• L-Systems

    L-Systems

    L-Systems are a type of fractal, well, that’s not really true; L-systems are a formalism for constructing rules for iterated systems, such as plant growth and turning those into images. But what’s interesting is that they’re actually remarkably simple to implement the evaluation of. So let’s look at one of the simpler ones, the binary…

  • Particles Tunneling Through Solid Earth

    No, I’m not going to write about neutrinos, or anything else that is ‘real’. Pixels are the particles of today’s post. Their universe is very different than ours, it is solid in all directions, it is quantized(at a different level than ours). At each moment, there are a countable number of choices. To be a…

  • Timetracker

    One of the other projects I’ve worked on, the one I’m not sure I’ve talked about here has been the timetracker tool. What it provides different than others that I have found is that it doesn’t ask what you’re doing, it just reads the window you’re using and files it away for later, along with…

  • Recreating an old Visualizer I swear I saw

    I have vague memories of a visualizer that I will likely never encounter without looking for it again. It was a waveform display but it had these rectangles that would ride them like boats, not really like surfing. Now, you might be wondering why I’m doing this when my library creates, at best, video. Well,…

  • img-genner Switching away from cl-png

    cl-png is a long lived package that mostly works, but it contains a single flaw, it relies on the presence of a library and the competence of the implementation in getting to it. It grabs the source and tries to build it. That’s one reason that I don’t much care for it. As much as…

  • Rescaling Video Using img-genner

    There’s not much of a reason to do this because ffmpeg has a much faster and nicer scaler, but maybe we want to write common lisp to handle an effect. When I introduced img-genner, I wasn’t sure that this was the direction to take, but now it seems appropriate, if nothing else. You will most…

  • Animating direct to mp4 with img-genner

    Two posts ago I started talking about img-genner. Guiding my authorship of the library by using it. Today I made a change that allows for what I think are exciting possibilities. One of the best uses I’ve found for this library has been using it to generate animations, surprisingly I’ve started to take a liking…

  • Drawing with img-genner

    I talked about img-genner’s glitch functions last time. Now you get to see the messier part of the library, as of (january 15th 2022), the part that needs refactoring and reconsideration. For one thing it is enormously picky in terms of types. So much so that much of the code broke regularly with only slightly…

  • Introducing img-genner, a Common Lisp Image Synthesis Library

    I have been working on the img-genner library(repo here) for quite a long time now, over three years if my memory serves me correctly. It contains a number of different modules, and frankly, it is a bit of a Frankenstein. At first it was about polygon graphics, then it became about pixel ‘glitch’ effects, such…

  • Forth and Optimization

    Forth is a strange old language. It’s among a relatively small number of concatenative languages that achieved any measure of success. Anyway, this isn’t something we’re going to go into much here because we’re thinking about something nearly tangential to the language itself. How you can make it fast. Stacks are somewhat slow compared to…