Posts
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20 years
TWENTY
DAMN
YEARS
September 11, 2001 is quite a memorable day for the obvious reasons. But for me, it holds an additional significance. Because on September 10, 2001 I registered the domain
bit-101.comand on the morning of September 11 the first version of the site went live, only to be massively overshadowed by other events just a couple of hours later.
Initially the site was a single page with a Flash application containing a calendar that linked to various interactive experimental pieces. I’d started doing the experiments in late August, so I was able to launch BIT-101 with fourteen experiments. It ultimately grew to over 600.
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More gif-making tips and tools
I’ve been continuing my search on the ultimate gif-making workflow and came across two more tools.
and
Both of these are command line tools available across platforms.
gifsicle
I first heard about gifsicle a while ago as a tool to optimize gifs. I tried it on some of the larger ffmpeg-created gifs and it didn’t seem to do a whole lot. You can specify three levels of optimization. The lowest level didn’t have any effect. The highest level took a single megabyte off of a 27 mb gif. Not really worth it.
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More ffmpeg tips
Palettes
In a recent post, I shared making animated gifs with ffmpeg. I hadn’t been doing it very long so I wasn’t sure how it would work in the long run. Lo and behold, I ran into a problem. I was making black and white (actually monochrome grayscale) gifs and for the most part it was going well. But then I saw some yellow getting in there!
None of the still images had anything but grayscale values. So how was I getting yellow? To be honest, I’m not sure of the details 100%, but it’s got to do with palettes. Gifs generally have just 256 available colors. There are tricks to make animated gifs use more than that, but let’s stick with the basic case. 256. The frames you create for your animations will likely be pngs, which mean they can have millions of colors. Somehow, ffmpeg needs to take all those millions of colors and choose just 256 for the gif.
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Chaikin’s Algorithm – Drawing Curves
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Animation Cookbook for ffmpeg and ImageMagick
I create a lot of animated gifs and I’m getting into creating videos as well. All of these are initially created by rendering a series of png files into a folder called
frames. Over the last few years I’ve figured out some pretty good recipes for converting these frames into animated gifs and videos. So I’m sharing.Both ImageMagick and ffmpeg are extremely complex programs with tons of parameters that allow you to do all kinds of image, video and audio manipulation. I’m not any kind of an expert on any of these. And this post is not meant as thorough documentation on these programs. It’s more of a cookbook of commands that handle specific use cases well. I’ll also try to explain what each of these parameters does, which might help you to come up with your own commands.
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NFT follow up
Well it’s been a few days since I gave in and decided to check out the world of NFTs. It feels like a few months. Figured I’d just post some thoughts and observations.
What I thought
I think my biggest confusion when I started this whole thing was, why the hell are people buying NFTs.
Initially I thought there was some kind of confusion going on where buyers thought they were actually buying rights to the artwork in some way whereas in fact, buying an NFT by itself gives you no rights to the original work. But as I talked to people I discovered that while people generally understood this, nobody really cared. It’s not like people were buying NFTs in order to use them in their corporate marketing campaigns or something. They just wanted to “collect” the art.
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NFT
OK, y’all wore me down. After multiple messages per week from friends and strangers urging me to put my work on hic et nunc, and many long, drawn out debates with people I respect, I finally gave in and created an NFT.
At some level I feel like a sellout. On the other hand, I was feeling way too stubborn and dogmatic about my resistance to try it. It was a serious internal struggle for the past few months.
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BIT-101 News
I’m starting a newsletter. I’ve been hearing more and more buzz about newsletters these days. I always assumed these were just cheap marketing gimmicks. “Sign up for my newsletter so I can spam you with info about this thing I’m trying to sell.” But apparently it’s become the replacement for RSS for a lot of people. Who knew? Probably everyone but me.
Anyway, I’m going to start one. For the most part it’s going to be quick summaries and links to stuff that I post right here, with maybe one or two other links or items of interest. I thought about doing more complete articles in the newsletter, but I’d rather keep my content centralized here, so summaries and links it is.
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Code Toggling Plugins
I’m a firm believer that creative coding is a very different activity than the kind of coding that most people do for their day jobs. In feature / application / systems programming, there’s usually a fair amount of planning, scoping and architecting that comes before you start coding. Ideally, when you start coding, you have a pretty good idea of what you are going to make and how you’re going to make it.
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A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics
I’ve come to be somewhat known as a “math guy” in creative coding. It’s one of my impostor syndrome items because I’m really not any kind of expert in the field. I took Algebra and some Precalculus in high school banged my head on a formal Calculus course, but never made it through. Most of what I know has been self-taught and pretty seat-of-the-pants.
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