Oh this is cool. I did something similar with a modded Launchpad by programming GOL on it and converting the positions by column and row to octave and degree and then outputting MIDI to a synth.
> That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse.
Yeah, same here! I had done a couple of simple personal Flash games previously, but Garry's Mod is where I really felt like I cut my teeth on programming. Doing Wiremod/Expression 2 taught me PID controllers and some basic linear algebra, and after having helped some friends debug their code, taught me the importance of style and good practices.
It's easy for me to quickly idolize the authors of books and blogs I have read—yours included (thanks for writing GPP)—and it's often I think I fall into the trap of feeling like I need to dedicate all my free time into practicing and learning software and computer science topics.
I also got a small collection of synths and grooveboxes, so seeing you start your Tiny Wires channel was a nice reminder that even those authors have things outside of software.
One of my favorite moments lately was just hanging out with my wife in the living room after setting up all my synths there and just jamming with her present as she also worked on her hobby.
I got a soft spot for SUSE. In the late 2000s, Novell partnered with my highschool to teach a certification class, so it became the distribution I cut my teeth on if you don't count my time playing with compiz window effects on a free Ubuntu live-disk in junior high.
I remember there was another story here about Google returning bad results for what to do for a particular medical emergency. The page had a list of "Do"s and "Don't"s, but Google had grabbed the list of the "Don't"s and displayed it as the immediate results.
During my CS degree, I had an opportunity to take a course which sought to bridge these two cultures.
The class was described as a kinetic art and embedded systems class opened to EE, CE, CS and art students.
We'd study some essays like Snow's "The Two Cultures" and create reports on contemporary artists before breaking up into groups consisting of both engineering and art students with the goal of designing and implementing kinetic art.
Coming from the engineering side, it was fun for me to get the chance to experience an academic art setting, and I think the class overall helped me overcome being immediately dismissive of more conceptual art as well as showing me tools and the frame of mind to approach and appreciate art.
For the artists, I think the goal of our professor was to build some technical literacy, and provide them with the technology that could inspire them, expanding their breadth of what could be feasibly done.
Though like this essay, the relationship between the two cultures could seem like it would turn adversarial or pretentious or dismissive, but I believe everyone in the class had a great time, and were all just excited to create things together.
Yup, bought an old, used point-and-shoot last year, and the low stakes of it have me using it more than my DSLR. Much easier to slip small P&S is my pocket for a vacation or hike. It's got the CHDK firmware on it as well, so it still outputs RAW, and I can keep my development process.
Oh this is kinda funny for me. I just bought a 2009 model PowerShot for $10 last summer so that I could experiment with the Canon Hack Dev Kit, [0] and use it to get RAW photos on my trips without having to lug around or risk my DSLR. Some of the eBay listings of that same model are going up to $70 now.
The PowerShot has been pretty nice to have. Been developing the RAWs with DarkTable, and the PowerShot's auto mode is sufficient for me to develop a nice image, and it's better at capturing a random moment where I would otherwise have been trying to adjust my DSLR.
I'm also not surprised at this new trend. Most of my close Gen-Z friends have Fujifilm instant cameras or a PaperShoot, a digital camera that markets itself emulating the film look, and I could see them jumping on this.
Thanks for starting it! I dabbled with Ubuntu, Debian and SUSE in highschool and would occasionally see things from the Arch Wiki when troubleshooting problems. Learned about its philosophy when at a highschool computing competition and my team captain was raving about one of our opponents using Arch.
Started a CS degree the following year, and I decided I wanted to take Linux more seriously, so I wiped Windows off my laptop and threw Arch on it to force myself to learn, and it's been my daily driver now for the last decade!
When people ask me how I learned web, I'm usually at a loss remembering what path I took. I often say it was some Dreamweaver and osmosis through reading a lot of A List Apart and Smashing Magazine after being introduced to those websites by my friend, but now seeing the cover the books in this article brought up memories of me being preteen in the mid-2000s finding "HTML for the World Wide Web" on my dad's bookshelf and meticulously going through it.
Oh wow, this is awesome!
As you can see by my username, this was influential enough to me as a kid that I named my online presence after it.
My whole 6th grade class got into it―particularly making Line-Rider-equse roller coasters with the beta version.
It was really fun being able to immediately load something from the "zoo", and reverse engineer how the mechanisms worked, and try to implement it yourself.
The font's designers did create a video and a page explaining their choices if you're interested. I wouldn't necessarily call it haphazard as it seems there was intention behind the choice to use script for the italics.
Yeah, Kongregate was also one of my first chatroom experiences as a kid. The community had many friendly people, and now as an adult, it's nice looking back and feeling I had a good environment to learn how to interact on the web. It also inspired me to learn Actionscript to try to make my own Flash games, which eventually lead to me now with a CS degree.