There’s plenty of color changing bulbs out there – but they usually only display one color at a time. The Moonside Star-Bulb allows you to have mulitple colors from the same bulb. Make one side one color, the other side another, or have the colors rotate and move in interesting ways. Very resonable at only $37 per bulb.
Are you a millionaire? Want to live the real Bruce Wayne lifestyle? Warner Bros partnered with a PR firm to create the luxury Wayne Enterprises company. How luxury? How about buying one of 10 real life, functional, Wayne Enterprises Tumblers – for a cool $2.9 million?
Or perhaps $20,000 custom chairs, $5,000 shoes, $120,000 wall clocks, $21,000 lamps, or $3,000 luggage? All of these ultra-luxury items are real and for sale.
Head over to Wayne Enterprises website and start living the luxury lifestyle you never knew existed.
This is an interesting twist – instead of the old dartboard – how about a digital pixel art dart board. It can be programmed with images to change gameplay and to display art, data, and even play retro games.
It uses silicone suction darts with a sensor chip that can send data on its exact position on the board to keep score. They also plan to make NERF-compatible sensor darts.
People have been making LED Halloween masks for some time.
Sean Hodgins created a digital face mask that could display moving images. The original used a projector, which made it impractical to wear. To make it more portable, his new mask uses thousands of RGB LEDs mounted to custom circuit boards.
Wild – the Atari joystick decanter set modeled after the CX-10 Atari joystick. Comes in at $120 for those retro Atari friends.
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.
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 can bring still images to life. I wrote about MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia tool before.
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/
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.