Posts
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Animated Sinusoidal Cardiods
I think I just made up a thing. Usually when I think that, it just means fewer than a few hundred people have thought about it before me, so who knows.
Let’s start with cardioids. A cardioid is a heart-shaped curve. One way to create a cardiod is to roll a circle around another circle of the same size, tracing the path of a single point on the moving circle. Like so:
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On the Road to Becoming an Audiophile, Part I
Over the past several months, I have been on the road to becoming an audiophile. The saying says something about the journey being more important than the destination. In this case, I totally agree. In fact, I’m fairly certain that I don’t even want to become an audiophile. But taking the first few steps towards improving the quality of my audio experience has increased my appreciation and enjoyment of the music I listen to.
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2019 in Review, and a new project
I don’t blog much these days, but usually do manage to get in a year-in-review post every December or January.
2019 was a tough year. Not bad, but lots of changes, lots of stress
Work
I’ve probably been more focused on work this past year than I have been in many years. To be honest, work has often been somewhat of “what I do in between my side projects” rather than the other way around. This year, the balance was very much the opposite. In fact, I had no real large side projects at all in 2019.
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Onyx Nova Pro update
Back in March I wrote a review of the Onyx Boox Nova Pro Ereader: https://www.bit-101.com/2017/2019/03/onyx-nova-pro-ereader/
Now, nearly 5 months later, I thought it would be good for a quick update.
tldr: I still love it. Like, really love it.
Details:
PDF reading
I’ve had more of a chance to consume PDF content on the device. As mentioned in the first review, most PDFs are utterly unreadable on a 6″ Kindle. Because each page has a fixed layout, when rendered full screen on a 6″ screen, the text is generally way too small. On a Kindle, you can zoom in and scroll around, but it was always way more painful than it’s worth.
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Onyx Nova Pro Ereader
Check out my update to this post, after using the Nova Pro for more than 4 months: https://www.bit-101.com/2017/2019/08/onyx-nova-pro-update
Let’s talk about ereaders. And first, let’s talk about Kindles.
I got my first Kindle in April 2009. Almost exactly 10 years ago. Goddaaaaamn, time flies. I didn’t buy into the whole Kindle hype at first. But I decided to try out the Kindle 2, skeptically. And I was hooked. I wound up buying several Kindles over the years, upgrading not at every new version, but every 2-3 years. I got the PaperWhite 4 late last year – as soon as it was available for preorder. And I loved it. Then I started thinking about getting the Oasis 2, mainly for the screen size. Most Kindles have stuck with the 6″ screen, whereas the Oasis went up to 7″. But the Oasis 2 is already pretty old, so I was waiting to see what might come out later this year.
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Perlinized Hexagons
In my last post, Hexagons, I talked a bit about how cool hexagons are, and gave one method of creating a hex grid. I also used this image as a header:
This was a bit of a tease, as I didn’t show how to create such an image. But I promised I’d come back around and give some code for it, so here we go.
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Hexagons
I know what you’re thinking. I’m thinking it too. So let’s stop tiptoeing around the subject and just say it out loud:
Hexagons are freaking cool.
Oh… you weren’t thinking that? Oops. My bad. I just assumed. Must be just me. So let me state my case on why hexagons are so damn neat.
First, let’s get some definitions out of the way. A hexagon is a six-sided polygon. And just to be clear, the hexagon I’m talking about is the regular, convex polygon type of hexagon. Which is to say that all of its sides are the same length and all of its angles are the same (120 degrees).
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2018 in Review
Here were are again… At the rate I’m going here, this blog will just be a collection of annual years in review.
Anyway, an interesting year. For most of my programming career, I’ve had my job and then my personal projects. This past year drew to a close, the day job took a lot more of my focus. In fact, for the last 2-3 months at least, I haven’t really had any big personal projects. Work has been taking most of my attention. That’s not a bad thing. I’ve taken on a new role, really a whole new career path at work and I’ve grown in so many ways. More on that later.
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tinpig 1.4.0 and sales pitch
For the past few weeks I’ve been putting a lot of work into an app called “tinpig“. It’s a tool for creating projects out of custom templates. I’ve described it in a previous post and the readme file details how to use it in depth, so I’m not going to go to much into that here.
This past weekend I got tinpig to version 1.4.0 and I think it’s pretty stable and feature complete in terms of what I envisioned for it. At this point, I’m mainly thinking about fleshing out some of the templates that can be used with it. So this post is kind of a sales pitch on why you might want to think about using it.
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Introducing “tinpig”
Years ago, I was a big fan of Sublime Text as an editor. It’s a great general purpose editor. There was one thing I missed though. Prior to that, I had mostly worked in dedicated, language/platform IDEs. These always had a “new project” functionality. They knew how to set up a new project in the language they were dedicated to. Because Sublime is a general purpose editor, it couldn’t really supply that functionality, because every type of project is different.
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