Creative coding

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This is an appreciation for the creative coders. For those that do it in their free time, and especially for those who have the courage and opportunity to do it part-time or even full-time. Taking their time to make exciting workshops, so that people who have no experience with programming can start with it.

Programming small sketches and animating them was one of early projects I did with programming. In some other posts I mentioned the use of Processing, P5.js or more recently Quil for canvas programming. I initially started with following tutorials on the internet, like The Coding Train, and repeating the code and making small modifications.

Lately I revisited what creative coding means, and got a lot of inspiration from artists and other creatives that are actively involved in it. Questioning the norm of software development, piecing it together in ways you do not expect. Or sometimes it just begins with a question, like “why are websites always expected to be online?”. The follow up then could be “well, when does it make sense to be online?”. If your answer is when the sun shines, great, you discovered the project of building a Solar powered webserver.

Having fun with printers

They can also be projects that try to make ordinary and boring stuff more interesting. Like when you go shopping, and you get your receipt, have you ever looked closely at the receipt? And wondered if it could be less boring that just a total and info? It is actually really easy to print your own receipts and make them interesting. Hack it a bit, you can send plain ASCII to receipt printers.

Someone wrote a Python script to do this, which had way more lines than needed but got the job done. It made a connection and had quite a bit of setup, to eventually loop for user input. But just with some bash scripting and standard commands, it can be way simpler, as I found out when toying with a receipt printer. It is just “lp -o raw -d <DEVICE NAME>”, and pipe in the text or provide the file to print.

The possibilities are endless, you can use a command like cowsay and add the following to your custom receipts:

 __________________________
< Thank you for your order >
 --------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

The conclusion is that the world needs more cows thanking customers on receipts. And that fun should be a ticket on the scrum board, because silly stuff like this makes the world a better place, one line at a time.

P.S. Friends reminded me that I printed the GNU/Linux copypasta on a receipt, and how random it was to get that handed to them.