Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Sandbox

Experiments, tinkering, and things I'm trying out.

I’m slightly divided on who to support in the curling tonight. The all-Scottish GBR team or the Canada team? Either way, it’s going to be a great final for the gold medal.

Generating note banners with Ruby

I created some banner images of my own for Apple Notes and Bear this morning, like the ones you can use with the Forever Notes system. Unlike the ones you can download from the resources page, though, mine are a bit more customisable and generate a different set of mountains each time.

I quite like the end result of these.

Auto-generated description: A series of overlapping mountains is depicted using various textures and patterns in a grayscale scheme.

Auto-generated description: A stylized illustration features a series of overlapping geometric mountain ranges in various shades of blue and dotted patterns.

Auto-generated description: Stylized green hills and mountains are depicted with layers of textured patterns.

The other nice thing about them is that the fill colour can be transparent. So in Bear, when you switch to a dark theme, the dark colour comes through the banner. It doesn’t look so great with the light themes, but I barely use them anyway.

Currently, I have two scripts, one for generating a transparent banner and one that generates a banner using a set of colours.

I plan on adding a few more over the next few months. Clouds, hills, snowflakes and skyscrapers could all be generated with random patterns and follow the same convention. I won’t be running a web server to allow others to generate these easily. Generating images consumes more energy than a typical web request, so in the meantime, you’ll need to download the scripts and generate them yourself.

Source code is available on SourceHut.

Waking up to significant changes in the political landscape in the UK. Not just a new majority party but also substantial changes in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I sincerely hope that all elected politicians try to work on gaining the trust of the UK public once again.

I can’t remember a wetter, colder, greyer and more miserable spring than the one we’re having right now in the west of Scotland.

Too much cloud cover over us tonight to see the blue moon. Fingers crossed we get better visibility tomorrow.

Is it time for a new Repulican party?

The GOP is continuing its move to always side with Trump.
In this, Cheney is hardly alone. At the national and state level, Republicans who challenged Trump’s Big Lie — ranging from Sen. Mitt Romney (UT) all the way down to a member of the Michigan State Board of Canvassers — have either been formally punished or publicly rebuked. The party may not agree on much internally nowadays, but on this point, they march in lockstep: Trump’s falsehoods about the election must not be challenged.

— The Big Lie is the GOP’s one and only truth
It makes you wonder if it's time for a new Republican party.

The Santa deniers just ruin it for everyone else. The Guardian hits back with some key evidence to prove Santa is real.

Santa’s workshop is located in a very snowy region that very few people can access, so it’s unlikely that many people would get to see it. It would theoretically be possible to view it from above, via an aircraft or satellite in a polar orbit, but what would Santa’s workshop look like from this perspective? A snow-covered building on a background of ice and snow? That’s basically just blank whiteness. And infrared scans can be tricky with snow.

— Santa Claus deniers: why do they get so much airtime? by The Guardian

Photo of the day

I still want to go back here and watch the sun rise and set on the canyon. I only got to see the canyon during the middle of the day. Nevertheless, it is a breath taking place to see, no matter what time of day it is.

via Mme Scherzo