Posts
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Pseudo-3D Blobs
Starting to get back into interactive stuff is nice.
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MinimalComps2 v1.3.0
I’m super excited to announce the latest official build of MinimalComps2. I’ve put a lot of work into these. Been seriously obsessed over them to be honest.
That’s a live demo, not a screenshot, so have a play around. The source for that demo is here (site no longer live). It includes instances of all 22 components in the set.
As you can see there have been several new components added since last week. I’m quite happy with all of them but I won’t go into detail about them here. Better to check the demos and docs, API documentation and source code (no live links anymore, sorry).
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MinimalComps2
Back in 2008, when Flash was still a thing, I created a set of UI controls called MinimalComps. A basic history of Flash UI controls starts with the ones that were included with Flash called “UIComponents” and later updated to “V2 Components”. Although most of the rest of the user interface world calls these things controls or ui elements or widgets, in Flash the name “components” caught on and stuck.
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Yet Another Way to Draw Lines
Sure, why not, right?
One of the things I was trying to accomplish with the shaky drawing from my last post was to give the idea of hand-drawn lines. By adding in a bit of random variance, lines and shapes can seem like they are drawn by a human rather than perfectly rendered by a computer.
But at some point I was actually sketching something by hand and realized another big difference between computer drawing and human sketching. Very often when a person is sketching, rather than boldly drawing what they hope is a straight line from point A to B, they will instead make a number of very light lines that roughly go between the two points. You’ve seen it, you’ve done it, you know what I mean. So let’s replicate that.
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More Ways to Draw Lines
In the last post, I discussed an alternate way of rendering lines, that could give a glitchy look, painterly look, or many other looks based on what parameters you used. In this post, I’ll discuss another way to draw lines.
The theme to these posts is that using
Read more...moveTo/drawTois fine but gives you clinical, antiseptic, perfect straight lines (or curves). And sometimes it’s nice to shake things up a bit. In fact, shaking things up is exactly what we’re going to do here today. -
How to Draw a Line
… in code of course.
First, I’m going to assume that you are working in some kind of system that has a drawing API. But wait, even the simplest of drawing APIs have a function to draw a line already. All right then, we’ll start with that. Assuming you are using something like HTML, JS and Canvas, you’re going to do something like this:
context.moveTo(x0, y0); context.lineTo(x1, y1); context.stroke();
You start with two points, defined by two x, y coordinates. You move to the first one, you line to the second one, you stroke that path. And you wind up with:
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Raspberry Pi Pico – What I’ve Learned
So the new Raspberry Pi Pico board came out a few weeks back and there’s all kinds of news about it. For the uninformed, it’s a shift from other RPi boards. Most Pis are single board computers. They run an operating system – usually some Linux-based variant. The Pico is a microprocessor. Basically an Arduino alternative. But a pretty damn powerful one. Two cores, fast, good memory, 26 gpio pins, analogue to digital converter, real time clock, temperature sensor, etc. All for $4. So I grabbed a couple. By the way, if you’re ordering on line, make sure that you buy the header pins. They are not always included by default.
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Probability #2
The Monty Hall Problem
You’ve surely heard of this one. It’s a really tough one to wrap your head around. I’ll describe the problem in order to solve it, but it’s worth looking into the background of the “Ask Marilyn” incident if you’re not familiar with it.
The story shows that it’s not just hacks like myself that find this stuff non-intuitive. Lots of highly educated, very smart people got tricked by this one.
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Probability #1
I started re-reading The Drunkard’s Walk again today.
I read it a few years ago and remember really liking it. There are lots of examples in there of situations that seem to defy logic, or at least defy our sense of what is logical. But these are provable mathematically using the basic probability.
Whenever I come across a problem like this, even once I get my head around it as much as I can, I like to write some code to prove it out.
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Learning CNC and Making a MediaBox
Earlier this year I talked about my “Bit-Box” – a custom keyboard, program launcher, Stream Deck clone, device. https://www.bit-101.com/2017/2020/07/bit-box/
The box was handmade, but I had purchased a 3d printed plate to hold the switches. A little later I had the idea of making my own plate with wood. Initial tests, chiseling out a square hole for a single switch worked pretty well, but as soon as I tried to cut out several adjacent holes, the wood between the holes kept chipping out.
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