Tootfinder

#ReleaseThursday #OpenSourceXmas A little present (to some of you)... Been meaning to release these recent additions before the holidays, but only getting around to it now. The most important new things are these:

Natural particle system, frozen in time (1/1000s exposure time).
(Close-up side view of the 160 meter tall Stuibenfall in the early morning light...)
#WaterfallWednesday #NaturePhotography

Channeling Revenant Feelings (Eagle Creek, Oregon, 2017)
(Hoping my friends in the US are doing everything in their power to help protect these sacred wilderness places from the onslaught of out of control greed...)
#FootpathFriday #ForestFriday

Advantage China: Trump's tantrums push US allies closer to Beijing (Amy Hawkins/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/25/china-europe-canada-charm-offensive-trump
http://www.memeorandum.com/260125/p14#a260125p14

"The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci once wrote.
“And the new world struggles to be born.”
In such interregnums, the Italian Marxist philosopher suggested, “every act, even the smallest,
may acquire decisive weight”.
In 2025, western leaders appeared convinced they – and we – were living through one such transitional period, as the world of international relations established after the second world war crashed to a halt.
During such eras, Gramsci more f…

"Thailand's Last Dugongs"
#Thailand #Dugong #Animals

A look at Detroit's Apple Developer Academy, launched after the BLM protests, which spends $20K per student, nearly 2x the budget of local community colleges (Paresh Dave/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-app-making-course-michigan-state-university/<…

Apple’s App Course Runs $20,000 a Student. Is It Really Worth It?
Apple, Michigan taxpayers, and one of Detroit’s wealthiest families spent roughly $30 million training hundreds of people to build iPhone apps. Not everyone lands coding jobs right away.

MEETING WITH TRUMP IN JUST DAYS! Russia in rage strikes Odesa and Mykolaiv: ports in flames!: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/26/meeting-with-trump-in-just.html

Why do you follow me? Multiple choice...
(Just saw someone else do such a poll and it reminded me to do the same...)

Unlike his predecessors,
Trump does not even pretend that his imperialism serves any purpose nobler than American domination
For Trump, “America first” didn’t imply any legal or moral opposition to foreign invasions.
To the contrary, he criticized Bush for not seizing Iraq’s oil.
He denounced regime change and nation building because they allegedly expended American blood and treasure on behalf of non-Americans.
Instead, Trump promised short wars in which onl…

Read and weep at the costs of this extraordinary grift measured in the lives of newborn and stillborn babies.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/nov/22/free-birth-society-linked-to-babies-deaths-investigation

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #EasternEchoes
Paham:
🎵 Biyaya ng Pasko
#Paham
https://open.spotify.com/track/66rBEKtoKh2fYtsNaZ3Uqm

10 years and a few days ago, I was running a DIY Synth workshop with STM32F7 dev boards in our kitchen in North London... Still have ~10 of these boards.
Here are also two videos (live performances) of some softsynths (some with MIDI via USB support) which we built in these workshops (I did quite a few of those in that year)...
STM32F746 MIDI synth (live recording, 2016-01-31)

NBC News: Meet the Press: Zohran Mamdani says he still believes Trump a ‘fascist’ after meeting: Full interview
#uspol

The new Zygote issue 39 is featuring stunning art by Kate MccGwire[1] and articles about:
Forward Motion: Robert J. Full’s Career of Discovery
Science of Seeing: Plant It and They Will Come
Cutting Without Cutting: Lessons from the Sawfly
Interview with Arindam Phani and Seonghwan (Sam) Kim
Building with Biology
Turning Bio-Inspired Ideas Into Patents
Biomimicry in Architecture

Heads up!
@… is sharing his thoughts on the #AI #LLM #GenAI

'iptraf-ng' is a TUI network monitor; it's a really easy way of watching bandwidth on each of your interfaces, and has modes to split between say IPv4/IPv6/TCP/etc, or packet size; and shows you all the IP connections currently transferrign thing, or all the ethernet devices currently doing stuff.
https://github.com…

@… on the #AIbubble, why it is a #bubble and what we will get out of it after it busts:

Already shared this track/EP some time ago, but it just needs another round: 13 minutes of beautiful minimal, meditative slow-motion dub with an absolutely remarkable (and unforgettable) bass line to glue it all together...
Blamstrain - 4AM (2013)
https://soundcloud.com/juho/blamstrain

ICE's interest in high-tech gear raises new questions: 'What is it for?' (Alfred Ng/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/26/ice-high-tech-surveillance-lower-privacy-guardrails-00705401
http://www.memeorandum.com/251226/p22#a251226p22

NFL betting trends — Week 13: 3 Thanksgiving Day games https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/betting/nfl-betting-trends-week-13-3-thanksgiving-day-games-3587440/

Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world | Childbirth | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/nov/22/free-birth-soc…

How climate breakdown is putting the world’s food in peril - in maps and charts https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2025/dec/18/how-climate-breakdown-is-putting-the-worlds-food-in-per…

Morning Glory
(Somewhere in southern Bavaria, whilst on a beautiful, but freezing early morning photo safari two years ago...)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #Photography

Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to America has a precedent:
the Maga evangelical perversion of Jesus’s message of radical love to one of hate and aggression
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-int

"Nothing will happen if you play it safe and outsource all of your experiences to a content machine designed to make rich people richer."
https://www.404media.co/why-i-quit-streaming-and-got-back-into-cassettes/

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #EasternEchoes
dwta:
🎵 SMP (Samahan Ng Malalamig Ang Pasko)
#dwta

The CEOs of Minnesota's largest companies call for 'de-escalation' of tensions after second fatal ICE shooting (Peter Gelling/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/ice-shooting-alex-pretti-minnesota-corporations-deescalation-peace-target-allianz-2026-1
http://www.memeorandum.com/260125/p59#a260125p59

As long as Putin remains alive, it doesn't end with Ukraine – Jake Broe | Interview: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/24/as-long-as-putin-remains.html

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MorningShow
Dude York:
🎵 Long Distance Christmas
#DudeYork
https://dudeyork.bandcamp.com/track/long-distance-christmas
https://open.spotify.com/track/3dj3R2ywPzErXhlp2W9UT6

Do(n't) look down...
(View down into Oytal from a precarious section of the ridge path near Laufbacher Eck & Schneck, late October 2021)
#FootpathFriday #LandscapePhotography

Es ist absolut, f**ng unbelievable:
#ice

After 30 years and hundreds of listens I'm still getting goosebumps from this amazing bassline, mood and pristine production...
Leftfield — A Final Hit (1996)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiM-MBpe8gY

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MiddayShow
Talking Heads:
🎵 Psycho Killer
#TalkingHeads
https://nooid.bandcamp.com/track/talking-heads-psycho-killer-nooid-bootleg
https://open.spotify.com/track/7dSCxR4LqkmxoBrq9MzVSD

RE: https://mastodon.thenewoil.org/@thenewoil/115773722160154268
Easy! What's the worst that could happen here... 🫣 Just casually converting a 40 year legacy codebase to Rust (using "AI" of course): "Our North Star is ‘1 engine…

They're doing to America what they did to Christianity (Bill McKibben/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/nov/23/america-christian-evangelical-discrimination-immigration
http://www.memeorandum.com/251123/p35#a251123p35

Sunset work at Ecola (2017)
#ThrowbackThursday

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MorningShow
Courtney Barnett:
🎵 Boxing Day Blues (Revisited) (Clean Edit)
#CourtneyBarnett
https://galina.bandcamp.com/track/boxing-day-blues-courtney-barnett
https://open.spotify.com/track/1MRr1ivNucqEBjHBMgDFjA

#WinterWonderland arrived early this year...
(From our #EveningWalk in the Ammergau Alps last night... 25-30cm fresh powder everywhere, -7℃, no people, but lots of animal tracks)
#SilentSunday

I think it's time for some #FollowFriday action once again. Today, let's focus on computational/algorithmic/generative art/design practitioners (not AI art :)
An entirely incomplete list, in A-Z order:
@…

Belated #MonochromeMonday / #MountainMonday: A moody winter day in the Ammergau Alps. A view down the snowed-in river bed of the Linder with the Notkarspitze summit catching the last light in the distance...

As I said previously, I do, do ❤️ ridges... This was six days ago, on almost the last day of autumn (meanwhile it's all white)...
#FootpathFriday #LandscapePhotography #Hiking

Wow, just noticed #ThingUmbrella reached 3700 stars on GitHub — I'm celebrating... 🤩🫠
Heartfelt thanks to all of you who've been helping along the way (in any shape & form) and been supporting this work for all these years and across different programming languages/camps! Merci beaucoup!!! Esp. big Thank You's to fellow fediverse people/supporters from various stages…

thi.ng/umbrella

#EveningWalk, two hours ago...
(Photo credit: @…)

Two interesting articles about the dubious financials of OpenAI and the recent NVIDIA earnings report (which regardless of positive outcome triggered a sell-off):
The Structural Collapse: How Google’s Integrated Stack Is Dismantling the OpenAI Thesis
https://shanakaanslemperera.substack…

The Structural Collapse: How Google’s Integrated Stack Is Dismantling the OpenAI Thesis
A leaked internal memo reveals the tectonic shift reshaping artificial intelligence, where platform economics are defeating venture-backed innovation at the exact moment markets assumed the opposite.

Prepping a digital negative of one of my old generative art projects (from 2008) for #Kallitype printing tomorrow. The form is actually _not_ 3D, but merely the time trace of a 2D physics sim of a single line (over hundreds of frames) and using spatial velocity deltas as metric for creating faux shading...

#ReleaseWednesday — Thanks to a user suggestion, I've added support for declarative canvas pixel density adjustments in the following packages:
- https://thi.ng/hiccup-canvas
-

Hiccup shape tree renderer for vanilla Canvas 2D contexts

Meeting the sublime
(A brief moment when the heavens briefly opened first for light, then for epic rain showers... Above Kandersteg, 2019)
#LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography

Animated #TextMode area plots with additive blending in ANSI16 format...
Source code for a static version of this example (made with http://thi.ng/ramp,

Early morning view from the supermarket carpark...
(Imst, October 2025)
#LandscapePhotography #Alps #Mountains

Fave hike of 2025... Ahh memories... Only 5 weeks ago, but already feels like a lifetime ago...
#WildWednesday #LandscapePhotography #Alps

A Golden Morning At Piz Beverin.
(Luckily, the dense fog was just starting to lift when we arrived, revealing the silent spectacle beyond and the majestic peak...)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography

The official Epson Print Layout application is such an annoying piece of bad software, bug ridden and slowly turning out to be quite costly (when working with expensive fine art inks & paper, costing 2.50 EUR per page)...
Any recommendations for alternatives (which also support the P900 advanced ink settings?)
Just one example: I go through the effort to create a nice custom page layout in a certain orientation (e.g. A3 landscape). The app also shows the preview correctly, bu…

As much as there's to dislike about Newsom and as much as this is an opportunity for self-serving purposes, he does seem to be the only one (at this level/forum) who speaks out clearly at this point and I much respect to him for that...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfDK84LKHjA

Frozen forest
(From tonight's evening walk in the local woods...)
#SilentSunday #MonochromeMonday #LandscapePhotography

Also new in #ThingUmbrella: The new https://thi.ng/text-format-image package provides conversion/formatting for bitmap output for CLI/Terminal apps, currently only via the widely supported iTerm2 format (se…

#LazyWeb question regarding the dreaded NPM #GlassWorm or similar malware to harvest auth tokens:
To avoid a potential infection leading to harvesting the token usually stored in `~/.npmrc`, I changed that file's content to:
`//registry.npmjs.org/:_authToken=${NPM_TOKEN}`
...…

Unhinged doesn't even cut it anymore... This speech & rhetoric needs a superlative to describe it... sheer brain rot! And yet, instead of a group walk out, a standing ovation at the end... unbelievable!

A touching short film about Yellowstone's Winterkeeper — and of course he's also a photographer (how could you not be living for 50 years in a place like that!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OwLLNPRbUw

Ever so fitting for our trying times, and a growing conflict for quite a few people (incl. myself), I imagine...
"Absurdism is the philosophical theory that the universe is irrational and meaningless. It states that trying to find meaning leads people into conflict with a seemingly meaningless world. This conflict can be between rational humanity and an irrational universe, between intention and outcome, or between subjective assessment and objective worth..."

Absurdism - Wikipedia

RE: https://mas.to/@carnage4life/115587666837745216
Sometimes I wonder if these semi-regular Grok quirks are nothing but a ploy to get more people to play with (t)his toy and thereby drive up user/customer stats & valuation... equally likely is that he rea…

TIL you can use `ffprobe` to get the GPS location of an iPhone video like so:
```
ffprobe -i input.mov -print_format json -show_format -v quiet
```
The resulting JSON output contains a key `com.apple.quicktime.location.ISO6709` with the concatenated latitude, longitude, altitude, like so:` 46.6240 012.0345 1866.934/`
There's also a `com.apple.quicktime.location.accuracy.horizontal` key with the lat/lon precision in meters...
(This is great news for the m…

Wow, tonight's #Aurora was also pretty visible in the Alps...
(All picture credits: https://www.foto-webcam.eu/)
Eibsee (Zugspitze):

Morning hike in the Lechtal Alps (October 2024)
We seemingly had the valley all to ourselves, for the first few hours the valley floor still mostly frozen with crunchy hoarfrost until the sun was high enough in the sky. The cirque at the end of the valley already completely in deep winter. These transitions (often within just a few minutes) are so magical and unique to mountain regions...
#FootpathFriday

For #TextureTuesday some more WIP snapshots of STRATA, a generative system I've been on/off working on since 2014 (in Clojure/TypeScript/Zig, originally for the cover design of HOLO magazine), loosely based on 1950s research/experiments by Barricelli, somewhat related to cellular automata and extended to use a different and much larger set of "reproduction/collision rules" f…

As promised, over the past few days I've been scouting for accounts on several Mastodon and Pixelfed servers related to #AltProcess photography & print making, in the hope to get more insights into each others' work/creations/experiences, successes & failures etc. Obviously the list below (in A-Z order) is NOT meant to be exhaustive in any way or form and if you feel you'd…

Recursive polygon subdivision inspired by thin-section mineralogy...
(The area of each polygon is mapped to a color from a gradient. Made with https://thi.ng/geom, see next message for example & source code...)
1/2

For #TextModeTuesday, some fonts from my old demoscene days, recreated in 2022 for an example project of my opensource libraries:
Figlet style text generator using big fonts:
https://demo.thi.ng/umbrella/big-font/

Alpenglühen in the Ammergau Alps
(Hochplatte, Branderschrofen, February 2024)
#WildWednesday #LandscapePhotography #Alps

Maybe a good opportunity to illustrate the purpose of one of the more uncommon packages in #ThingUmbrella: The https://thi.ng/hex package provides hexadecimal formatters for a variety of word sizes (4-64 bits) and also a…

I keep on thinking about this so often, now mostly about how the word has been co-opted & abused by contemporary "AI"... Just refound the link (from 2012):
Generative vs generated
https://www.anomalogue.com/2012/05/01/generative-vs-generated/

Generative vs generated
A generative idea is worth much more than a generated idea. * Generative ideas are perceived only indirectly in the ideas they generate — if the generative idea is perceived at all. Most peop…

This was an interesting problem to work on (back in 2017): A visualization of a path planner for 3D printing (FDM) a single layer/mesh structure of a multi-layer textile. Two setups of the same path strategy which optimized for longest continuous sub-paths and minimum rapids (distance without filament extrusion) between sub-paths. The planner supported six strategies in total, incl. optimizing for straight sub-paths and minimum amounts of "recent" crossings (to allow filament to co…

Behold, the 1200 meter tall "Labyrinth" ice wall/fall at Morteratsch, Bernina group, Engadin. September 2024.
(A special place if you ever wanted/needed to feel real small, surrounded by majestic fourthousanders...)
#MountainMonday #MonocrhomeMonday

Monday night dinner at The Shining...
(Literally... a snowed-in Timberline Lodge in winter of 2018, the drive up there very much like the scene in the movie, 2 meters of snow on either side of the road and a huge snowdrift reaching up to the top of the roof of the lodge...)
#MonochromeMonday

Reflective pause in Cirque de Troumouse, Pyrenees (just too grand to photograph)...
#FootpathFriday #LandscapePhotography #Photography

New #ThingUmbrella example to create a parametric, grid layout-based calibration sheet for black and white photography development. The sheet includes different swatches and gradients to measure results/responses of different exposure times and developer solutions/processes. The sheet also includes a placeholder for a custom test image to be added later...
All sheet components are pa…

Almost reached the top!
(A wonderfully wild path along the cliff edge and glorious evening light on the way to Teufelstättkopf, with a view of the Wetterstein massif and Zugspitze in the distance...)
#FootpathFriday #LandscapePhotography

Been updating my personal Mastodon tooling to download and convert my bookmarked toots. Here's how little code is needed to download a single message and convert its HTML content into Markdown, all using these #ThingUmbrella packages:
- https://thi.…

RE: #QuoteOfTheDay: "A blurry picture of a sharp thing must not be confused with a sharp picture of a blurry th…

Roadtrip Radiance
(July 2021, the blinding evening light stopped us in our tracks to take it all in, also a rare image of @…... Been creating more print proofs last night, slowly preparing myself for offering limited edition toned kallitype prints of my images... A phone image of this print doesn't really do it justice, but this is fresh from the drying…

#Genuary10 #Genuary2026: Polar coordinates
Circular Fold (2022), an animated circle inversion loop. Made with #ThingUmbrella.

MonochromeEvolutionaryBioDigitalMultiCellularSymbiosisStruggle
(Selected stills from my infinitely evolving C-SCAPE project, 2022 - made with #MonochromeMonday

Sonnenberg ridge entirely living up to its name...
(Made the most of the last warm weather yesterday afternoon to hike/climb along this beautiful long ridge with many cliffs, roped sections, some cute chamois and hardly any people — temporarily felt like late August, yet in two days supposedly snow starting...)
#SilentSunday

On the way to Gepatschferner, September 2025... How I miss this place!
#FootpathFriday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography

Thank you to the kind person behind the anonymous account who keeps DMing/forwarding me screenshots of interesting Twitter posts about my work a few times a year, but then never responds. You know who you are and I truly thank you for your service! 🙏
As much as I appreciate it, unfortunately I can not go back to that place [if this is partially meant to lure me back] and I'd much rather wish for people still there due to various network effects and social pressures to organize them…

"What is an ocean but a multitude of drops." — David Mitchell
Final tweaks (version 11 by now) of the tone curve for digital negatives for my current combination of emulsion & developer: It's pretty impressive how even minute changes to black & white points of the curve have quite noticeable impact on the rest. I've also been experimenting with reducing emulsion from 8 8 1 drops to 7 7 1 drops, but that makes that 1 drop of contrast agent ~13% stronger (too st…

More Conforce goodness: Grace (2010), from his debut album on Delsin records, with a hypnotic bassline slowly revealing itself as central element and a multitude of layers constructed around it. Track!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrNyq_EJ4rM

RE: https://toot.cat/@zkat/115737870313508332
Been afraid of similar knowledge for many years myself & still hoping to make the world a better place, at least a teensy bit... But yes, the right to "use for any purpose" has always been the weakest point…

A cacophony of colors, textures, temperatures and climate zones
(That rubble actually is a tiny section of the side moraine of a glacier, with a several hundred meters drop down to the ice flow directly behind and its vast carved out valley opening up... Boulders and rubble which have been piled up for millions of years and life slowly spreading its thin fragile carpet over it... True borderlands experience and sheer wonder about the forces actively shaping this planet... Sometimes I d…

Good morning with the Negative Neutron remix of Syntagma — ethereal with sweeping bass, loose beats and only fully taking off after 3 mins, then flying high (and low), diffusing into layers upon layers...
Syntagma (Negative Neutron Remix, 2009)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2kGyUmL8kg…

MonochromeEvolutionaryBioDigitalCellularAutomataSimulation
Unlike the recently shared[1] multi-cellular struggles, these here are some selected research stills (handpicked from tens of thousands) of only single CA configurations (aka mono-cultures) which I found interesting/promising and which were then used as raw ingredients/candidates for my infinitely evolving C-SCAPE project[2]...
Each of these cellular automata is 1.5D, meaning each pixel row is one generation, but I allowe…

(An overdue) super chill Friday night #Music4Coding night... Next up Scottish artist Petrichor with my fave track from their Cloud Chamber EP (2017), just all-round beautiful and very fitting to what "petrichor" describes... the smell/feeling after a summer rain...
Koh-Rah

Alone into the rocks: Tunnel walk and traces of glacial plucking at 2200m
(And yes, the colors really were that stunning...)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #Photography

Truly one of my fave tracks of all time — such a calm & warm energy, dubby ambient techno at its finest...
Toffes Värld - Bortom (2017)
#Music4Coding

RE: #Genuary2026

RE: #Genuary2026

The utopias of yesterday – GfZK Leipzig presents the history of Robotron...
(Robotron was East Germany's largest computer manufacturer and they also made the machine I first got to use on my way to becoming a "computer toucher"... Almost exactly 10 years ago, I wrote about those early experiences and the lessons learned already back then in this long read article here:

The Jacob’s Ladder of coding
Anecdotes and questions about climbing up and down the ladder of abstraction: Atari, ARM, demoscene, education, creative coding, community…

My art, but not my video[1] for #Genuary9 #Genuary2026: Crazy Automata
C-SCAPE (2022), a piece of multiple co-evolving cellular automata, running on vertical aspect ratio LCD screen.
Also see:

My art, but not my video[1] for #Genuary9 #Genuary2026: Crazy Automata
C-SCAPE (2022), a piece of multiple co-evolving cellular automata, running as a massive projection as part of the ALGORYTHMS group exhibition at Collective, Oslo (August 2023).

Into the reeds...
#MorningWalk #NaturePhotography #Texture