Simon Willison's Weblog: hacks

doom-htop

2024-04-21T13:59:06+00:00

Ludicrous, brilliant hack: it runs Doom, converts each frame to ASCII art, then runs one process for each line of ASCII and sets each process to allocate enough memory such that sorting by M_VIRT will show the lines in the correct order. Then it updates the argv[0] for each process on every frame such that htop displays the state of the game.

Probably only works on Ubuntu.

From the FAQ: “Q: Why did you make this? A: I thought it would be funny.”

Via @willmcgugan

Tags: hacks

Trainbot

2023-04-28T14:24:29+00:00

Trainbot

“Trainbot watches a piece of train track, detects passing trains, and stitches together images of them”—check out the site itself too, which shows beautifully stitched panoramas of trains that have recently passed near Jo M’s apartment. Found via the best Hacker News thread I’ve seen in years, “Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?”.

Via Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

Tags: computer-vision, go, hacks, raspberry-pi

The Commodordion

2022-10-21T23:36:10+00:00

The Commodordion

The Commodordion is “an 8-bit accordion primarily made of C64s, floppy disks, and gaffer tape” by Linus Åkesson. It’s absolutely beautiful.

Via Hacker News

Tags: commodore, hacks, music

gls: Goroutine local storage

2019-05-28T23:13:38+00:00

gls: Goroutine local storage

Go doesn't provide a mechanism for having "goroutine local" variables (like threadlocals in Python but for goroutines), and the structure of the language makes it really hard to get something working. JT Olio figured out a truly legendary hack: Go's introspection lets you see the current stack, so he figured out a way to encode a base-16 identifer tag into the call order of 16 special nested functions.

I particularly like the "What are people saying?" section of the README:

"Wow, that's horrifying."

"This is the most terrible thing I have seen in a very long time."

"Where is it getting a context from? Is this serializing all the requests? What the heck is the client being bound to? What are these tags? Why does he need callers? Oh god no. No no no."

Via Aaron Boodman

Tags: go, hacks

10K Apart Contest: Cheating by Compressing Your JavaScript and CSS to PNG Images

2010-08-23T09:45:00+00:00

10K Apart Contest: Cheating by Compressing Your JavaScript and CSS to PNG Images

Fascinating hack: transform your JS and CSS in to coloured pixels, save the result as a PNG to benefit from PNG’s built in compression algorithms, then read the data back out of the PNG and convert it back to text using JavaScript and canvas—all to reduce the on-disk filesize when entering the 10K app competition. Alex’s GithubFinder entry is worth checking out too.

Tags: compression, github, hacks, javascript, png, recovered, 10kapart, alex-le

Quoting qwzybug on Hacker News

2010-08-10T11:54:00+00:00

When all of human endeavor falls under the rubric of the “hack” the word ceases to mean anything. Hack your commute, take public transit! Hack your next dinner party with parlour games. Delightfully clever key hack keeps all your keys on the same ring. Hack Mexican food with a “burrito” sized tortilla! Hack your brain with REM sleep. Hack the sun with a straw hat. Hack hygiene with silver oxide “deodorant”. Hack girls with compliments. Hack your windowsill with a pot of wheatgrass, and hack the sky with the goddamn moon.

— qwzybug on Hacker News

Tags: funny, hacker-news, hacks, recovered

Video for Everybody!

2009-07-02T19:33:02+00:00

Video for Everybody!

Reminiscent of the early days of Web Standards, Kroc Camen has created a fiendishly clever chunk of HTML which can play a video on any browser, starting with HTML5 video then falling back on Flash and eventually just an HTML message telling the user where they can download the file. No JavaScript to be seen, but conditional comments abound. Requires you to encode as both Ogg and H.264, but Kroc includes details instructions for doing that using Handbrake.

Tags: codecs, encoding, h264, hacks, handbrake, html, html5, kroccamen, ogg, video

Notes from Hack Day at The Guardian

2008-11-18T23:42:46+00:00

Notes from Hack Day at The Guardian

Our first hack day was a ridiculous amount of fun. Matt’s write-up includes a 15 minute highlight video, which includes my 90 second presentation of my crowdsourcing SVG-powered parliamentary constituencies hack.

Tags: hackday, hacks, matt-mcalister, svg, the-guardian

Quoting Anil Dash

2008-06-26T17:17:30+00:00

Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft's success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria.

— Anil Dash

Tags: aids, anil-dash, bill-gates, hacks, malaria, microsoft, philanthropy

Bit Twiddling Hacks

2007-11-02T06:49:34+00:00

Bit Twiddling Hacks

I’ve never been much of a bit twiddler, but I’ve always felt I should learn.

Tags: binary, bits, bittwiddling, hacks, programming