rikroots

56 ms·

1. 361.▲
   by rikroots 4y ago

   I remember famo.us - "a free, open source JavaScript framework that helps you create smooth, complex UIs for any screen." as they say on the 'deprecated' website: http://deprecated.famous.org/ I never si
2. 362.▲
   by rikroots 4y ago

   Unstructured distraction seeking, mostly online - mostly text. Or reading books. I read too much! I also enjoy daydreaming - though it wasn't so much fun that one time it turned maladaptive, lasted for months and almost lost me my home
3. 363.▲
   by rikroots 4y ago

   Inertia, nostalgia, politics. I remember when the UK went metric in the early 1970s - not only weights and measures, but the currency too. It saved me an awful lot of heartache at school as I was taught entirely in metric and only had to le
4. 364.▲
   by rikroots 4y ago

   I wish you great luck on your journey! I did this when I was 42 - studied for a degree part-time, wrote some books, ran out of money and did some minimum wage jobs, etc - and it was a scary-yet-exhilarating adventure which, thankfully, ende
5. 365.▲
   by rikroots 4y ago

   Problem: how to make HTML5 <canvas> elements responsive, interactive and (importantly) more accessible for end users. Solution: an OS Javascript library to make it easier for devs to achieve the above Progress: ongoing - possibly neve
6. 366.▲
   by rikroots 4y ago

   This site gives an overview of support for color fonts beyond the browser - https://www.colorfonts.wtf/
7. 367.▲
   by rikroots 4y ago

   I've posted this link before (as a ShowHN) - this is my attempt to "replicate" color fonts using my JS canvas library. Getting the effects to be both responsive and amenable to user accessibility choices, while also including
8. 368.▲
   by rikroots 4y ago

   I went to the magazine expecting to read a 1985 article about declarative languages and instead (also) found a review of the first Amiga computer. This sentence in the editorial column made my day: "Dazzling graphics and audio and an o
9. 369.▲
   by rikroots 4y ago

   This is similar to my approach to serving videos of me reading a few of my poems to my poetry website. It works mainly because nobody wants to watch me read my poems. I do worry about what would happen if one of those poems went viral - I c
10. 370.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    Other commenters have mentioned how liberating the experience of solo development can be: the freedom from deadlines and constraints; the ability to translate a vision or goal into code quickly; the chance to step away from the project for
11. 371.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    So I tried to create a demo of this (the second paragraph) on CodePen[1]. While it works fine for shallow angles, it leads to some unsightly loops when tracing tightly acute (deep? sharp?) curves. I assume there's a way to mathematical
12. 372.▲
    Show HN: Proof of concept – colorise/animate any website font(scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk)

    2 points by rikroots 4y ago|0 comments
13. 373.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    When I recoded my canvas library's filters functionality last year (because: make it more like SVG filters, which allow you to branch the data multiple times, apply various effects, then merge them back into the final output - which is
14. 374.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    This. I have nothing against unit testing; there's been times when a unit test (often written by someone else) has stopped me pushing some truly stupid code to production. But when I started developing my canvas library (for fun, not w
15. 375.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    I could write a book on this! But the section that resonated most with me was: "Look to Other Fields, Learn From Other Fields" My elevator pitch background: I first learned to code when I was at school, back in 1982 (which, techni
16. 376.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    Photopea has been mentioned several times on HN. When this question was raised before, I think the answer was that the layout of Photoshop is not protected by copyright, thus the Photopea author is within his rights to use it as inspiration
17. 377.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    I think the title should have been "How mammals reconquered the world" as mammals descend directly from cynodonts and their relatives which were the dominant life form before the permian-triassic disaster. Cynodonts are synapsids,
18. 378.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    I love these - a fantastic piece of retro coding! My only criticism would be that the code uses `element.appendChild(canvas);` - if the element already contains child elements then the generated canvas is going to go over them, blocking any
19. 379.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    I had to chuckle as I read the post. I, too, suffer from occasional bouts of jealousy when I see "competitor" JS canvas libraries get some sunshine and appreciation in various venues for features that I think (in my own very opini
20. 380.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    While I agree that "high quality art" or "art made from expensive materials" may, for much of human history, have been available only to the rich, I would argue that such art is a minuscule percentage of all the art prod
21. 381.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    I have a lot of sympathy with this article's main point of view, that art has has its roots in the biological evolution of the human species. The author references a book by Denis Dutton - The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Huma
22. 382.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    I just Googled my name and the search engine returned a good long list of pages featuring my work in various places[1]. Of course it does help to have a fairly unique name; others may struggle to find themselves featured on the first page o
23. 383.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    Yes. I wrote the entire .d.ts file by hand. I did look at including JSDoc comments in the .js files to define types and function signatures, from which I could then autogenerate TS documentation files. But the results were a mess, and they
24. 384.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    My personal experience as a library developer, who has written my library in JS, not TS ... TS is an excellent choice for a lib dev starting a new project today. I can see the advantages of using TS for the library code - in particular for
25. 385.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    That's an interesting approach! I went a different way, converting each pixel to its LAB color space values to find the optimal palette for the image (based on preference arguments), then afterwards measuring each pixel against the pal
26. 386.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    Thanks for checking the demo out. The code[1] is very much a work-in-progress - suggestions for algorithm improvements (they're not based on Floyd-Steinberg) are always welcome! [1] - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/
27. 387.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    Thank you! The demo is a part of the testing regime for my canvas library. I set the default to "don't memoize" because it's the quickest way to see how intense/computationally expensive the filter gets using differ
28. 388.▲
    Show HN: An attempt to make a reduce-palette/dither filter for 2d canvas images(scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk)

    21 points by rikroots 4y ago|12 comments
29. 389.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    I felt this way too. This structure is a single artist's vision, made solid over the course of 50 years. I can't get a feeling/reaction from it just by looking at photos but, maybe give the chance to visit, I expect I'd
30. 390.▲
    by rikroots 4y ago

    I may be an outlier here, but when I look at those images I can see that they're pretty but I'm not getting any sense of, well, character, backstory from them. Maybe when the AI used to create them learns to go back and add some c