dave's blog of art and programming

  • Strange terraforming

    Working on the upcoming Raspberry Pi programming workshop for dBsCode, I’m wrapping the Minecraft Python API with a functional style one to reduce the amount of syntax we’ll have to teach. The idea is to build complex 3D shapes via abstraction, out of simple primitives. The IDE we’re using is Geany which seems to run…

  • Coding is Fun

    West Cornwall’s CodeClub team (Glen Pike and I) bring you the next stage at dBs Music:

  • Egglab – pattern generation obsession

    I’m putting the final pieces together for the release of the all new Project Nightjar game (due in the run up to Easter, of course!) and the automatic pattern generation has been a focus right up to this stage. The challenge I like most about citizen science is that along with all the ‘normal’ game…

  • Scratch -> Lego Mindstorms

    A bit of hardware hacking for Troon Primary CodeClub, who have tons of old style Lego Mindstorms they don’t use any more, and after a year of Scratch programming on their PCs are just getting started with Raspberry Pi. We’re using this Scratch modification together with the hardware I’m making which is based on this…

  • How to back up your encryption keys

    Without really noticing it I’ve gradually acquired more and more encryption keys without understanding how to back them up properly. Until fairly recently I lazily assumed that remembering the passphrases would be enough in case of my laptop catching on fire, but this is not the case. I use GPG keys both for authenticity over…

  • Solar powered computation

    This is a Raspberry Pi running a Racket Servlet (with the Mongoose 2000 data sync server) serving a webpage to the tablet. The neat thing is that it’s running on solar power – a day of gloomy winter Cornish light (not even outside) charging the on board battery results in over an hour of running…

  • Making a butterfly shader

    From sketches to fragment shader tests (unfinished) – see it running in webgl with the source code here. This is for a genetics and mimicry game, more on this project soon…

  • Many languages: Düsseldorf Institute for Music and Media Seminar

    Last week was my first official seminar at the

  • Mongoose 2000 testing interrupted by the wildlife

  • Egg camouflage evolution tests in different nest sites

    I’ve spent some time testing Project Nightjar EggLab: clicking on algorithmically generated eggs on backgrounds taken from nightjar nest sites and recording the time it takes for each egg. It’s designed for lots of people to play in parallel, but I wanted to test it before coming up with more gameplay mechanic ideas. The timing…