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bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

removed that search engine and set this up. Works fine.

set up for custom search engine in zen browser for noai.duckduckgo.com?q=%s

February 8, 2026 at 4:00 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

For example, a ddg image search for "red car" returns less than 20 results !?!

my search settings don't seem to be filtering...

duck duck go image search for red car showing all settings doing no filtering.

February 8, 2026 at 3:43 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

I love this illusion and plan to use it in a book. But whenever I want to use it, I find many different versions on line, usually with no attribution. So I coded my own. It was fun. And honestly, I had to pull it into gimp and use the eyedropper tool to ensure […]

[Original post on mstdn.social]

isometric cube with 25 randomly colored tiles on each side. the center tile on each face is marked with an x. perceptually they seem to be very different colors, though they are exactly the same

February 8, 2026 at 2:44 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

Took a diversion from writing to start working on a cover.

ebook reader showing the cover of a book
Coding Curves
by Keith Peters
image of a complex guilloche figure

February 7, 2026 at 7:25 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

WHAT'S IN THE RED BIN????

oh...

sign at doctor's office:
What goes in the red bin?
picture: bloody gloves
caption: visibly bloody gloves
picture: bloody scrubs
caption: visually contaminated PPE
picture: bandages with a large drop of blood
caption: bloody bandages
large picture of a smiling cartoony drop of blood
caption: anything blood soaked or bodily fluids

February 7, 2026 at 12:50 AM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

Someone should go to jail for this.

buttons that say, in order, "next", "back", "finish later"

February 5, 2026 at 3:33 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

Company swag this year was custom designed shoes. It was at our big offsite during the main dinner last month. There were stations where you could pick a shoe, colors, customize it all to heck. Mine arrived today. My first Converse.

my foot in a converse shoe. blue with red trim, a green strip on the back with "BIT101" stitched in.

February 4, 2026 at 7:21 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

Randomly got back into some cellular automata yesterday. Had to consult my own book to recall the algorithms. https://bit101.gumroad.com/l/playingwithchaos

With some blur and palette mapping...

a mandala like random pattern with vertical and horizontal symmetry, rounded shapes, rendered in greens and blues.

January 30, 2026 at 1:04 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

I really miss the ternary operator in Go, but honestly I cannot argue with the logic for why they left it out. I've seen code like at the bottom of this example all too often in other languages and hate it to death.

(from https://www.bytesizego.com/books/anatomy-of-go )

Why Go Skips the Ternary Operator

The ternary operator offers a quick way to write conditional statements in a single line—a compact alternative to an if-else:

// Ternary operator example
var max = (a > b) ? a : b;
// If-else equivalent
max := a
if a < b {
max = b
}
The Go team left out the ternary operator because they believed it would encourage unnecessarily complex code. Go doesn't need two ways to handle the same logic—especially when one could lead to bad habits.

As the Go FAQ explains:

"The reason ?: is absent from Go is that the language's designers had seen the operation used too often to create impenetrably complex expressions. The if-else form, although longer, is unquestionably clearer. A language needs only one conditional control flow construct." — Go FAQ

Many of us like to believe we'd use the ternary operator wisely. But when deadlines are tight or you're rushing through code, it's easy to fall into the trap of writing tangled expressions like this:

int n = (x > 10) ? (y < 5) ? 100 : 200 : (z == 0) ? 300 : 400;

January 28, 2026 at 8:54 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

recursive isometric boxes.

a green isometric box has an image on each side which is a blue isometric box which has an image on each side which is a cyan isometric box which has...

January 28, 2026 at 12:26 AM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

I don't know what people are complaining about with Liquid Glass. Looks fine to me.

January 26, 2026 at 3:07 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

I think I worked out some decent dynamic isometric lighting. The first attempt was over-complicated and didn't look that great. This is much simpler and I think is decent. I don't think I'll actually be animating it often, but this makes it easy to say, "I want […]

[Original post on mstdn.social]

January 25, 2026 at 8:54 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

Huskies will be huskies.

January 25, 2026 at 8:04 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

wallpaper edition

several thousand isometric boxes in various colors and textures and sizes, looking like a very compact cityscape.

January 25, 2026 at 2:06 AM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

There are 8 million stories in the isometric city...

a couple thousand isometric boxes in various colors and textures and sizes, looking like a very compact cityscape.

January 25, 2026 at 1:56 AM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

A bit on the tacky side, but it's a thing.

January 25, 2026 at 1:23 AM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

I hope I'm not annoying anyone with all these images... I now have a box list that I can add boxes to, then sort and render, continuing to refine how textures work, etc.

random isometric boxes mostly in browns and dark oranges, floating over a floor plane, everything has a texture made up of contour lines.

January 24, 2026 at 9:55 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

Generating a zillion random images while I continue to massage this isometric interface into something I won't hate using.

Right now, you create a box, give it a position, size, base color, then you can set a pre-rendered texture per face, or assign a custom […]

[Original post on mstdn.social]

random isometric boxes with a tetradic color palette, green, blue, pink, orange, with a worley noise texture on each face.

January 24, 2026 at 5:30 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

Adding things to my palette module. I had a getRandom method which returns a random color out of the palette, which was nice. But often, you want to use one color more sparingly for contrast, so now I have a getWeightedRandom method. You pass it a list of […]

[Original post on mstdn.social]

random isometric boxes with noise patterns. most are colored either green or blue, but some are colored a salmon color.

January 24, 2026 at 2:26 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

random isometric cubes mostly of a bluish green hue, varying saturations and values, with black speckles

January 24, 2026 at 12:41 PM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

I think I like what I'm coming up with.

random isometrix boxes colored coral, light green or light purple with hatch patterns on each face, as if lit from bottom left.

January 24, 2026 at 1:43 AM

bit101

@bit101.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

Not sure where this is going, but I've made isometric libraries a bunch of times. This is the 2026 version. I'm never totally happy with the api for defining the different textures. You either have a set list of predefined textures, which winds up being limited […]

[Original post on mstdn.social]