So … DOSBox …

On Friday, once work was done, I kind of started thinking about “SimLife”.

I’d posted about it a week or two ago and I thought it might be fun to try it out again and see if it was as bad as I remembered.

I went and installed DOSBox (https://www.dosbox.com/) but discovered that Boxer (http://boxerapp.com/) no longer worked for my version of macOS since it has not been updated in ages — shows how long it’s been since I tried DOSBox I guess 😛

That sent me down all sorts of byways and alleyways trying out various alternatives to Boxer and even setting up MS-DOS 6.22 on a VM but I eventually came back to DOSBox since it was the easiest/simplest way to get going.

I tried out “SimLife” again and was pleasantly surprised to find that I actually kind of liked the game. I probably hadn’t tried out the tutorial back in the day and probably just tried clicking around and it’s the kind of game where you really need to know the mechanics. So I might try playing it again over the next few weeks …

But that opening graphic, so gorgeous even for that time period — just so lovely 🙂

#Games #DOS #Memories #Sim #History
“SimLife” opening graphic / spl…
“SimLife” game start showing th…

A gorgeous tricolored heron (also known as a Louisiana Heron) slowly wading through the water looking for food in the lakes at Huntington Beach State Park.

https://pixels.com/featured/colorful-tricolored-heron-chad-meyer.html

#AYearForArt #BuyIntoArt #TheArtDistrict #heron #birds #birdwatching #naturephotography

Anyone have good leads on Mid-Senior level iOS roles?

A good friend and former coworker is looking for a new job. They've been working with SwiftUI a lot lately, but really interested in doing anything with iOS. I can share more detail and a shining reference on request!

Does anybody remember the classic “Star Trek” game from the 70’s? Or was that way before anybody’s time? 😛

I was playing around with DOSBox (more on that in a separate post) and was reminded of the game suddenly.

I recall playing a version on DOS back in 1990 (or 91) which had color graphics and more graphical controls than “Trek73” or “Super Trek”. The closest one I can find now is “EGA Trek” (see first screenshot) but I’m fairly certain that that wasn’t the one I played because the Main Viewer area in “EGA Trek” cycles through different graphics and I don’t remember that.

Also the game I played had long range and short range scanners which used up energy and that doesn’t seem to be a feature of “EGA Trek”.

Now that I’ve remembered the game, I really want to play that exact version again 😛

I’ve played “EGA Trek”, “VTrek” (second screenshot) and gone through a bunch of newer variations that people created on GitHub. But none of them have the same feel as the game I remember. If anybody knows of the game I’m talking of, please let me know?

I think part of the trouble is that back then they were all called “Star Trek” and that was it. So many variations by so many people.

In fact, I thought the one I liked might have been created in Turbo Pascal (for no reason I could think of) and almost went down another rabbit hole setting up Turbo Pascal just to re-create the game for DOS 😛

Then I realized that if I were to re-create it that I might as well do it in Swift or Flutter so that I can have it avaialbe on more platforms. Will I do it? I don’t know … I guess it depends on how badly I want to play the version I remember again 🙂

#Games #StarTrek #DOS #Memories #History
“EGA Trek” game screen showing …
“VTrek” game screen showing a b…

#introduction

Hi, I'm Justin. I am a software engineer living in #SanFrancisco's #innerrichmond. I'm married, have two kids, and enjoy spending time with them.

Right now, I am working on personal projects and would like to work someday in #MachineLearning or #VirtualReality #VR. I wish both were more open like the web was in the early 00's.

To keep fit I mostly enjoy #Cycling around #sfbay

I enjoy #3dprinting, #gaming, #SciFi and #GeekCulture #Goth #Cyberpunk.

I've fallen behind on my #MarshMadness posts, so here's Thursday's marsh critter for you you. This is a greater yellowlegs (Tringa melanoleuca). Probably. The greater yellowlegs actually looks remarkably like the lesser yellowlegs, but the lesser yellowlegs is more closely related to the willet. Try to keep up here.

#birds #BirdsOfMastodon #photos #photography

Enchanted
By Jennifer Lommers

#trees #mastoart #painting #flowers

Dark Sky

2023-02-20/21 day 248/249 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off). 

I followed a Joel Create tutorial. It’s a bit different from the usual, which is its charm.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/dark-sky/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A sunset image in pinks and pur…

Psychoticat

2023-02-18/19 day 246/247 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off). 

I loosely followed a Tatyworks tutorial. Emphasis on loosely.

Her tutorial is for a bear. I did one of a cat.

So my quick sketching skills need work and my cat looks a little bit crazy. And yes, I see the things that could be improved, alas. And yes, that is a blep.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/psychoticat/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A peach coloured cat standing o…

"Inversion-Based Style Transfer with Diffusion Models. (arXiv:2211.13203v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)" — Accurately transfer the style attributes such as semantics, material, object shape, brushstrokes and colors of an input image to the target image.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13203
Code: https://github.com/zyxelsa/InST

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Style transfer results by using…

"Scaling up GANs for Text-to-Image Synthesis. (arXiv:2303.05511v1 [cs.CV])" — Adapting the GAN architecture for generating images via text prompts to work with large datasets, offering faster generation times and higher resolutions.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05511

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Some sample images generated by…

"Mark My Words: Dangers of Watermarked Images in ImageNet. (arXiv:2303.05498v1 [cs.LG])" — A look at the potential risks of watermarked images present in
ImageNet and their impact on popular Deep Neural Networks (DNN) trained on this dataset.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05498

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Multiple images with watermarks…

"3DGen: Triplane Latent Diffusion for Textured Mesh Generation. (arXiv:2303.05371v1 [cs.CV])" — Generating 3D meshes using diffusion models.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05371

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Single category unconditional m…

"BaDLAD: A Large Multi-Domain Bengali Document Layout Analysis Dataset. (arXiv:2303.05325v1 [cs.CV])" — A dataset to help with Bengali document layout analysis, containing 33,695 human annotated document samples from six domains.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05325
Code: https://github.com/anon-user-for-web/badlad

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
A sample of the different layou…

"Detecting Images Generated by Diffusers. (arXiv:2303.05275v1 [cs.CV])" — Detecting if given images were generated by diffusion models or not. Appears to be limited to detecting images only if images generated by a particular diffusion model were in the training set.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05275

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
The two different network setup…

"O2RNet: Occluder-Occludee Relational Network for Robust Apple Detection in Clustered Orchard Environments. (arXiv:2303.04884v1 [cs.CV])" — Using deep learning to detect apples in orchards for harvesting.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04884

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Six sample images from the coll…

Windmill

2023-02-16/17 day 244/245 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off). 
I followed a Tatyworks tutorial. In this tutorial, Tatiana demonstrated the use of the vanishing point guidelines. (I think. This is why I shouldn’t wait a month to do a write up. Sheesh.) I messed it up and didn’t quite follow the instructions properly, so I should do this again (but using another subject, of course.)
And this demonstrates what I like about her tutorials – I learn how to use the bits and bobs of the app.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/windmill/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A windmill in the distance with…

Indian Ocean Sunset

2023-02-14/15 day 242/243 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off). 

This is a very basic painting that’s basically me playing with oil brushes and seeing how it would go.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/indian-ocean-sunset/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A sunset over an ocean. Paintin…

A #SilentSunday throwback to my favorite place in the world, #Heidelberg, Germany, in 2013.

#MastoArt #Photography #Landscape #Cityscape #Sunset

A few days ago, I switched over to using the Microsoft Edge browser since it had a few nifty features that I really liked — like the sidebar tools, the ability to “sleep” unused tabs, the Bing search integration with chat (I was testing it out) and so on …

I was happy with things till yesterday when I started noticing subtle issues:

1. Text copied from Edge and pasted into an edit box in macOS behaved strangely. This was rather weird because I’d try to delete (rather than backspace) using the “fn” key and it would go in the opposite direction for some text. Perhaps some leftover invisible encoding?

2. Sometimes you couldn’t click on elements around the edge of the browser window. This one was again weird because the issue would go away if you restarted the browser but over time would re-appear.

I finally had enough of it and switched back to Firefox today 😛

But …. After so many years of using Google as my default search engine, I switched to Bing since I like the Bing results better and I do want to keep testing the Bing Chat feature …

#Browser #Edge #Microsoft #Firefox #Search