New desk setup as of this weekend

Process

Materials, with extra for later

Thinking a lot lately about making a comfortable environment for myself. Both in real space and digital space.

In real space I think about my desk setup. I think about nostalgic 90s photos of cozy computer setups.

In digital space I think about my neovim and terminal setup. After getting things pretty well setup I've kind of let them sit - and added a few things that never quite worked right. That cruft started to build up and now I'm starting to clean it out.

Back on the train and in the glasses deck. Sitting next to a big coffee spill on the flor and a man slowly, methodically eating a sandwich.

I don't know if I'll actually publish this as a post, but I wanted to collect my thoughts by writing.

This morning I was thinking of buying a new kitchen knife and working on cooking a couple of dinners a week again. I'd like to find some sort of system for all of that that feels good.

I'm doing some more experimentation with raspberry pi's around the house. Working on a base ubuntu setup, that is pretty close to what I would do with ubuntu on any other computer.

Flashing

Install ubuntu-server through rpi-imager. Annoying rpi-imager doesn't work with sway, something about QT apps and security. I've been flashing from my work macbook so far. I'd like to get a better setup. I could do it from the command line with dd but I'm not sure how to replicate the settings presets that the imager has, which is especially nice for automatically connecting to wifi. Still, I should dig in and get this figured out.

Organizing a new quotes repo: https://github.com/grantcuster/quotes

pokemonsay hooked up to my quotes text file

Inspired by dynamicland to try some real world manipulation linked to digital objects. I'd guessed coarse color matching would be enough here - it may not be.

Red construction paper in real life moves sloth on computer

Demo that has some promise where all data is in the image file. Sources on the left, canvas layout on the top right. Data encoded as image pixels on the bottom right.

But I'm not excited to jump back into it lately so I need to figure something out.

I think it gets more interesting when I have the three ways of working with the images.

Brainstorming on the train. Laying out the pieces.

I can use mediapipe hand landmark. I know the positions of the fingers. I'll use pointer finger as cursor, if they have two hands up I can use both of them...

I can use pointer and thumb pincer as click. I can normalize distance based on lower knuckle thumb distance probably. Click and drag works with that motion too, although maybe it's a shame you can't just point and drag - maybe also some ability to toggle based on the other hand.

The elements: mini PC, AR glasses, portable battery, bluetooth keyboard

Simulation of POV from the porch. A floating window over the world.

After trying out a DIY deck version, I've redone my cyberdeck experiment using AR glasses. It's not perfect but I've been using it pretty consistently on subway commutes and porch nights.

Some of the most interesting responses I saw to Ted Chiang's piece:

Mat Dryhurst tweet:

The easy unlock re the cyclical AI art culture war that will seem obvious in retrospect is that the people creating models are artists

Redid CSS zoom method again. Hopefully a base to build on for future projects at https://github.com/GrantCuster/zoom

Zooming in on the sloth

More response writing! Here we go. Same rules, don't summarize, pick out what's interesting to me even if it leaves a bunch of other stuff out.

First his definition:

art is something that results from making a lot of choices.

Source, output, data. More wyswig work.

I'd like to get into the habit of using this blog to write down responses and appreciations of things. So let's do that:

I've been listening to the "Moving Beyond Syntax" episode from Future of Coding over the past couple days. Overall I've just really been enjoying Future of Coding episodes as a break from AI hype. As a reminder of all the interesting things there are still to do in programming as programming.

I also think the addition of Lu has been great. Now (and especially in this episode) there are three distinct points of view from Lu, Ivan and Jimmy, that bounce off and contrast with each other. I think sometimes I get stuck wanting to know / cover everything, and listening and enjoying the back-and-forth is a good reminder that it's good to be coming from a perspective. That you're part of a larger conversation and you don't have to cover every angle yourself. A good thing for me to write about is what angle I am coming from these days.

Maybe: everything (source, layout, output) in one big image. WYSIWYG

Source on the left, output on the right, the beginning of data below

I have some image blending ideas.

Sloth overlap

Departure Mono font site

A great, free pixel font (packaged as vector). Probably too intense to use for a terminal font, but would be fun to try for some of my Linux system UI. Though at this point I have very little system UI to speak of... From https://departuremono.com/

A piece by Spacefiller from Fantasy Parameter Spaces Showing bold computational plants

Thinking about Spacefiller's work this morning. Specifically wondering how they're able to achieve such a feeling of solidity + presence for the plants. Part of it is the structure but I think a big part of it is the linework. There's no anti-aliasing and line's look like they're maybe four pixels wide (in visible world pixels, probably much higher in actual resolution).

I'm interested in creating digital spaces with a similar level of solidity. But I feel like introducing images often hurts the solidity - because the pixel pieces are too small to see. Obvious solution that I continue to experiment with is scale down the resolution and color of images, so that the pieces are more visible. That could hopefully make them feel more of a piece with a world like Spacefiller's. The dilemma is that often loses a lot of the semantic content (turns a face into a blob). This is part of why I'm interested in progressive pixelation that scales up or down in resolution depending on the content. Though my efforts there I think still lack the solid feel I'm after.

Progressively pixelate an image.

https://grain.constraint.systems

I turned off threads for now, the roll-ups were too much noise with all the new imported posts in here. I think maybe the right move is to have threads as an extra layer, so you can click through and see the thread page, but the index sticks to 'every post, reverse-chron'. Styling also plays a role here...