Mine would be creating pen and paper ciphers for my made up secret communication needs.
I was learning Gregg Shorthand at some point just for the fun of it and every time I brought it up people had no idea what I was on about.
I’m old enough to remember when shorthand was a required course for women in secretarial schools. I always though it was black magic and very cool.
Model trains. I don’t bring it up because it’s obscure, but I’ve definitely found there’s a stigma. “Oh he’s the guy who plays with trains”. Screw the haters, I like to relax after work and do a bit of escapism. Eventually I got over it though and talk about it with friends, but it’s not the first thing I bring up either
I’m a math teacher. I use my video game making knowledge from Godot to make little video games to review skills. Each takes a few weeks to make with game design, making all the art, programming, and making the worksheet.
Here is my Disco Dj-Demo if you were curious what I mean.
I think it’s fun, it’s not something I can really chat with others about.
You are awesome. Thanks for being a good teacher and making math as interesting as it is for your students. And your hobby is fucking cool too.
I am a programmer (as in it’s my job) and I can’t really program anything in Godot. I’ve done the dodge the creeps tutorial and did some more tries, but I don’t really get game dev. It’s definitely a unique skill.
I try to make something that looks good (or at least doesn’t look like random static) by running pictures I’ve taken through audio editing software. There are some extra steps that go into it to “trick” the program into importing the picture as if it were a sound file, making sure the header (information that tells your computer that this is a picture) doesn’t get fucked with, and then exporting the data in a way that it will be saved as a picture and not an mp3 or something else.
On the rare occasion I do bring it up, I can literally watch people’s eyes glaze over. Until I show them a picture
Edit: internet is really bad right now, will reply with an image when I can
Edit2: picture was too big at 7MB. Hopefully a screenshot of the picture doesn’t look too bad
Ok now that’s really cool
I do a lot of photography and I’ve been trying to find something that I could do with some of my more experimental shots that makes them more… more‡. If that makes sense?
You wouldn’t happen to have more details on how to do it would you?
Edit: ‡ My more experimental shots are more done as like experimenting with how a shot is taken for like evoking a specific feeling or doing something strange in camera or really any number of reasons. Hell some of my experimental shots were accidentally taken pictures that are disorienting or confusing. I don’t share them often, because IDK it just seems like really personal sometimes. Those experimental shots feel less like photography and more like painting with photos.
Absolutely!
I have a bookmark saved on my computer at home to an old forum with the instructions I followed when I started doing this, and I can send that link later.
There are two programs that I use, and both are free.
GIMP - image editing software
Audacity - audio editing software
Here is the basic process from that bookmarked forum post that I can remember off the top of my head. If something is wrong (especially the Audacity import settings, since I don’t ever change them), I will fix it later.
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In GIMP (or other software of your choice) convert the image to a bitmap (.bmp). This step is very important!
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Use the option to import raw data as A-law with “little endian” (I have no idea what those setting do, but I assume it’s for keeping the header intact)
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Change the timeline in Audacity from time to samples and select everything after the 34th sample to edit and add effects (samples 1-34 are the information that tells your computer that this is a picture CHANGING ANYTHING IN THE HEADER WILL STOP YOU FROM OPENING THE IMAGE AFTER THE EDIT)
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Export the audio using the raw data option, selecting A-law again. This should re-save the “audio” as a bitmap image as it will not add an audio file header to the data.
I believe the blue parking garage image uses reverb, or maybe a phasor… possible both to get that effect? But there are a lot of setting to mess with for each audio effect that can dramatically change the outcome. The trees picture was made by putting the original picture in the left audio channel, and putting a horizontally flipped copy of the image in the right audio channel. Delete the header from the flipped copy, and exporting the data smashes them together in this really strange mirror effect. Afterward, I would use GIMP for any color correcting, changing saturation/hue, simple stuff
Edit: spelling and formatting
Is there a way to convert an audio file to an image? Might be interesting for album covers.
I did try turning a song into an image last night, and it looked like TV static. Kinda disappointing, but I’ll try some other songs and see if I can mess with some settings
Working on my (private) servers is a hypnotic activity for me. It can be interesting or I can hate it and still want to do it. It can also be relaxing. Last time when I was sick in bed I played around with wireguard VPN configs all day to get a routed VPN for my VPS. I’m going to fix it today because something doesn’t work the way it should.
Also, I learn Japanese. 日本語が大好き!
Learning Greek is (very casually) one of my hobbies I wanted to try, because it has a different alphabet.
I am also learning Japanese. I fine it hard to think of the sentence structure as different than English. In my mind I find myself daying the sentences the way Yoda from star wars does and it makes more sense.
Yoda I am–>Yoda desu
Any good ressources you used for the wireguard VPS stuff? Still on my bucket list.
I found this software to fit my purposes: wg-gen
You configure your wireguard stuff on your host and this is just a web ui that can show current peers and generate new ones.
That is useful for more complex configs. I only connect to specific servers and address spaces with the VPN, I also Support ipv6.
For that kind of configuration, I found it necessary to host a DNS server for the network, so that I can access the reverse proxy of my Homeserver.
If you’re only looking to warp your device into a different network, that’s more straight forward. I suggest to take a look at wg-easy if you want a web ui for that scenario.
Also, Caution: Some wireguard containers that use your hosts config love to delete them, so make backups. I’m looking at you, wireguard-ui.
Sorry for the late reply. I just wanted to day Thanks for posting this. I’ll have a look in the next couple of days and see what I can achieve.
Have a good weekend!