What a week it’s been! I’m excited about a few things right now:
painting!
ways to incorporate motion into painting
bash shell scripting
flask
NES and SNES emulation on Raspberry Pi
So, first, I actually had time to work on paintings in the studio this week for the first time in literal months. It feels good. I’m still on my collage kick, but I like it. I’ve got a bunch of wood panels that I ordered from Sunbelt Mfg and I’ll glue whatever I like on those solid bodies. I’ve currently got one 40 x 30 inch panel going, and I started a 16 x 22 inch panel and a 26 x 20 inch piece on textured polypropylene.
I don’t have a lot to say about these at the moment, aside from that it feels good to take something that feels special that would otherwise go into the trash and instead paste it into a weird painting that might not ever go anywhere. Also one of the things I tore up and pasted in is a paper that T. painted a few strokes of purple paint on.
I have not made any practical progress on my motors project, but I have made some conceptual progress. Ideas. Paintings that expand beyond their borders. Paintings that move when you’re not looking. I might need some sensors. Also weird technical things that I have been thinking of like putting in regular reboot cycles to make sure things run right all the time and how to lock down a Raspberry Pi so it’s not on the network but also make it a thing that I can get shell access on.
I have had some problems at work that have been the kinds of problems that are best addressed with mildly complex bash shell scripts. I never really got into shell scripting before, and am now pretty impressed by how powerful it can be. Also, I’ve been leaning on chat GPT a lot to help me, and this is really a huge game changer. If you have basic conceptual understanding of how computer programming works it can still be basically impossible to write a program in a language you’re not familiar with, but with chat GPT if you’ve started a convo about bash shell scripting you can ask it things like, “do all arithmetic functions go inside double parentheses?” and it will cook up a straight answer (“Yes”) and an explanation with examples. The neat thing is that I’ve gained a new understanding of the relationship between shells and scripts and how the Python shell is a place where you can run Python commands while the bash shell is a place where you can run bash commands. It seems obvious in retrospect, but I’d just never thought of it that way before.
I’m getting back into my Codecademy course on Flask. Flask is a framework for doing web things in Python. I have an art project in mind here that involves Game of Life and the web and I think Flask is one of the tools I can use to realize it. I also have a practical web app I really want just in life that tracks how long it has been since things have been done. Like, if I have a task that should be done once a month but I do it a week late one month, I want a reminder to do it again a month after I did it not a month after I was supposed to have done it. The app would have a list of tasks and each task would have a time since last completed attribute and optionally a time until due attribute with a “done now” button. If this already exists and I just can’t find it please let me know in the comments. I need it for things like cleaning the aquarium and changing the refrigerator water filter.
The last thing I’m pretty excited about is that I’ve been toying around with the idea of playing some video games and I have installed a couple emulators on a Raspberry Pi. I got a couple Logitech USB game controllers for pretty cheap during a Black Friday sale and I’ve gotten Super Mario World, Super Mario 3, and Super Mario 2 to work well enough to realize how bad I am at video games. It’s partly a fun project to get more familiar with the Pi, and partly an excuse to play games. My family had a Nintendo when I was a kid, the original NES. I’m realizing now that the Super Nintendo already existed when we got the Nintendo, which is wild to think about. I haven’t really had a gaming system since then. I had room mates after college who had a DreamCast, and we played a lot of Soul Caliber and Crazy Taxi, and a suite mate in college had a Game Cube and we played a lot of Super Smash Bros. and Tetrisphere (which, we came to realize was actually a Tetris Toroid). I listen to the Get Played podcast and feel like I know what’s going on in gaming more or less, or at least I’m aware of what games are good right now in a way I haven’t been in a long time. I’m not ready to shell out hundreds of dollars on a console, but I’m excited to play Mario 2 every now and then!