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hamoid

386 karma · joined May 16, 2011

Interactive generative art using OPENRNDR (Kotlin), openFrameworks (C++), Processing (Java) and p5.js.

Home: https://hamoid.com

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/funprogramming

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hamoid··on Show HN: I built a synthesizer based on 3D physics
Looks very fun :-) Does anyone notice issues with the sound quality? In many of the examples I hear clicking: sometimes as if the attack is too high, or as if there is some kind of aliasing or sample rate issue, or just clipping. Probably noticeable with headphones. For instance in the announcement video at 3:11 or in the "J.S. Bach, Prelude in C Major (BWV 846)" video between 4.4s and 7.2s. It's somewhat visible if I load that audio in Audacity and turn on the spectrogram view with these settings: Logarithmic, 200 to 6000 Hz. Algorithm: Reassignment, 1024, Blackman-Harris, 1. Colors: 50, 40, 50.

What's odd is that I hear the glitches in in Firefox and in the file downloaded with yt-dlp, but not in Chromium. Is Google serving me bad audio on purpose?

Correction: some videos also do have glitchs on Chromium.

hamoid··on Sensorwatch pro – Hackable ARM Cortex M0 brain upgrade for Casio's iconic F-91W
See "Chirpy TX/RX": a protocol and implementation for transferring data out of an airgapped device over a piezo buzzer.

https://aka-gabor.xyz/lab/

hamoid··on Show HN: Hydra - Open-Source Columnar Postgres
Or https://github.com/hydra-synth/hydra (Livecoding networked visuals in the browser, since 2017)
hamoid··on Godot 4.1
I haven't seen people mentioning using Godot with Kotlin, so I'll leave the link here. At some point it could be nice for Kotlin devs.

https://godot-kotl.in/en/stable/

hamoid··on Tell HN: Somebody implemented something I wrote a blog about
Once I realized that Flash .swf files could be compressed to half the size using gz, so I sent an e-mail to Macromedia suggesting that they zip their files. The next version had that feature enabled by default, which made me happy :-)

Also, at the time when interactive maps had 4 arrows to click and move North, South, East and West I developed a map using Flash and MapServer where you could drag the map around with the mouse. I sent a message to Google to show my work and they replied saying it was cool. Later Google maps came out with such an interface. I'll never know if my messages had any impact but I can still dream they were my inventions :-)

hamoid··on Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not influencers
For years I've thought that dating sites could benefit from such post limits. If one could write 3 posts per day I think one would be more careful about what is posted and success might be shifted a bit from quantity of posts to their quality instead.

I like the idea. I think it would be nice to read in SlowSocial how will posts be treated. Will the company's algorithms read them? parse them? Put users into categories? I assume not, but it might be nice to display this in the front page.

And maybe there are useful ideas in https://www.humanetech.com/technologists ?

hamoid··on Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments?
That's where I stopped reading.
hamoid··on Dall-E 2
What if explicit, questionable and even illegal content was AI generated instead of involving harm to real humans of all ages?
hamoid··on Processing and P5 got newbies into coding
I know what you mean. I still think Processing and p5.js might be the best way to start, but what's missing is a bridge to move to the next level: showing other ways of doing things, comparing languages, IDEs, how to avoid the spaghetti, what are the strengths and weaknesses of different tools, etc.

This is my small contribution to help with this situation: https://vimeo.com/channels/p5idea Still much to do :-)

hamoid··on Processing and P5 got newbies into coding
When I started using it 3 years ago I was concerned about using Kotlin (a language developed mostly by one company) or choosing a framework with a small community. After writing hundreds of audiovisual programs in Java, Kotlin, C++, JavaScript and some other languages I can say OPENRNDR provides the most frictionless creative experience for me. I enjoy it every day. Still, to appreciate what it has to offer I think it's better to start with Processing or p5.js and write growing programs until they become hard to follow. Then it makes sense to have a good IDE and a beautiful API.
hamoid··on Processing and P5 got newbies into coding
I'm happy to hear those third party tutorials are considered great! ;-)
hamoid··on Can Northvolt solve Europe’s impending electric car battery problem?
> with green energy hubs like Finland and Norway

In which way is Finland a green energy hub?

If I look at [1] and [2] I see that in 2019 Finland's energy use was 55% fossil based. Sweden's was 31%. Coal was 5.10% for Finland, 0.20% for Sweden.

ps. I see there's worse... Germany 77.42% fossils, coal 17.53%. Still, I never had an impression Finland is a green energy hub (no waterfalls, no sun in winter). It is a green hub though.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/finland [2] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/sweden

hamoid··on Yamaha MOTOROiD
You are right. Big or small bikes, buses, trucks or a driver trying to quickly burn as much fuel as possible in their car are all disturbing.

A difference is that some of them are not trying to be loud on purpose while others are. That's what triggers me. Their violence.

If smoking is not allowed I don't understand why this is, or why rules are not enforced. Changing homes is much harder than changing sidewalks.

At least there's hope. Seeing silent electric bikes go by makes me smile.

hamoid··on Yamaha MOTOROiD
To me the sound of those big bikes is a form of terrorism. They rise my blood pressure, increase stress levels and make me hate. Try living somewhere where every 20 minutes such bikes make the windows of your flat shake and you can't hear your TV or your partner talking until the bike is gone. Why do I have to suffer this every day of my life? I can't wait until the ICE is part of our primitive past.
hamoid··on Free Software: An idea whose time has passed?
Unreal Engine? If I got it right you get the source but not the permission to redistribute it.
hamoid··on KDE.org migrated to Hugo
My home page (a few hundred pages, lots of images) took over one minute to build with Jekyll and around a second with Hugo. Waiting for a minute for every tiny change I make trying to figure out things makes it completely unusable.

That said, Hugo is the only piece of software I remember that makes me feel stupid.

It must be a awesome if you use it frequently, but I only make changes to my sites maybe once per year. I often struggle for hours to make simple changes or to figure out why it's not working. Two examples:

https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/raw-html-getting-omitted-in-0-... https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/comprehensive-hugo-tutorial-fo...

Sharing the feeling of others in this thread and happy to discover Zola! :)

hamoid··on Rete: JavaScript framework for visual programming and creating node editor
I like PraxisLive[1] because it combines both code and nodes. Reconnecting nodes in different ways it's ideal for experimenting with different implementations or trying out different orders when applying filters (which works both for audio and graphics effects). It also facilitates changing values in real time without stopping the program, which is perfect when developing time-based software.

[1] https://praxislive.org/

hamoid··on Making Games with Kotlin
Although not strictly a game engine, OPENRNDR[0] could probably be used to create one in Kotlin.

> OPENRNDR is a tool to create tools. It is an open source framework for creative coding, written in Kotlin for the Java VM that simplifies writing real-time interactive software.

[0]: https://openrndr.org/

hamoid··on Making Games with Kotlin
Because it's not FLOSS. At least that's my reason.
hamoid··on Too Many People Want to Travel
Here a documentary about the case of Mallorca (subtitles in various languages, 65 minutes long):

http://totinclos.cat/documental/

hamoid··on OpenShot – Open-Source Video Editor
This [1] blog post describes the state in which the different Libre video editors were in December 2018. It's a great blog to keep track of Libre creative tools out there.

Personally I have edited over 150 tutorials with Kdenlive. By setting many shortcuts the process became fast and intuitive. Except for some releases it worked well. It's great to hear that alternative editors are all improving :)

[1] http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/the-quest-for-susta...

hamoid··on Delaunay and Voronoi on a sphere
By accident I figured out how to draw a simple Voronoi pattern: draw lots of planes at the same distance from a center point, each plane perpendicular to that center point. https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/611667 (click </> to see the code). Probably someone did it before already :)
hamoid··on Two Photographers Unknowingly Shot the Same Millisecond in Time
In 2006 I shot a different kind of coincidence that made me wonder about the uniqueness of our actions: 10 minutes apart, two unknown men walking on a street, both with jeans, black jackets, white hoodie/cap, black shoes, the same leg in front and with their feet on the same spots on the ground: https://hamoid.com/post/2006-07-dimensions-of-the-city/ (photos #7 and #8)
hamoid··on Global living conditions are getting better
As a 16 color grayscale png it's 870KB.
hamoid··on Global living conditions are getting better
What's heavier, the linked web page as provided (html, css, js and image files) or as ONE large image?

I tested it: the whole page rendered as one high quality 1918 x 17591 JPEG file weighs 3.58 MB.

As loaded by the browser, without ad blocking, it does +280 http requests to dozens of servers and downloads 6.9 MB.

If pages were provided as images, we might burn less CPU cycles and produce less CO2. Not so good for clicking ads though ;)

hamoid··on Glowforge launches consumer-grade laser cutter
I had missed point 12 (air filter upgrade), and non of the pictures showed an exhaust tube...
hamoid··on Glowforge launches consumer-grade laser cutter
Laser cutters generate smoke (with possibly toxic particles). They have air extraction attached to them for that reason. No air extraction on this model?
hamoid··on Samsung's ‘Safety Truck’
Why not mount the camera higher so you see further? Maybe it feels confusing when the angle is not right?
hamoid··on Shooting Down Drones
I wonder if someone will sell a product that takes control of hovering drones and lands them without breaking them.
hamoid··on A world without work
I did web and app development. Years of PHP + MySql + CSS + JavaScript. At some point it felt overwhelming to choose a PHP framework and I switched to ActionScript, which I enjoyed a lot. I worked in a startup, got paid well, but noticed their only plan was to sell and retire. They did not care about their impact on the world or their employees, nor about doing things properly. I quit and worked in an FOSS Android project with a positive impact on people.

Then I could not do than anymore. I started finding databases, forms and interfaces unbearable. First I thought I did not like coding anymore. Then I realized it was not coding, but doing it alone, and focusing on things so detached from color, movement, space and sound.

I decided to focus on art and creativity. To teach creative coding, and play with code. Create beautiful interactive things without thinking so much about the performance, about the usability, about the correctness. Basically experimenting and playing as I had done as a kid. Apparently there's some demand for teaching, generative art and design, and helping other creative people with their projects.

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