Blair Neal

6-ish weeks off and on of progress working with Claude Code to make a tool to make pen plottable trees/svgs. Tried like 3 or 4 different approaches and ive finally landed on manual branch placement and auto twig/leaf placement

A little video of it in action

Working on making a happy little tree generator for pen plotting a forest, but not with pure L-systems, just a little SVG tree builder tool with manual adjustments and then going to make it more procedural later

Now on to some generative pipes…

Braaaaids! 🧟‍♂️ BRAAAIDS! 🧟‍♂️

That feeling when someone sends you an Alibaba Express link they found because they think the trusted hardware you recommended is too expensive

The fun kind of pen testing

Still dipping into some time to mess with generative braids - tried a new technique of having the strands "break" to simulate a highlight and i love how it is looking even more natural in spots. fixing those tight foldover curves is my white whale though...

YouTube video by Brad Lander for NYC Brad Lander for Congress

Hell yeah @bradlander.bsky.social - excited to see he’s running for congress in my district youtu.be/qmoyCPtPSTw?... (Obligatory fuck my current rep, @repdangoldman.bsky.social )

Pen plotter results of some of the generative braid work I was doing a week ago. Still have some work to do to make it feel more organic but I’m encouraged by the results so far #plotter #penplotter

Trying to vibe code a generative braid that i can eventually pen plot has been quite a journey in trying to break down the problem well enough for AI to get what I'm trying to do. I've still got a little ways to go to fix edge cases, but im very pleased with what i've got so far.

Actually - @nick-hardeman.bsky.social after I made this I looked around and saw you had some lovely rope/braid experiments from a few years ago - nickhardeman.com/718/pen-plot... really lovely process!

ive been trying to figure out 2D braids/barber poles for pen plotting/faking occlusion and this took so long to get to but im so satisfied (havent worked out whats going on with the phase glitch in the middle, but whatevs)

I also have a method that thickens based on line length - thicker lines are longer.

I’ve been trying to find a good way of making thicker pen plotter lines for years and finally cracked a way with some new code. This is originally a drawing I made, converted to vector and then an attractor laid on top to thicken lines within an influence field #plotterart #bantamtools

Ooh cc @bantamtools.bsky.social as well. Although I’m guessing something like this already existed and I didn’t find it haha

Sharing a little pen plotter calibration tool made with Claude laserpilot.github.io/Pen-Plotter-...

Code on GitHub. Meant to let me figure out just how close and fine I can get certain pen tips for fine drawings. (Cc @golan.bsky.social if this is useful for any students)

GitHub - laserpilot/Guide_To_Projectors_For_Interactive_Installations: Article Repo for a Guide to Projectors Article Repo for a Guide to Projectors. Contribute to laserpilot/Guide_To_Projectors_For_Interactive_Installations development by creating an account on GitHub.

Oops missed this - the guide is actually getting a little out of date and needs another update pass but latest is here github.com/laserpilot/G... - I will say that 1080p projectors are probably still in the good enough for 99% of use cases especially over the increased 4K cost

Another great move from the Adams team, our embarassing mayor who can't be out of office soon enough.

Sidenote - is $100 considered a decent bribe? was it jsut like a balled up pile of 20's, 5's and 1's? what were they trying to cover up with so little money? an ill timed fart?

Great ad timing on this DC tourism ad in your app @nytimes.com food! History! Raids!

What hope do we all have if Waldo can’t even find himself?

Shout out to that time in 2016 where i chopped up images of a Where's Waldo book and had @genekogan.bsky.social 's amazing ofxTSNE sort them by similarity to make a hellish Where's Waldo

I’ll be sharing it soon! Will be open source. Just working through some fps challenges and trying to get macOS working too. Definitely not something I would have attempted outside of AI tools

Wow - someone in my neighborhood doing a real deep clean this morning

Used Claude Code/Gemini to help me make a CEF browser->Spout2 simple app for Windows that ill release soon. Going to do the same for Syphon on MacOS because why not. There were old implementations of this, but most were abandoned. Let me know if this sounds useful!

Damn - Gemini Code Assist CLI is really not performing well on most coding tasks. So many syntax errors and oddball solutions. I like it as a big picture view/project manager when im out of tokens on Claude Code, but I've barely had success with it implementing working code

Ah thank you! p5.plotsvg was great to use on another open tool that I’m going to share out this week - a little song visualizer -> plot toy

GitHub - golanlevin/p5-single-line-font-resources: An archive of monoline vector fonts, and p5.js code to render them. An archive of monoline vector fonts, and p5.js code to render them. - golanlevin/p5-single-line-font-resources

cc @golan.bsky.social and their excellent p5js single line font resource github.com/golanlevin/p... - im guessing I just re-made something that already exists, but vibe coding it was fun and educational nonetheless

Sharing a new niche tool I made - Font Ozempic laserpilot.github.io/font-ozempic/ it is specifically for taking SVGs with text objects and replacing the text with a single line font (or hershey text) and letting you re-position and save the file. Meant for pen plotters #penplotter #plotterart

uncovered skies A multimedia installation designed for the “information or inspiration?” exhibition held at the Suntory Museum […]

Awesome projection technique i havent seen done this cleanly before, or only really with LCD's with polarizers removed: www.nendo.jp/en/works/unc... - they remove the polarizers from LCD projectors and then put circular polarizers on the umbrella. so nice