Making a 88x31 button book using ImageMagick

(k.sosnierz.me)

105 points | by birdculture 2 days ago

12 comments

  • ninjalanternshk 3 hours ago
    I think the title undersells the accomplishment.

    He made an animated button gif that scrolls the entire text of Moby Dick.

    4.2 Mb, 19 hours long.

    Top quality useless proof of concept. 10/10.

    • coldpie 29 minutes ago
      Man, few things have made me feel like more of a philistine than reading Moby Dick earlier this year. I read a lot, but I've never considered myself a "literature guy" and wow Moby Dick cemented that. I did finish it, but I thought it was just an awful read, absolutely boring from start to finish. About halfway through I was just skipping pages and pages and pages of filler descriptions and incomprehensible 20-page-long speeches. I absolutely hated it, among the worst books I've ever powered through to the end.

      It's definitely a "me problem," obviously people who are into literature and analysis get a lot out of it. But in future I'm gonna stick to my dumb sci-fi books where people talk in comprehensible sentences and things blow up, lol.

    • Zobat 34 minutes ago
      Yep, but I'm inclined to say he went full "Jurassic Park" on that one.
    • emil-lp 1 hour ago
      Then I know what I'll do tomorrow!

      19 hours. Don't blink.

  • unleaded 2 hours ago
    Reminds me of the classic "P Diddy Calls Bjork" https://www.negrophonic.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/bjork...
  • Jakob 57 minutes ago
    Very nice article. Refreshing to see one liners and fun projects. And the website’s glamour mode is great, too.

    Although, as tradition requests, any example of the useless use of `cat` (UUOC) must be called out. The _much_ more efficient use would of course be

      tr '\n' ' ' < input.txt | tr -d '\r' | fold …
    • coldpie 20 minutes ago
      These uses of cat aren't useless.

      It improves readability. One reads shell commands from left to right, following the logic of each step in the pipeline individually. It makes sense to start with a file, then pipe that to command 1, pipe that to command 2, etc. It makes less sense to start with command 1 into which we put the file and then take the output of command 1 from before the file and put that into command 2 etc.

      It also improves future editability. If you wanted to change the input to command 1, you go tweak the bit to the left of command 1 instead of having to hunt down where the < is stuck in the middle somewhere and potentially remove it and replace it with something off to the left anyway depending on whether it's a file or the output of some other command.

      Using cat as the first step into a pipeline is almost always the right thing to do!

  • K2h 1 hour ago
    At bottom of article click link to load all of moby dick in a single GIF. To play on ios, long press and select ’play animation’.

    ImageMagick was created and written in C by John Cristy (also known as Cristy) in 1987 while working at DuPont https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageMagick

  • noufalibrahim 46 minutes ago
    What a glorious combination of interesting, quick and absolutely useless. It's beautiful.
  • tarsierscripter 2 hours ago
    I do really like this! I had never even heard of 88x31 buttons yet when presented with a few of them I got instant nostalgia for the “old web” of my youth.

    I think it’s my age speaking again, but I would have preferred Arial for this, as it’s much more legible to me than the final bitmap font he chose. He could have simply sped up the animation to account for only fitting 11 words per page and kept the whole thing in a reasonable time (if 19 hours is reasonable to you).

    • skyyler 2 hours ago
      Arial would not look good at three by five pixels per character, would it?
  • sodimel 5 hours ago
    This is a really great article! It show some simple tools calls and is still very small (no long wall of text to read). Thank you!
  • tdhz77 1 hour ago
    Reminds me about my attempt at the 1 kv club using wasm. Horrible choice all aroundc
  • lubujackson 2 hours ago
    Mostly useless but genius, hand-written text and code.

    It is so, so refreshing and I love it.

  • wartywhoa23 5 hours ago
    I recommend enabling the Glamour mode. So hilarious in a good way :)
    • jaffa2 3 hours ago
      I like it. Can we have a general glamour mode plugin for all web pages.
  • vladde 1 hour ago
    obligatory recommendation, the "The 88x31 GIF Collection: Part 1" https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/
  • derekhong 1 hour ago
    [flagged]