[1] this shape is neither round nor oval. A few years back I experimented with shapes that are almost round, but not quite yet. Slight Imperfections that become irritations are very interesting for me. Imagine a round mirror, or a picture frame shaped like the object [1] above — would you immediately see that it isn’t round? Most people would subconsciously expect it to be round or oval and find it to slightly deviate from the norm.…

using ffmpeg. I use ffmpeg to convert videos from one format to the other. In order to create small video files from gifs I use this script: #!/usr/bin/sh # two-pass video-conversion with resizing to width echo "$1 >> $2 resizing to width=$3 with target video-bitrate of $4" ffmpeg -y -i "$1" -vf scale=$3:-1 -c:v vp9 -preset quality -b:v $4 -pass 1 -an -auto-alt-ref 0 -f webm /dev/null && \ ffmpeg -i "$1" -vf scale=$3:-1 -c:v vp9 -preset quality -b:v $4 -pass 2 -an -auto-alt-ref 0 $2 explanation -an (no audio) -vf (video filtering -> see below) -c:v (video codec options - e.…

Reaction-diffusion systems can model many natural pattern-forming processes. One very popular reaction-diffusion system is the Gray-Scott model, which consists of 2 coupled partial differential equations: $$ \frac{\partial u}{\partial t} = r_u \nabla^2 u - u v ^2 + f(1- u) $$ $$ \frac{\partial v}{\partial t} = r_v \nabla^2 v + u v ^2 - (f + k) v $$ In this model the interaction $u$ and $v$ can be seen as 2 chemicals each with their respective diffusion rates.…

A looooooong time ago in the year 2006 I began to play around with AVS. Advanced Visualization Studio came as a plugin with the famous Winamp Media player. Winamp had 2 plugins that rendered colorful procedural art that reacted to the music. These music visualization plugins were “Milkdrop” and “AVS”. Typically the user would choose from a variety of presets that would then visualize the sound. But in AVS users could actually create their own presets.…

In the final months of writing my master thesis there was little time. Simultaneously a lot of problems in the c++ code that I had written became very apparent. Since then it has been a dream of me to rewrite the whole thing. Thereby learning even more C++ and also using git/github in a more professional manner (I used it before, but only locally and I didn’t quite adhere to a consistent way of commiting changes or wording the commit messages).…