I keep a running list of random ideas in a gmail draft. Whenever I think of something mildly interesting, I jot it down so I can revisit it later. Most of the ideas aren’t very good, but every so often there’s a gem. Lately I’ve been working through some of them with Claude Code*, which is great for prototyping and quickly killing the ones that don’t pan out.

One idea on the list was JPEG generation loss. I’d seen a few demos years ago and thought they were fascinating. Claude told me it was a good idea and that I’d see the image decay with each save. That sounded good to me so I asked it to create a script, but it didn’t work. There was no obvious generation loss, even after 1000 saves. However, I remembered seeing demos showing jpegs disintegrating, so rather than dismiss the idea like I had others from the list, I tried making a script by hand, but that also didn’t produce the expected results. Then I tried making a Photoshop plugin (maybe there was something wrong with the libraries I was using?). But that also didn’t work.

Finally, out of frustration, I went back and found and rewatched the old demos that had originally piqued my interest, and I noticed they were randomizing the quality setting between saves. Changing the quality changes the quantization table, so that forces the data to be crunched differently between each save, which is what was causes the generation loss. The other demo I remembered wasn’t doing this, but there was someone in the comments saying that the generation loss shouldn’t occur (jpegs stabilize fairly quickly after repeated saves), which matched up with what I was seeing.

I didn’t find the idea of randomizing the quality to be very interesting (even if the effect was cool), so I decided to just start messing around. One idea that led to really cool results was saving an image as a jpeg, then as a lossy webp, then as a lossy avif, and then just repeating this. The image ended up melting into a magenta soup. Once I saw that, I felt I had something neat enough to be worth sharing. I made a short little video on it, you can see it below if you’re interested.

If you enjoy it, a like helps more than you’d think. And if you want to play with the script yourself, I’ve put it on GitHub: https://github.com/patorjk/image-generation-loss 

* I may talk more about this later. I’m still pretty new to this and am probably behind the curve.

I made a new YouTube video! This one is doing better than usual. I think I may have finally found my groove, though I have no idea what I’ll do for my next video. Amusingly this came about kind of quickly and kind of randomly. I wasn’t planning on making a video, I just went down this weird rabbit hole when I noticed this effect, and wound up learning about (spoiler alert) Turing Patterns. There’s a lot more that can be said about reaction-diffusion but I wanted to keep the video high level and light. It’s just a cool effect that has a neat underlying mechanism.

I’ve made available the accompanying web app and video generator I created to make the effects in the video. Had I known people would ask for them I probably would have done them in a different language, as JavaScript is really, really slow for this kind of stuff. However, it’s the language I’m most comfortable in and I was able to bang it out really quickly (you may notice that web app is just a hollowed out version of the Color Palette Generator I showed off a few weeks ago).

The video does a pretty good job going over the new 404 page. I actually wasn’t planning on updating the 404 page. What happened is I wanted to create a “Fire” filter for the TAAG app, and while looking into how to create a pixelated fire texture I stumbled upon the Doom Fire algorithm. It was simple yet produced such a cool result – I felt I had to do something with it, and that’s when the idea of re-doing the 404 page came to mind. I’m now kind of debating even making a separate app just for burning text or other things, as it’s weirdly kind of fun.

Anyway, if you like the video please leave it a like / comment / etc!

I thought it might be fun to make a follow-up to the Subpixel Snake video I did a few weeks ago. One regret I had after I posted my original video was that I didn’t show more of the game itself, and I only showed it on my iMac screen. So for this video I decided to show what it looks like on a variety of devices.

This was a ton of work, and I actually recorded more screens than what I showed in the video. However, most devices seem to use either an RGB stripe or BGR stripe subpixel geometry, and I was a little worried it could get boring if I showed a 20 screens and most of them were those 2, so I whittled things down to what I thought were the most interesting.

I really wanted something cool to end with (even though most people don’t make it to the end of a video), and I wound up hearing about this computer called the OLPC XO that had a unique subpixel layout. It’s screen had 2 modes: a monochrome mode for use in sunlight (similar to the Game Boy), and a backlit/color mode for use in darkness. When in color mode, each pixel would become either a red, green or blue subpixel along a diagonal line.

The thing even had a really cool story. It was supposed to be this $100 laptop that was going to change the world – children in developing countries would get access to a computer and the internet with one of these devices. They’d be able to learn about open source and linux and have access to the same information as we do in the developed world. There were even plans to add a hand crank as a way to give the machine power. Sadly though, the initiative failed, though they gave it a good shot and made a few hundred thousand of these devices.

Anyway, it just sounded really cool device and the perfect way to end the video, so I picked one up on eBay for $125. Initially was going to sell it afterwards, but it’s actually a lot of fun. The only downside is that it looks like you can only enter your name in once when setting up the computer, and because of the wonky keyboard I typed “Pzt” instead of “Pat” ????.

Anyway, if you have some time check out the video, and if you enjoy it please like / comment / share it!