Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryanbraun | Hacker News Reader

Some background: a little while ago I built a library called "Checkboxland" at the Recurse Center for rendering stuff into a checkbox grid. I recently made an update that lets it render arbitrary images and video. The video feature supports HTML MediaStream, which is what powers the webcam demo.

View on HN

Recurse Center for Rendering Stuff into a Checkbox Grid, 1 Checkbox Drive, etc.

I was there for this! I actually use this as an example of a perfect mini-batch project to anyone who's skeptical of what they can get done in a week.

There's no way to change camera input. Shame I couldn't try this demo.

This is really fun! I'm not sure of the practicality (particularly with the QR demo, my boxes don't turn bright blue like yours apparently do, so its pretty invisible to a scanner) but if it looks cool then that's reason enough in itself

Yeah, the boxes are bit brighter by default in Safari, so that's the browser I tend to use for screenshots and video.

You hint in the docs that you make some efforts to render efficiently. Are there any write-ups on the optimizations or it is just as simple as updating only when needed?

I wrote up some notes about it here: https://github.com/bryanbraun/checkboxland/tree/master/src#p...

In short: only updating when needed, minimizing the number of DOM queries, and avoiding costly CSS layouts.

This is brilliant. Amazing work. It even caught my ceiling fan running in the background.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com