After updating my print scroll routine, I started thinking about how I could use it to create a different version of my infinite maze program. The original used graphic characters and spaces since the ZX81 lacked a backslash. This new version takes a different approach, using alternate graphics to build a more visually interesting maze while leveraging a better machine scrolling routine.
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the 1984 Dune movie, a film that still holds a special place in my heart. Don’t get me wrong—I thoroughly enjoy Denis Villeneuve’s stunning adaptations, and I admire how he’s brought Frank Herbert’s world to life for a new generation. But for me, the original remains unique. It’s tied to so many of my childhood memories and the passions I cultivated during those years.
Funny enough, I'm still having a surplus of fun creating AI art. Between challenges and random ideas, it's been quite a year. I love reading articles and seeing what other creative minds come up with. Reading "This AI Tool Combines Stable Diffusion's Level of Control and Midjourney's Image Quality — It's Called Distillery," by Jim Clyde Monge, I was intrigued by some of his images and thought I'd give it a whirl with my own whimsical prompt.
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.
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?
Do you find yourself fighting your editor? The common text editors of today work quite well as long you work they way they want you to. Yet, when you stray from their paradigm, even when they seem to offer infinite flexibility, it can be a chore to get even simple things done. What is a developer to do?
While working on a new theme for my Reid’s for Fun site, I flipped over to my 3v sub-domain to check something. While there, I noticed that all the user bars were failing with an API error. I quickly jumping over to the 360voice site and found it dead. Only the “Safari Can’t Connect to Server” error stared back at me.
I spent the last two days watching football and fixing up a few odds & ins around my sites. Probably the biggest change is the top menu. I’ve tried to match the style across each major site, including font and minor format changes. I also added my 360voice Dynamic Usersbars as a top-level site.
You know you've been spending too much time playing HALO when Microsoft names you a VIP. Interestingly, they offered me a badge to prove it.
Sometime back I created an animated userbar that showed the current PPV movies on Dish. Sadly, soon afterwards Dish changed their support pages to require a login, breaking my script. Sure, I could log in to get the information, but that kind of defeats the purpose. I decided to try to at least get the UB working again, even if not the full movie list.
I geeked out a bit today by loading Ubuntu onto an old laptop that I’d been having problems running Windows on. Seems the issue was a bad hard drive as it started to slam the drive head against the stop during the first installation. I pulled a drive from another broken laptop to fix that problem and started over.
It came to light that another Xbox 360 site is shuttering their doors: MyGamerCard.net. I was using an MGC gamer card on this site for years due to oddities with the official one from Xbox. I dropped it recently as I didn’t feel it was as important to my site anymore, but I really enjoyed the stats MGC provided and I stilled used my MGC userbar as a forum signature. Sad times indeed.
I recently stumbled across The Guild. Yes, I'm a few years behind, but I got hooked and am now on Season 4. Although I don't play MMO's, I can still relate from my RPG roots. The production value is excellent and writing is spot on. Worth a watch, even if you aren't a gaming nerd.
This years marks the 30th anniversary of the Sinclair ZX81 home computer. To celebrate, over the next year I plan on updating my ZX81 site with site updates and monthly spotlights.
Much to my surprise, I finally figured out one of the other cartoons I used to watch when I was Italy. Along with Daitarn 3 I remembered watching another show with a ship that accidentally pulled a city with them. Sadly, searching for such a broad term was a bit harder than I thought.
I ran across Wordle while pursuing other Flickr photos. I was intrigued and decided to give it a whirl. I’d been avoiding installing Java on my machine due to my distaste for the poorly coded apps that tend to use it, but my desire to give Wordle a try overcame my desire to remain Java free. I ran it against my site with interesting results.
I’ve been having a bit of a problem lately getting Safari to keep working! Seems it keeps crashing every few minutes with a library issue that I can’t seem to fix.
Okay, I’ve been a fan of adventure games, and specifically Infocom games, for most of my life. I have fond memories of playing great games such as “Planet Fall” and “Zork” when I was in high school on my C64. However, even before playing those games, I was playing and writing games on my ZX81 using a very simple adventure engine.
I’ve been waiting patiently to upgrade my iPod Touch to iOS4 today. Now, as a long time network engineer, IOS has always been Cisco’s CLI. So, it was a bit weird installing iOS on an Apple product. But in the end, it was worth the wait and the install. Some common issues I had with the previous
Here’s an interesting idea, plant a tree and offset the carbon emissions produced by your blog. And, even better, you can make it happen for free! That is the premise behind Mach's grün's Carbon Neutral campaign. Just blog about their initiative and the “Arbor Day Foundation,” their partner in the US, will plant a tree in the Plumas National Forest on your behalf.
This funny article was tweeted by Major Nelson and it was too rich not to pass on. FINALLY: The Difference between Nerd, Dork, and Geek Explained by a Venn Diagram provides a visually comprehensive way to determine the correct usage of those oft hard to pick social epitaphs you are bound to throw my way.
Well, I’m finding the 64bit version of Windows 7 works pretty well. I have most of my applications running again, using the 64bit versions if I could find them. The SSD drive is working great and I'm just using an external drive enclosure to get around the space limitations.
I was honored with a 128GB SSD drive today and I just had to give it a try. Since I can only have one drive in my laptop, I decided I’d swap out the old one and, while I was at it, spin up a 64bit version of Windows 7 on it as well. I’m curious to see how things will work.
Well, as of today my GeoCities site of the last 12 years is no more. I’m a bit saddened as it has been a place of comfort, seeing me through different ISP’s and such. It is because of GeoCities that I use Yahoo! mail, even if Yahoo! then turned around and removed the best features of GeoCities. I still feel that GeoCities was killed many years ago by Yahoo! and that it was only kept around due to its legacy. I’m not surprised by its shuttering in these times of Web 2.0 and the emergence of the Social Internet site.