May the ending of your year be as fancy as the ending of this synthesized rendition. 🎄
From the seasonal hacks department, here’s my toy app to make it snow on macOS. ❄️
https://github.com/twstokes/snowflakes
How it works:
When the app is told to make it snow it adds full-screen non-interactive windows on each display and inside those windows adds a SpriteKit view with a scene inside that contains emitters.
That’s basically it!
Happy Festivus!
For the rest of us.
Old iPhones are teeny tiny
A few surprises today:
- I still have my iPhone 4S.
- It still charges and boots!
- It’s so tiny! The picture doesn’t do it justice.
Thanks to Whisper and this awesome port, the tree is responding to spoken words. 🗣🎄
Since the tree itself only has a low-powered MCU, we need another machine to act as a listener.
The architecture is:
- A machine in my office runs the Whisper model and listens for words.
- If certain keywords are found it finds a corresponding command to run (e.g. do a theater chase sequence in a green color).
- It sends that command to the tree over the network.
For now I’m running it from iOS and macOS, so I wrote the current implementation in Swift. The code is currently still in “hack” status, but working well!
Now it’s time to test it when talking to coworkers at Automattic.
Windows 3.11 in QEMU
Thanks to this repo you can fire up Windows 3.11 painlessly and even connect to the Internet! Lots of goodies are already installed so it’s a fun virtual trip.
To get it going on my Mac all I had to do was:
brew install qemu
- Run
qemu-system-i386 -nic user,ipv6=off,model=ne2k_pci -device sb16 -vga cirrus -snapshot -no-shutdown hda.img
There were some graphical glitches (restarting or dropping down into DOS and back helps) and it crashes when running Netscape, but Microsoft Bob seemed to work fine!
After configuring the network’s gateway and DNS servers, I had to visit one of my favorite test sites for old browsers:
Something I should’ve done long ago – enabling OTA (Over The Air) firmware updates so I don’t have to disassemble the project box and move the tree every time I want to change its code.
To add a touch of UX, the pixels represent the upload progress. 😎
Here’s the prompt I gave ChatGPT:
Draw a Christmas tree using SwiftUI
Here’s the code I got:
struct ChristmasTree: View {
var body: some View {
ZStack {
// draw the tree trunk
Rectangle()
.fill(Color.brown)
.frame(width: 20, height: 100)
// draw the tree branches
ForEach(0..<5) { i in
HStack(spacing: 5) {
ForEach(0..<5-i) { j in
Triangle()
.fill(Color.green)
.frame(width: 10, height: 10)
}
}
.offset(x: 0, y: -10 * CGFloat(i))
}
// draw the star on top of the tree
Circle()
.fill(Color.yellow)
.frame(width: 10, height: 10)
.offset(x: 0, y: -50)
}
}
}
The only major issue syntax-wise is that Triangle() isn’t defined – where did it get that?
A quick visit to Hacking with Swift had this nice snippet, which I dropped in.
struct Triangle: Shape {
func path(in rect: CGRect) -> Path {
var path = Path()
path.move(to: CGPoint(x: rect.midX, y: rect.minY))
path.addLine(to: CGPoint(x: rect.minX, y: rect.maxY))
path.addLine(to: CGPoint(x: rect.maxX, y: rect.maxY))
path.addLine(to: CGPoint(x: rect.midX, y: rect.minY))
return path
}
}
Now we can compile and…. tada!
Not great, but darn impressive! 🎄🤯
A K&R classic
It has been zero days since opening this classic.
This weekend the NeoPixel tree got many much-needed updates!
Though I have more ideas to implement, the basics of what I wanted to do are complete, like sending commands remotely.
What we can currently do:
- Set the brightness
- Change the color
- Turn the pixels off
- Run some built-in sequences, like a nice rainbow
- Set repeating color patterns
- Set individual pixels
I also threw together a really quick iOS app to set the color with SwiftUI’s built-in ColorPicker view. Thanks to the Rover project (another one that’s been neglected), I had some UDP client code I could borrow to speed up development.