demake of portal for the Nintendo 64

https://github.com/lambertjamesd/portal64

These are some great a11y tips, and great explanations/examples too!

https://hidde.blog/common-a11y-issues/ https://hidde.blog/more-common-a11y-issues/

See also: https://www.a11yproject.com/checklist/

Tomb Raider Reflection Effect: How it works

https://www.tombraiderforums.com/showthread.php?t=226585

I've been using a couple of these tools for a while now with Windows 10. Great to see such a detailed overview of the whole suite!

PowerToys - 11 awesome features Microsoft won’t add to Windows: https://www.fourth-wall.co.uk/post/powertoys-11-awesome-features-microsoft-won-t-add-to-windows

"Building like it's 1984: Scrollbars in web applications" https://height.app/blog/scrollbars-in-web-applications

Great use of CSS variables to set inheritable aspect ratio styles!

"Building a combined CSS-aspect-ratio-grid" https://9elements.com/blog/combined-aspect-ratio-grid/

Giving this a go, as I'm already using Hyper-V with some guest OS' on this machine I had to fiddle with the Virtualbox settings to get the installer going, but it seems to be working‼

"Push-button installer of macOS Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra guests in Virtualbox for Windows, Linux, and macOS" https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox

⌚ Lots of information about 7 segment displays, and some alternative designs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTB5XhjbgZA

🤯

Q1K3 – An homage to Quake in 13kb of JavaScript

Play it: https://phoboslab.org/q1k3/ Making of: https://phoboslab.org/log/2021/09/q1k3-making-of

Starting a bunch of these sounds at once beats white noise, hands down!

http://savethesounds.info

I suppose as a Jekyll/Github Pages user I've grown used to the levels of redundancy afforded by using the platform, and it's pretty neat for my development process to be so transparent (if anybody is bothered to look!)

If you're using Github and have a good number of followers, you also get a bit of syndication for free in the form of your commits showing up on your followers' timelines.

The only downside I've found is that I tend to have multiple drafts, on multiple clones of my blog repository across multiple machines, and I tend to lose stuff if I don't finish writing and publish in a timely manner!

https://tomcritchlow.com/2022/04/27/triple-entry-blogging/

Looking forward to trying this!

It's time to renew #3DS #emulation https://mikage.app/time-to-renew-3ds-emulation/

Excited to see that @LazyDevsAcademy@twitter has started a new #pico8 #indiedev #gamedev #pico8hero series. This time it's to make your own shmup!

Parts 1 and 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81WM_cjp9fo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICf5RvdS7wQ

It's 2022 and #CSS :only-child isn't aware of text nodes?

I'm trying to select an image that is the only direct descender of an element, with no text node siblings, e.g.:

<div><img /></div>

Not

<div>Hello<img />World</div>

div img:only-child will select this img in both cases, as will div img:first-child and div img:last-child

Am I missing something?

Amazing! 😍🕹

Porting Zelda Classic to the Web https://hoten.cc/blog/porting-zelda-classic-to-the-web/

I've been fiddling with my #Known instance (https://social.omgmog.net), and for now I think I'm happy with it and how it integrates with the rest of my site.

Another couple of evening and it'll hopefully match my site design more!

#indieweb