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When I created OpenDithering back in June, the feature I was proudest of was the Auto-tune button. It did the slider work for me: it compared the dithered result to the original image, nudged the settings, and repeated until the image stopped improving. Over the summer it grew into a three-step process (Auto Expose, Color-tune, […] The post I deleted my favorite feature, and the image got better: Direct Binary Search (DBS) in OpenDithering appeared first on Style over Substance.
Back in 2021, I wired up data from Buienalarm and Buienradar through Node-RED and a big pile of Jinja2 templates to get a rain forecast graph on my Apple Watch: eight Unicode block characters showing the next two hours in 15-minute chunks, glanceable without unlocking the phone. It worked, and I used it every day […] The post Buienwatch, a custom Home Assistant integration for Buienradar and Buienalarm graphs on your Apple Watch appeared first on Style over Substance.
Dithering is one of those techniques that feels like it belongs in a museum. It peaked in the ’90s, the era of 256-color palettes and early computer graphics, when you needed to trick the eye into seeing colors that your hardware couldn’t actually produce. Now, even our phones have OLED displays that do HDR, and […] The post Dithering is obsolete (except when it isn’t); creating OpenDithering appeared first on Style over Substance.
Last year I wrote about how I had written an ESPHome configuration for the Seeed Studio reTerminal E1002 device to work as a small, color, digital art frame. This year, I wrote about how I had been using Claude Code to help me write Home Assistant code for myself. Those efforts have now combined in […] The post Black and white epaper photo frame based on Seeed Studio reTerminal E1003 using ESPHome and Home Assistant appeared first on Style over Substance.
For the past few months, I’ve been dabbling with Claude Code. Not in a “no one needs developers anymore, anyone can build apps now” kind of way. More in a “I have a basic understanding of this, but not enough to turn it into code I can actually use” kind of way. I don’t need […] The post Using Claude Code to write Home Assistant integrations appeared first on Style over Substance.
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I love Letterboxd, but I hate how they show you the cast on the web app. Here's the cast of The Batman on the web. I mean, that's them, but I'm often going to this page wondering who played someone, and that is an
If you visit, someone someone will inevitably tell you: “The Day of the Dead parade isn’t a real tradition!
In short: I use iOS Shortcuts to run a Mastodon bot. I run a Mastodon bot that posts random quotes from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. (The writing in that game is so charming!) I used to run it off a server, but for the past few days, it’s used an iOS Shortcut on my phone. How it works The bot is called Ulrira, named after a beloved Link’s Awakening character. Ulrira (the bot, not the character) samples a line from the text dump, then makes an HTTP request to post it. Here’s a screenshot of the full thing: As you can see, everything here is hard-coded, from the server credentials to the file name. (It probably wouldn’t be hard to make this more generic, but I didn’t bother.) This used to be a short, hand-written Bash script. I used the new AI-powered Shortcut creator and prompted this into existence. I said something like, “Here’s a Bash script. Turn this into a Shortcut.” Like a lot of LLM output, it wasn’t quite right, but it was useful for getting started. Shortcuts doesn’t seem to have an elegant way to express something like “run this every 6 hours”, so I created four additional scheduler Shortcuts that call the main one. They run at 12am, 6am, 12pm, and 6pm. That means there are five shortcuts in total: one to actually make the post, and four to schedule the main Shortcut at different times. Why do it this way? I didn’t want to pay for my server anymore, nor did I want to maintain it. When I went looking for alternatives, they either (1) cost money (2) had some significant limitation (for example, GitHub Actions requires me to update the repo every 60 days). This solution runs on a device with high uptime and is effectively free. If you’re a pro software genius, you might complain that this is not reliable! It doesn’t work if my phone is offline, for example. Or what if I change timezones? But in the words of Link’s Awakening: You’re good! You’re a pro, aren’t you? ………… Well, beat it! Pros aren’t allowed in here! Follow the bot here.
