Here’s the result of some more graphical hacking. I quite accidentally discovered the nice patterns caused by rotating a shape around a midpoint. It’s a bit like those overly complicated spyrograph toys we used to have, only without the pens, cogs and irritating scoring pen line where the cog slipped, sending your pen skating across the paper.

Spyrofern

I’ve registered on the Context Free website, and since the app itself has a handy upload feature, I can put things on it easily

I have set up a picture gallery on my photos website, as an easy way to show off the images I’m creating. I can’t include the code there as there’s no way to do that, but one of the things my new main website will have is a section for these pictures and their associated code.

Creating these images is really good fun. Usually programming is a process that has a definite aim - I’m going to create a new website, I’m going to make a program to catalogue my music, etc. From that aim the program is structured and then code written. It’s a well documented process. It’s comparable to traditional art, with the artists creating their own interpretations of real world objects or scenes, or through their imagination creating a scene that could be a real place.

There’s another style of art though which is more abstract. The artist being more interested in experimenting with form, colours or whatever else they can think of. Context Free is the programmer equivalent of that. I can sit down and for half an hour mash out some code that draws something pretty. If I don’t like it, I can modify the rules until it looks better. Often it will accidentally produce something I had no intention of creating.

It’s also fast and immediate. The only code I can write is rule definitions that describe how circles and squares are drawn. There are no loops, no variables and no boilerplate setup code.

I’ve rediscovered the programmer friendly art ‘package’ known as Context Free, a system that allows pretty and often fractal images to be created from things known as context free grammars. I had a go with this before, but couldn’t quite work out what was going on. This time though, things make more sense.

After a few random pictures, I managed to create the image you see above.

It’s done using surprisingly few lines of code, the magic being in the recursive nature of both the pattern and the code generating it:

startshape trunk

rule trunk {
SQUARE {y 0.2 s 0.1 1}
fork{}
}

rule fork {
branch {y 1 x -0.33 r 45}
branch {y 1 x 0.33 r -45}
}

rule branch {
fork {s 0.7}
SQUARE {s 0.1 1}
}

I’m going to have a bit of a play with this and see what I can come up with.

On Friday I ordered a Gelaskin from UrbanRetro. What is a Gelaskin you’re probably thinking? Well, to put it bluntly it’s a giant sticker that is applied to the back of a laptop’s screen. They’re supposedly to protect it from scratches and damage, but their main purpose is to make your laptop look really really cool

They’re fairly pain free to stick on since the glue on the back is scored with lots of little lines allowing trapped air to escape. The glue doesn’t leave any residue when peeled off should you want to remove your Gelaskin (which would be an absurd thing to do).

When sticking mine on I had to peel the Gelaskin off a few times before it looked straight and wasn’t crinkled in the middle. My advice is to gently stick one edge on, peel off the backing and carefully smooth it over the rest of the lid. Don’t fret if it all goes wrong and the thing needs taking off, just gently start pulling and try to avoid touching the sticky side or letting it stick to itself. The vinyl is a bit stretchy so apply even force over an entire edge rather than just a corner or it might stretch out of shape.

They make them for iPods and normal laptops too, so go buy one

My copy of Processing, Creative Coding and Computational Art has arrived. Now to begin the good old system of learning a programming language by typing out lots of examples and messing with them

The book contains information on how to write code using Processing, but I think I can safely ignore that part; well until I come across some weird part of Java anyway. I bought it for the ideas and sample code it provides. Being one of those people for whom maths is a confusing and difficult subject I like to see a direct cause and effect when learning new things.

I’ll upload my efforts to my projects area for people to look at and play with.

I’ve just been playing with my macro lenses and some stuff lying about my house. No doubt the novelty of taking really close up images of things will wear off eventually, but for now it’s a nice diversion from mountains and grass.

I’ve made a new section in my Flickr photostream for these images. Going to have to sort out my own photo hosting, I’ve filled my webhost’s webspace again.

Here’s the results of letting the tools run riot with 20 photos of the inside of my office. Originally it was 56 photos, but it threw tons away claiming they weren’t part of the same image set - I have a slightly mental “panorama” of my doorway and another of a patch of carpet …

Enjoy the bendy walls, I don’t think panorama tools like the indoors, or things really close to the camera!

Earlier on I was introduced to the most excellent Hugin and the timesaving magic of Autopano-sift and decided to try them out.

This is the result of it stitching together five photos from my camera, looking out the back of my house.

(click for bigger)

This isn’t the full res version, that’s 5704×1133 and 3.2 meg which eats too much of my Flickr space.

When it gets light again I’ll try a more complex shot.

Once again proving that there’s nothing magical about the insides of a computer, this website shows a binary marble adding machine in action. It’s a six-bit binary adder which uses a system of rockers and marbles to add numbers together. The marbles fall down channels onto rockers which then dump their marbles onto the rockers below, performing simple binary addition. And to all the techies reading this, yes he rigs it up to do 31+1 causing a fun cascade effect as the carry “bit” walks through the machine

If you’ve never really understood how binary works, have a watch of his included YouTube video, it might make things a bit more clear.

Look at what the Stupids have come up with as a logo for the 2012 Olympics…

Here’s a link to the BBC story about it. You can comment on it too

Please click the link below, mostly out of curiosity to see if it makes any difference, but also because that logo is so bad; kids in my classes have made better things!

Online petition - Change The London 2012 Logo