Moar Crazy Project Ideas: Mastodon Archives / Live-Feed, and Personal "Boss Mode" Dashboard

As if my current projects slate wasn't full enough, I did admittedly spend some time this weekend thinking how nice it would be to have a few other little utilities to solve a bunch of problems I don't currently have nice solutions for.

    1) A Mastodon Archives/Live-Feed viewer - Mainly for searching for past posts (and/or managing ones you no longer want to keep up) - e.g. to extract a bunch to a blog post for easier access in future (e.g. similar to how this post came about).

    2) A personal "boss mode" ish dashboard screen that can be launched with a single keypress, and can be used to put up a placeholder / dashboardy type screen that allows monitoring a whole bunch of feeds = info that you'd like to keep an eye on, while you step away from your machine OR are interrupted (and/or don't want others to look at what you were doing)... Sort of like the lock screen, but more fully featured, and maybe also a bit like the  

 

Now, both of these "ideas" aren't really something I plan to go "all in" on. But, having had the thought, they are tempting enough to at least toy around with to see if I can clobber together some prototypes (or at least draft designs) - as a bit of an "itch scratching" exercise in creativity.  Whether I ultimately built these properly for my own use (or even for others) is moot... it's likely I won't get that far, as these are not really priorities!  But still, it's fun to tinker with!

Christchurch Wastewater Treatment Stench Rant (+ A Layman's Alternative Interim "Workaround" Scheme)

If you've been following the news from Christchurch in the past week (or my socials for that matter), you'd be aware that this week, we've been *plagued* by waves of a putrid poopy stench (that irritates the eyes and airways, and yes... aggravates asthma in folks like myself). The last time many of us were faced with this stench was for the first half of 2022, after the water treatment plant caught fire in late 2021!

That was 5 years ago now! Yet this, we suddenly have the same bloody problem again!

For additional context:  No we are *NOT* in the "Eastern Suburbs" near where this plant and all the open-air "oxidation ponds" that the poopy water is pumped into are located, next to the Estuary / Eastern coastline lining the Pacific Ocean. Anything past the centrally located "Hagley Park" really cannot be considered an "Eastern Suburb" here, with places like Wigram, Halswell, or out around Burnside/Harewood where the airport is located certainly falling *well outside* the range where you'd expect to smell stuff like this!

Despite all this, and the problem first *really* rearing its ugly head city-wide (after having been a problem for months already in the areas surrounding the plant), the latest council update today says they are still "monitoring" the situation and hoping it miraculously improves - somehow... by itself... when hopefully some algae miraculously grows to fix it!  WTF?!!   🤬 

"Monitoring" (i.e. standing there with you hands to kept to yourself, scribbling away on a clipboard, while peering into the abyss / monitoring screens, staring at the charts) is about as much use as "thoughts and prayers" after yet another mass terrorist / gun violence incident... jeez 🙄

Knotted - A Short Film Idea (for testing Tools for Animating Hand-Rope/String Interactions)

(This post was split off from my post about a grand vision for the future direction of animation tools, as it was growing a bit too large for that).

For the ultimate test of hand/finger interaction with a length of string, I've dreamed up a little short film, set in a village where everyone (but the main character) is a master knot-tier. In fact, the opening scene is literally a montage of different pairs of hands tying increasingly fancy knots and bows.

The idea is that, we'd produce this short once we have the technology in place to make producing it feasible. That is, we'd have a bunch of awesome new tools that are amazing at helping animators manage such interactions (which are fiendishly hellish now), meaning that doing such shots should be much easier, meaning that we can afford to do quite a few of them to show off a bit :)  Well, at least that's the theory!

Of course, we'd first have to find a solution to that technical hurdle :)  (I'd love to have a chat with some experienced animators about this sometime in the coming months, so get in touch)

Thoughts About Geometry-Editing UX issues - Multi Object Editing, Edit Modes, Selection/Action Split, etc.

Just a little earlier, I spent some time reviewing and commenting on T54242 regarding the design issues behind making Blender be able to have multiple objects in Edit/Sculpt/Paint Modes at the same time. As outlined, there are certainly a few rather prickly issues in that we'd need to resolve to be able to do this.

In this post, I'll go over a few of the key issues we need to contend with here, along with some other general thoughts I've been mulling over for quite a few years now about what IMO makes an effective UI for editing large amounts of geometry (i.e. vertices, control points, etc.)

Breakdowner/GP Sequence Interpolation Ideas

While working on some recent improvements for the Breakdowner, I started daydreaming (as you do, when in full feature development mode, which is one of the things I love most about this process/work ;) about some ideas for how we could make these things even more awesome than they were already.

In case you haven't kept up with the latest developments in Blender, there are now two sets of tools with Breakdowner-like functionality:
1) The Pose Breakdowner (and the related "Push" and "Relax" tools)
2) The GPencil Interpolate and Interpolate Sequence operators

This post looks into what we could do for both of these - first common features, and then stuff that's more specific to the GPencil case (since it's newer functionality, which also has heaps more room that we can explore).

Oh, and just in case/before any gets confused, THE FOLLOWING CONTENTS OF THIS POST ARE ALL ENTIRELY HYPOTHETICAL/IDEAS ONLY. There's no guarantee than any of this will be implemented, though I'm curious how well they would turn out if I did :)