Uh, so this is maybe a weird post to put up after not writing anything for a while, but here I am.

I’m a big fan of the Awesome window manager. It’s definitely not for everyone, but I switched to it a while ago and have really become a fan of how it works. I don’t even use most of its features, honestly, but I like that they’re there. And I really appreciate that you can change almost any aspect of how it works. One weakness of it, though, is that it isn’t very well-documented. You kind of have to dig into the internals to figure out how things work, or get lucky and find some internet rando’s blog post telling you how to do the thing you want to do.

In this blog post, I, internet rando, will tell you about one Awesome customization I’ve done, to give each tag (workspace) button a different color.

(By the way, these instructions are written for Awesome 4.2. You might be able to follow along for other versions, though.)

So I may have become a little bit obsessed with Google’s new Deep Dream hallucination algorithm. As I understand it, they use their image-recognition algorithm and make it enhance the features that it thinks it sees. Then, they run the new image back through the algorithm several more times, so that those features become amplified even more. However, the features that it thinks it sees tend not to correspond to actual features of the image, leading to hilarious/terrifying results.

Google has set up a repository for it on Github, but I couldn’t figure out how to set it up. So I thought that was the end of it. Until! I found out that there is a website that will process images for you! This was a very exciting development, so of course I had to go process some of my own pictures.

Recently, I’ve been trying to get away from using Flash to make games. It seems like a relic from a bygone era. As such, I probably need to start learning to write games in HTML5 or something. Today, I’m messing around with the <canvas> tag.

But unfortunately you aren’t using a browser that supports the canvas tag. That’s too bad.

It's a little level editor, implemented in 44 lines of Javascript. (And it could be less if I shrunk it down.) Granted, I used jQuery for some of it, and it doesn't do very much, but I doubt I could have done much better in Flash. And, unlike Flash, this thing has the advantage of being cross-platform. So I think this is pretty nice.

You select which thing you want to place using the buttons at the bottom, then click on the image to place that tile in that place. If you want to save your level for some reason, you can right-click on the canvas element and hit 'save image.'

I may discuss later how I built this. I will also make some more weird canvas experiments. Wish me luck!