Atari 2600 glassware
Wild – the Atari joystick decanter set modeled after the CX-10 Atari joystick. Comes in at $120 for those retro Atari friends.
Updated install instructions for Flux AI
Dominik Bößl made a pretty straightforward video on how to get FLUX.1 installed and using StabilityMatrix as package manager so you can use multiple different generative AI packages.
Epic Photography often is boring looking
I used a lot of interesting tricks when I was taking landscape photography. You could use a dirty mud puddle to make amazing shots that looked like you were on the beach or overlooking a lake. It works for shooting people too. Epic shots are often all about lighting and focusing on split second shot. A good reminder in the Instagram era where everyone is posting ‘perfect’ pictures.
AI Brings History to Life
AI can bring still images to life. I wrote about MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia tool before.
Demoscene is not dead
Andreas from Insomniac Games made a Amiga 500 demo in 2019 as part of this work with The Black Lotus demo group. He presented not only the Eon Amiga 500 demo, but tons of great technical information about the 4 years it took to develop it.
Old demo scene programmers hold amazing amounts of wisdom. When solving the core pieces of logic, I found this is true (but when doing larger, complete system development, these don’t work)
Work backwards from desired outcome to discover your constraints. Don’t just brute force. Instead, ask, what must be in place for us to get the peak performance from the key component we’re dependent on (render, disk load, etc). Then work from that constraint.
Do everything you can at compile time, not run time. Pre-compute tons of things – even the build-up of the data structures in memory. Just run it and then save and reload that blob automatically.
Over-generalizing early is a trap many devs fall into. Solve the problem in front of you. Trust that you can delete the code and do something else if it sucks. It’s cheaper and faster than trying to anticipate things ahead of time. Do the simplest thing that will work and if it sucks come back and delete it.
If you end up with a small runtime table/code that doesn’t require runtime checks because you can prove it can’t go wrong, you’re doing something right.
When developing, the actual Amiga is super slow and limited. They took an Amiga emulator and hacked it up so they could debug on it instead. Using calltraps to trigger the emulator, they added memory protection, fast forward, trigger debug, loading symbols, cycle accurate profiling, single step, high-resolution timers, etc. Also allows perfect input playback.
Modern threading and consumer/producer components (disk loading, data transfer, decompressors, etc) often just throw things in buffers and YOLO. There’s no clear backpressure to show you where you’re wasting time/space. Running on this kind of hardware/simulator shows you how much time the design is wasting by poorly and inefficiently designed algorithms/constraints.
Presented at Handmade Cities event in Seattle at: https://handmadecities.com/
Sub-pixel art
Japhy Riddle in a hackaday article tries to re-create the look of old CRT sub-pixels – the individual red, green, blue phosphors that make up a single pixel. His approach is to basically fake it with Photoshop, but old systems like the Apple II, debayering, and even modern text anti-aliasing actually use some of these techniques.
Tiny Volumetric lamp
Nick Electronics shows how he built a motorized volumetric display that uses a small grid of LEDs and wireless power.
80’s brand logos for modern companies
Graphic designer Kostya Petrenko create logos for modern brands as if they existed in the 1980s. He has both Instagram and TikTok channels with lots of interesting retro clips.
Song of the Lark
Jules Breton’s “Song of the Lark” was deemed the most popular painting in America in a poll conducted in 1934. A young peasant woman stands silently in the flat fields of the artist’s native Normandy as the sun rises, listening to the song of a distant lark. It currently hangs in the Art Institute in Chicago, one of my favorite museums.
The painting was Eleanor Roosevelt’s favorite work of art; it also inspired Bill Murray to try again while he was struggling actor in Chicago.
Zooming in
Jesse Martin does an extreme zoomin on his art (I’m betting there’s some splicing, but it’s a great zoom-in). He also has a ‘making of’ video how he used ProCreate to do it.
Reminds me of the ‘Powers of 10’ video from 1977