For my daily art yesterday, i really wanted a dither pattern that looks like stars.
Unfortunately I could not find such a thing. So I made one.

How does a dither work?

A dither is essentially a map from every colour to black or white, this is done by adding the source colour and the dither pattern together, and then forcing each pixel to either be black or white. (Coloured dithers are created by doing this to each channel, Red, Green, and Blue)

As such, this pattern is actually a bunch of pixels that add up so that they max out in a certain order.

Take the 2x2 General dither pattern:

It is simply four shades of gray, equally spaced from black to white. 
The top left corner of the pattern will be the first to turn white, as it is the closest to white. then the bottom right, then the top right, and finally the bottom left. It creates a gradient like so:

It can be thought of as several combining layers, with each layer being combined with all the previous ones to produce the desired pixel.

Black here indicates transparency

Making the dither:

The method i have worked out is that, starting with a black background layer, for each stage of your dither you want, you create a layer with each pixel of the pattern filled in white.

You then need to calculate the opacity to set each layer to, I have found the best calculation is 100 divided by the number of layers, minus 1%. so (100/4)-1 is 24% in this case. Then setting each layer to that opacity level, with a black background at full

I have recently joined a hackerspace, and since i have been wanting to get more into writing, as well as recently purchased an ereader which i have been loving, i decided i wanted to manufacture a pair of clips to attach my e reader to my keyboard for writing usage!

I spent a fair few hours learning freecad, measuring both devices, and creating a cad document of a structure to hold the tablet.

The images of the sketch are of the later iteration 2, i do not have screenshots of iterations 1's sketch

I designed it with the intent to allow the design to bend slightly in order to allow a snapping motion to attach each device. with both snapping points having a slight arc doubling as better cradling the devices curves. I did later discover that i mistook a pair of lines as parallel in the design, but this didn't turn out to be a problem.

After spending some hours at home, i headed out to the hackerspace (for the first time!) and from there i started 3d printing! A massive thanks to hank who spent his time teaching me how to use the printers, and helped to solve problems!
Our first print did fail due to some lifting from the build plate, but the second print went well!

Testing iteration one, i found that the snapping was a bit too hard, and the tolerances a bit too tight on the e reader. To solve this i increased the height of the e reader in the sketch by 1mm, and increased the tolerances from 0.1mm to 0.25mm. I also added a small fillet to the edge faces to prevent elephant

today i performed two experiments on my way home from a date with my partner^[1]

the first one was my gloves, usually i use a pair of fingerless bike gloves when wheeling around, however they are made of plastics and other non renewable fabrics, so i've been wanting to find an alternative.
I found a pair of fingerless leather gloves the other week while exploring a farmers / wholesale market, they are very comfortable but i have found they are not great for wheelchair use. the first and main problem is grip, the leather gloves are surprisingly slippery and as a result i have to use more force when breaking. as well as that i found myself using my thumb more when pushing which would develop a blister if i continued too much. its more protection then nothing, but not well suited for wheelchair usage. i imagine it would be possible to make some wheelchair designed leather gloves, however at the moment i don't have those. there is also the small issue of as they are new, the fuzzy leather on the inside turns my hands black as if i have been holding charcoal.

the second experiment was my route. i took a different street home from what i usually do. my usual path is fine but it has a lot of extremely steep curb-cuts which can even be so steep as to be dangerous. this other street i have taken is much easier on the curb cuts due to many renovations of corner houses, however the overall camber of the street is much more harsh. that said a harsh camber is preferable to falling out of my

Yesterday, i was thinking once again about digital tombstones. The things we leave behind once we are no longer online for whatever reason. My site is not static, the server is programmed with nodejs, express, and liquid (and other irrelevant stuff). while some pages are more manually crafted, the blog/art pages autogenerate from the 800+ posts on my site (which is a lot wow), and then each post page is generated via its own page, markdown, etc.

This means as soon as i can no longer afford to pay my VPN bills, my website vanishes. I do not want this.

So yesterday and the day before i gave myself the task of making my site generator able to run on its own, apart from the actual web server itself. and i did that! i can now generate my entire site via a small script, and have that running every two weeks on my server, so in the worst possible case, i will only loose two weeks of my work. You can visit the archive here. The archive has a notice that it is an archive, and a date it was last updated!

It is being hosted on neocities, which i picked because it's goal has always been to provide free and good hosting for static sites, and while it is smaller then something like amazon, i think it will stick around for a long time. in fact the neocities supporter will be the second last subscription i have that i get rid of to reduce spending. (the last being the server itself). it's not perfect, but its the best solution for me, for now.

Reading Suggestions:

Cyber Mauseoleums, by neonaut

Web Web

Motherfucking Website - Some stuff about how the web is more accessible by default then it is mostly
Better Motherfucking Website - A response to the above, about how the default accessability could be better very easily
Grumpy Website - a big list of bad designs
Tonsky - Checkbox - A tribute to checkboxes
neonaut - Just a bunch of thoughts about the web

Art

dedware - Beautiful Biological Art
Rondoel - Amazing Comics
Ditherit - Make any image dithered!
Diode Tapestry - Just some beautiful lifelike art and photography

Personal Sites

Castle Cyber Skull  - The coolest virtual castle you will ever visit (a true estimate to the early web)
Mothclub - Columbo - Columbo...
Simone's Computer - I heard you liked computers so i put computers in your computers

Misc

Defensive Computing Checklist - Protect yourself, Own your technology.
Ink & Switch - Interesting papers and experiments on how we interact with computers

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