Two new things to play with on the site this week. Both run right in your browser, nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. They are also in the Coding Projects box at the top of the left column.
A drum machine you play with your fingers. You get a 4x4 grid of pads and 18 kits to pick from, everything from Arena Rock and Jazz Club to 808 Electro, Trap, Metal, Reggae Dub and 8-Bit Arcade. Every sound is synthesized on the spot, so there are no samples to download.
How to play:
Keyboard: the left-hand block 1234 / QWER / ASDF / ZXCV is the pad grid. The right-hand block 7890 / UIOP / JKL; / M,./ plays the same pads, so you can drum with both hands. The number pad works too.
Mouse or touch: click or tap the pads, or hold and drag across them. It works on a phone.
Gamepad: buttons, triggers and the D-pad are all pads.
Space plays a demo groove for the current kit so you can watch which pads light up and play along. Kick is bottom-left, snare is right next to it.
T starts the loop recorder. You get a four-click count-in, then you play, and it loops. Press T again to stack another layer on top. You can save the result as a WAV.
When you get comfortable, turn on Expert mode in the top-right corner. That adds lessons that teach you each kit's beat one part at a time, tap tempo, note repeat, a bass line and chords that follow along, a stage view, and saved beats.
The classic bluffing game. Everybody rolls in secret, then you take turns bidding on how many of a face are on the whole table, something like "five 4s". Every bid has to raise the last one. When you think the player before you is full of it, call Liar. Whoever is wrong loses a die, and the last player holding dice wins. 1s are wild, until somebody is down to their last die.
How to play:
Set up 2 to 10 seats. Each seat is either a person (pass the device around) or a computer player.
The computer players come in flavors: Aggressive, Passive, Random, Poor, Expert, or Mystery, which picks one in secret. You do not find out who was who until the game ends, and they talk trash while they play.
New to the game? Hit How to play for a short practice round against two friendly computer players, with tips at every step.
There is an optional Exact house rule: call Exact if you think the bid is dead on. Get it right and you win a die back.
Both were built with Claude Code over a few evenings. Give them a spin and tell me what breaks.
First new post here in, oh, fourteen years or so. Figured I should come back with something loud.
This is my HDR Jamboooooree, and the fun part is how it got made. No film crew, no edit bay, no band. Just me, a pile of ideas, and four tools doing the heavy lifting:
Claude Code was the shop foreman. It wrote the scripts, wrangled the files, and kept the whole pipeline glued together when I kept changing my mind.
Suno is the band. Every note you hear came out of it.
Blender did the 3D work, driven by scripts instead of me clicking around for weeks.
Midjourney supplied the artwork and the look.
If you have an HDR screen, watch it there and turn the brightness up. That is the whole point of the thing.
A few years ago any one of these pieces would have been a month of evenings. Now the hard part is deciding what you want to make. Wild times.
I had a an absolute blast at Orion Festival in AC yesterday. Mostly I wanted to just absorb all the great music but you know I couldn't resist taking a few pics along the way. For that, my little Sony NEX-5n is so so so so good!
It remains my favorite little cam for walkabouts and ESPECIALLY concerts.
You can't use it expecting to make ultra sharp images every time but with the right lighting and a little luck you can make some very nice concert pics. And security never bat an eye at it thinking it's a DSLR...
I was literally less than 8 rows deep in the middle of a surging crowd, people were moshing it up, crowd surfing and generally going insane. Then the lead singer of Cage The Elephant decided he was going to join in!
For Metallica tho I was a little too far back to get any real details, but the lasers and showmanship were amazing!
Crowd surfing is not all fun and games tho, here's the proof: The most brutal picture I've ever taken =)
Was glad to see that it didn't get cancelled, but let's put this one in the "Learning experience" column for the new organizers.... They need to coordinate with the auxiliary and get some ideas on how to make it a bit less chaotic next time!
Was proud to support TEDxMidAltantic as their Social Media guy and as a vol the day of the event. This is Reggie Watts rocking out on the keyboard, he is quite an interesting guy.
Pics from the day are up -here- and you can see the whole official Flickr stream -here-
