Ever have something you really want to learn, but for some technical reason, it just isn’t making sense. The “Laplacian” operator is one of those things for me recently. Every time I see demo and see the name “laplacian” in the solution, I get excited and spend about 10 minutes reading about how it work. I then get frustated and give up when it isn’t clicking. Complicated code is frustrating to look at.
Wow! That was my first thought when browsing some of the examples of the recently released AI music generation platform https://www.udio.com. It is hard to believe how far AI music has come in the past couple years. I have no way of knowing how ethical all this is with trained data, but that is for another discussion. Knowing it is possible to create results like this from an algorithm is pretty fascinating.
I spend most of my time these days doing development. It would be nice to focus on UI/UX things more, but that isn’t always where business priorities are at. UX Strategy: How to devise innovative digital products that people want was book recommendation that came across on my LinkedIn feed. The concept of “UX strategy” intrigued me, so I decided to give the book a read and extract any useful insights it might offer.
A simple line graph that allows for zooming, updated to version 7 of d3.js. The maintainers really need to update the examples for their site as they are stuck on version 4. I am still not convinced d3.js is focused on making charts. It seems more of a library for making SVG graphics. See working example Everything is all in one HTML page, so you can view the source to see what is going on.
Recently I finished converting the krita.org website over from WordPress to Hugo. One of the challenges with this conversion is trying to make it easy for authors to publish news posts. WordPress is just so easy to log in, make a post and publish. How can this nice user experience be replicated using a static site generation tool such as Hugo or Jekyll. Current issue with static site generators There are a lot of technical hurdles that need to happen to make static site generators accessible for more people.
I do web development and design all day at work. I come home, eat a bit, then start dwelling on my current skills becoming irrelevant. I browse a few YouTube ’expert’ influencer types. Look through the news to see what technologies are shiny. After a short time infinite scrolling, it begins to settle that the landscape of web development is too disorganized. I take a step back, sit in silence, and hear a distant voice….
Many books and self-help articles bring up the deathbed scenario to help you think more clearly. That is, when you are on your death bed, what are you going to regret? What did you wish you spent more time doing? What are you wasting your time on, or what risks should you have taken that you didn’t. While this deathbed perspective is useful, I recently found a better take on this concept that is more actionable and just feel more natural.
Earlier in the year, I went through a great three.js training course learning more about WebGL and the WebGL framework three.js. You get a certificate that you can share with people for resumé purposes (e.g. https://threejs-journey.com/certificate/view/27115). It is a really good course. While I don’t really use this at my day job, it is a fascinating area in web technology. A side project that I thought would be fun is making a sort of Mixamo clone.
If you want to start developing for the Krita drawing and painting (krita.org), developing on Windows is the easiest path in 2023. This is the general guide for building Krita from the source code. If you don’t care about history, skip to the next section. Near the end of 2022, and through 2023, the drawing and painting application Krita has been updating/replacing a few of their core C++ libraries. These new libraries have a much deeper feature set.
Gary Vaynerchuk is a guy that is all over YouTube if you are get into marketing. He is similar to a Seth Godin type of thought leader. Sharing nuggets of wisdom from his experience as a business owner and entrepreneur. Where he differs a bit from Seth Godin is that he spend more time on concrete examples and real life situations to help teach his message and ideas. Seth always seemed kind of in a higher, ideological, plain of existence at times with his ideas.
Writing is a form of art as much as utility. Whether telling a story or providing education to people, a “book” is something that comes with expectations. One of those expectations is how much content should be in the book. This is an important aspect to writing and something worth thinking about at a deeper level. How many pages, or words, that are in a book seem to be driven by a number of factors:
When heated arguments arises in the workplace, relationships, or with strangers on the internet, how often is your objective to be right? Harsh words are used and people question your judgment. It can be very easy to get on the defensive where you stop responding rationally. You dig yourself into a hole and come across even worse. This happens to everyone including myself. This loss of control intensifies the more emotions are heightened.
Recently I finished the Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learning from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company autobiography by Bob Iger. A lot of the book is about business acquisitions and all the tribulations it took to make them happen. Over the course of Bob’s tenure at Disney, they purchased many companies including Pixar, Marvel, LucasFilms, and 21st Centry/Fox. These acquisitions transformed the company and did a great job breathing new life into their stagnating animation division.
My roommate gave me an idea to start back up blogging to get some ideas flowing. Looking back at my blog, I realized how many things I worked on while blogging. It is easy to get in a rut and stay inert, and that is where I am right now. Maybe starting to blog again could get my curiosity sparked a bit more. Moving to Gatsby Static site generators have been around for a while now.
Scribus is a free, open source application for page layout and design. This is my quick guide to build the program from source on Ubuntu 16.04. This will build the 1.5.x development version. It has some tweaking that still needs to be done, but at least it works and is pretty straight forward. All of these steps are being done from the command line. Go to your search bar at the top left and type “Terminal” if you don’t know how to get to it.
Every so often, I get to a point with my RSS feeds where I start to get bored. Right now, it is filled with mostly tech news. While technology improves at a rapid pace, it gets rather boring with incremental speed increases, larger screen sizes, companies merging, or someone being litigated. I often times forget why any of this is important. Will most of these technology improvements make an impact?
I now have a comeback for people that tell me the art field doesn’t pay well… https://www.patreon.com/sakimichan
I was recently told about a neat service called Draft that allows you to write in one spot and publish to many places. You don’t have to publish to places to WordPress though. You can just keep it to yourself if you want. I will probably start using Draft for a bit and see how it goes. The interface is minimal - which I love.
I occasionally read Quora about advice people have. Sometimes the advice is so-so, while other times it is really profound. I recently read an answer describing how Elon Musk learned enough to start his SpaceX program. The advice made a pretty good impact on me. https://www.quora.com/How-did-Elon-Musk-learn-enough-about-rockets-to-run-SpaceX
I frequently hear from people that are having issues using an application. This can be with either software or web applications. It usually goes something to this tune: Can we add a checkbox in case we don’t want it to work that way This feature doesn’t work I need to be able to add the same thing 10 times Of course this type of feedback is ambiguous and raises a lot of questions.
“For a Limited Time”. “For 2 weeks Only”. “Hurry…this offer expires soon” In marketing, it is commonplace to have a sense of urgency in your communication. How many thousands of these messages have we seen in our life like this. Probably too many to count. After years of seeing verbiage like this, the words begin to lose its meaning and our attention is lost. Of course the purpose of having this type of message is important.
If you are on a Linux machine like I am, you will occasionally get a smattering of system updates that it recommends. New features! Fixes! Better performance! More stability! All for free! Those are usually the things that run across my mind when I see my package manager appear. I squeal with delight. I click update…and away it goes. Everything finishes, but I am never really sure what exactly just happened.
[] I have been spending the past couple of months working with the community reorganizing, rethinking, and re-designing the Krita marketing website. It was really fun working with the community, artists, and other developers to make this happen. Like any project that has stakeholders, there is a lot of feedback that had to be processed. We started with a brainstorming session and we had a forum going for all of the objectives we really wanted to accomplish.
I have recently been taking a break from Blender and starting to help with another great open source project - Krita. I posted a little while ago about the features that Krita has. I wanted to start playing around with the source code, but wasn’t sure the best IDE to use when editing code. After trying out a few options, I settled on Qt Creator. If anyone is building Krita from source and wants to hook up that code to an IDE for a better developer experience, check out the Youtube video I made with me getting it set up.
If you like reading technical books like I do, Packt Publishing just had their 10 year anniversary and their entire library (books and video training) are $10 a pop. I haven’t really done the video training at all, but their books have really helped me take my skills to the next level in the past years (just finished a Selenium book). They are more than just a regular publishing company.
I have been wanting to get more involved with the open source community for a while. It is great to have free options for people that don’t have a lot of money - especially college kids who are more focused on finishing school than owning a real copy of Photoshop. The type of people that work on these open source projects appear to be selfless individuals who really care about having software available to everyone.
No, I didn’t draw that - it is Krita’s mascot! Krita is a free open source software designed specifically for digital painters, illustrators, and concept artists. It has the usual photo editing capabilities like cropping and image adjustments, but really excels with its painting and art workflow. I originally heard about this application through the Blender 3D community. While reading an article about Blender’s Sintel project, it mentioned that the concept artists would use Krita to do all of their pre-production and concept art.
[] The Ouya needs some love if you want it to purr for you. It doesn’t give you any slack when it comes to performance on this little $100 box. I have been developing a game for a few months and recently started testing it for the Ouya. The game is an open world sandbox, so optimization is at the forefront of my mind. I didn’t originally think Ouya was going to be able to handle it.
Disclaimer: I was given this book as a review copy from Packt Publishing. If I didn’t like this book, I wouldn’t be writing a review. That is a little spoiler of what is to come. The timing for me getting this is rather convenient. My artificial intelligence programming skills are pretty much non-existent - and I currently need to start adding AI for the game I am working on.
I have used a few different art programs so far in the app world with my tablet. I mostly use my tablet for drawing, so I am always looking for better apps out there that make drawing and painting simpler. I actually stumbled upon this app because there was a review on another app ( Sketchbook Pro) that mentioned that ArtFlow is better. It is “Free” to download, but requires an IAP(in app purchase) to unlock all of the features.
[] I recently was looking at some 3D art and the whole “3D sculpturing” technology seems to be standard now for doing modeling. I have been doing polygonal modeling in the past, but didn’t want to fork over the $$$ for the usual tools like ZBrush or Mudbox. I learned about Sculptris a while ago, but never got around to spend time with it. This past Sunday I was bored and watched a couple hours of training video for Sculptris.
It has been half a year since I bought my Lenovo Thinkpad tablet and I couldn’t be happier with how my drawing/painting skills have progressed in that time. They just came out with a second generation Thinkpad with Windows 8, but I am usig the first generation model with Android. Before I purchased the tablet, I mostly would use a basic 2B pencil and do value sketching in a traditional sketchbook.
After installing the update for Unity 4.1 a few days ago, I saw a release note about different types of blend trees you can do with Mecanim. After playing with the different blend state types for a while , I have found that they solve a lot of issues that I struggled with before. They are very powerful and reduce the amount of code dramatically. [] Here is a setup that I am currently using for idle/walk/run/turn.
I have spent the better part of the past two month using Unity 4 and building a game with the new Mecanim animation system. With the video tutorial and material out there, it seems like a great next step for managing animations in Unity. This post outlines some of my experiences and solutions to make the Mecanim system work with non-trivial situations. Creating a Good Setup for Mecanim When starting with any new system or concept, I think it is best to start from scratch.
Just finished up with the Global Game Jam in St. Louis and it was a blast. There are so many awesome people in the game development community. I can’t think of many things that are better than spending an entire weekend with a ton of supportive and driven people like you. I have spent about a year now learning to write and arrange music for video games. It has a lot of challenges that I didn’t expect.