code is art
Nomad: Wanderer in the Worldglass Imagine an hourglass, except rather than measuring hours, it counts out aeons. Its circumference is 25’000 miles. The glass walls are 60 miles thick. The sand within forms a desert almost 8’000 miles wide edge to edge. The peoples within know not where they came from, or why, but all know where their end lies; the sinkhole in the centre of their world, 200 miles…
The Markdown Web The ’Web is shit. Apps are a terrible replacement; Want to install — and sign in to — an app every time somebody wants to share something with you from a different service? Want to install a different app for literally every interaction with every different company? Have you even got the drive space for that? The bandwidth? An app is just a name for a webpage that’s been skinned…
Making the Ugly Elegant: Templating With DOM How It Works The Code Caveats The API Instantiation Shorthand XPath Syntax (string) repeat next setValue set addClass append remove History Update v20: This will be the last version to support PHP7.1+ (use v19 for PHP5.4+); PHP8.2 support is coming next! Templating is easy to do in any particular way, but doing it right is hard. I can’t count how many…
The Fastest Way to Update VRAM Tiles on GameBoy? What is the absolute fastest method for transferring tilemap (“nametable”) updates during V-blank on the original GameBoy? In this article I introduce a method I've named “pop-tile” that is notably faster than existing examples out there. The Issue † The GameBoy’s LCD operates much a like a traditional CRT even though it isn’t cathode-ray based! The…
AI Art: Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained This is an updated, polished, blogified version of a Twitter thread where I wrote up a quick first-experience of toying with AI generated art. This is the experience of someone who has never used the technology before, and whilst I'm a programmer and designer, you can also take this experience as an outsider’s view into the public perception of a technology…
Rogue’s Dice: You Bet Your Life Poker Dice Battles Equipment Attack Life Status Effects Magic This is an original idea for a game I've come up with but won’t be able to pursue so I'm putting this out there for free for anybody to take it up that wants to. Rogue’s Dice is not so much a game as it is just a battle system for a bigger game. This could be an RPG, a rogue-like (thus the name), or a…
Do One Thing Well It’s not exactly a new year’s resolution, but I do have a plan for 2022. There’s this thing that I'm good at, and yet it’s not good for me, and that’s organising other people’s stuff. I have to admit that my comfortable place is creating projects that make the best out of something that already exists rather than creating something entirely new. I am, at heart, a tools person. I…
Tron Cubes 2019 Make Your Own Retro Resolutions Handhelds, Tablets & Phones Laptops, Desktop & PCs Back in 2004 , I played about with 3DS Max and created a simple stack of cubes with a neat neon-reflective look. This simple scene took 2 hours to render at the then-standard resolution of 1024×768 on a pretty beefy 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 and 512 MB RAM. Technology has moved on quite a bit! I've updated…
Update! Fixed for PHP7! For a 10 year old piece of software, it’s been stupidly reliable. ReMarkable! ReMarkable is my own Markdown -like syntax, used to write and publish the content on this site. It is a plain-text method of writing articles that is then converted into HTML. Download Documentation Quick Reference Guide View source ReMarkable on GitHub To skip the talk and see it in use, you can…
Unshaven Yaks It’s unshaven yaks all the way down @4am Nothing else I've come across has quite been able to explain the last 5 years of my programming and development work than this quote — what I've been doing personally for the last 5 years I will cover in another blog post soon, if you’ve just had the shock of your life seeing something new from me in your RSS reader. It’s that Kroc guy. A…