A recently posted meme reminded me of the silly things we did on computers. In the early eighties, most computers came with BASIC as their default OS. A common starting point was a s simple “hello world” program. But almost as often, someone wrote something a bit more personal. This is my tribute program to the “I was here” concept of those days.
I saw the Commodore 64 maze generator for years, but ignored it on my ZX81 for different reasons. For one, the characters needed didn’t exist on the ZX81 keyboard. The other was the lack of automatic scroll. Undeterred this month, I created my own version in Sinclair BASIC. I’m quite happy with the results, even if not quite the same.
It’s been some time since I moved my music over to Myspace after the reboot of Acid Planet. I’ve never been happy with it and have looked for alternatives on and off again. I ran across another offering called Audio.com and decided to give it a try.
Hard to believe, but I’ve been futzing with AI art on NightCafé for a month now. I’d dabbled with DALL-E for some time, but not consistently. The social aspect of NightCafé is probably the biggest draw. Besides sharing content and seeing what others have made, but I get prompt ideas and support. Perhaps the biggest advantage are the challenges. I‘m slowing getting better. Today, I got into the top 20% for the third time in an official daily challenge.
In my final article about Mandelbrot sets, I’m sharing the hybrid program built from the last two. After finishing the chunky graphics version, I envisioned a merged version. This split graphic version is a nice compromise to showcase the beauty of the fractal.
I haven’t done a short blog post in some time but today is an opportunity. I’ve been playing around with AI generative art using NightCafe. It is quite a fun community. Whether you love or hate generative AI, it is the narrative of the day. Always one to try out technology, it is interesting to see what things emerge from various prompts.
I was futzing around with my site yesterday, checking stats and stuff. Seems my Wordle article using word clouds is one of the more popular ones. I have a feeling it relates more the game than the word cloud I wrote about it. After a quick view, I realized that the site I was linking to wasn’t active anymore. Thus, I began a short journey to find something else?
After completing my Chunk Graphics mode, my thoughts went to how best to use it. My first idea was something new, such as a flight simulator. After pondering, I stuck with something current by modifying my Mandelbrot Set program. With three gradients, it would be an interesting use of the mode.
I recently purchased the Princess Leia (Boushh) Helmet. It looks great next to my other helmets, including the custom C-3PO Helmet MOC I assembled some time back. The problem is C-3PO doesn’t have a matching name plate. I’ve been wanting to fix that for some time, but couldn’t find a decent template. Given up, I decided to create my own. Follow along to see how I made it.
Out on a run back in November of last year, I had this idea to create a 3-color screen mode of the ZX81. The idea was to use the checkered, or gray, graphic characters to add a third color. After reading about the C64 color modes, I called it chunky graphics as an homage to its wide pixel format. The pixel’s are chunky due to the 2x1 ratio and not being square. Let’s dig into the details.