The bored, polite bot

A while ago I created this bot that fetches a work from the Drawings, Prints and Graphic Design Department of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and posts it to a website and to twitter, three times a day. I like this pace. It’s not an overload. But sometimes it’s not enough. What if I want a new image right now. The easy option would be to surf to the Cooper Hewitt site and add a query into the search field. The not so easy option would be to create a twitter bot that posts an image of a thing if you ask it to. Politely.

So imagine that you’re bored and you want to see an image of a shark. Now you can ask @onethingplease to send you a shark, please. Be sure to include the word ‘please’. It’s a sensitive bot that will not answer you without it. And right so. The internet can use some manners. But if you do ask it politely it will do its best to find an image of a shark — or whatever you ask it — in the Cooper Hewitt collection. And after a few minutes of searching it will probably send it to you. Or well. Probably not. It is not that accurate. But the results are definitely more surprising than all those fancy “intelligent” image search algorithms we’re used to.

A few of you will try it out. And ask it to send you an image of beer. Or wine. Or a book. Or a computer. Or a lion. Or an alien. But most of the time this bot will be idling. In order to prevent it from getting too bored I gave it the power to update its profile pictures if nobody has asked it anything in the last 30 minutes. This means it will probably do this at least 40 times a day. And nobody will notice. Which makes you wonder. If a bot updated its profile pictures and no human saw it, did it actually happen?

A take-a-break-bot

Last week I was working on a course with a colleague of mine. After a while he told me to take a break. He suggested me to play a game called Pause on my phone. I told him that instead of playing games during my break, I usually take a look at the ceiling. And when I looked up I realised that most ceilings in offices are rather dull. So I created the Ceiling Bot.

If you let it, that site will notify you every two hours that it is time to take a look at the ceiling. If you click on the notification you’ll see a new ceiling. Most of these ceilings are probably much more interesting that the one you see when you look up right now. Like this incredible glass dome. Or this chandelier. 10 minutes is probably not enough to see all the details in this ceiling of a mosque. Or this ceiling in a bar. It looks like in the past ceilings were much more important than they are today. Looks like we’re not very interested in looking up anymore.

If you like, you can follow the ceiling bot on Twitter as well.

One day I might create a back-to-work-bot that shows you a computer screen after the ten minute break is over.

Visual translations

In summer I sometimes lay on the grass with my kid and look up at the sky. And we tell each other what kind of shapes we see. Turtles, birds, dogs, horses — indeed, mostly animals. We see shapes we recognise.

The Google Street View car doesn’t just take pictures of streets, it also looks up and takes pictures of the sky. Katie Rose Pipkin created a website that shows these pictures. But it doesn’t just show them, it also translates them. It does so by virtually laying OCR software on the grass and asking it what it sees. On the coordinates 44.296576,43.168091000000004 for instance it sees

. _\ J . . < _ 2m

I see several smileys when I look at those characters.

The Daily End Of Time

Yesterday I saw this tweet that mentioned the welcome news that the end of the world has been delayed by two days. It will now end on the 25th of September, instead of the 23rd. So with a bit of luck I can still teach my class on Friday. It depends a bit on the exact time and how long such an event takes.

The world has ended at least 165 times in the past 2000 years, according to this list of dates predicted for apocalyptic events. And it has been ending most regularly in the last 50 years or so. I had no idea the world was such a dangerous place to be on!

I thought it would be interesting to make the Daily End Of Time: a bot that tweets — and archives — about one of these catastrophic events. Every day it picks a random end date from the past or the future, and tweets how long ago the world ended. Or how long we still have. It adds a link to the person, or group, who predicted this particular apocalypse. Very interesting reading material. There are a few people who predicted more than one apocalypse! Harold_Camping for instance was very thorough. He predicted six eschatons. Just to be sure, I guess. You’ll also find some surprising names on this list. Isaac Newton for instance! He believed we still have some time. But he might be wrong, and in a few days we might see the world end yet another time.

With a bit of luck you’ll be able to see two or three more updates before the 25th of September though. I hope you enjoy it!

It was 13:37 everywhere

I created a new bot. Twenty four times a day, at 37 minutes past the hour it tweets a location on earth where it’s 13:37 at that very moment. One minute later this location is added to this list of past places where it has been 13:37 before.

The Daily Synonym

A few days ago I created this rather slow animation of the word minimalist and its synonyms. As you can see, the animation isn’t about minimalism at all, it’s about shaping each letter as random as possible by using random values for quite a few CSS properties. While I was looking for synonyms of the word minimalist I noticed that synonyms are more random than I initially thought. For instance, both modest and artist are synonyms of minimalist. And yes, if I search for synonyms for modest, the results will be completely different than when I do a search for artist.

I created a website that will look for a synonym of yesterday’s word, every day at 13:37 CET. It started with the word random, which was synonymised to haphazard. According to the Big Huge Thesaurus haphazard can be synonymised to hit-or-miss, slapdash, slipshod, sloppy, careless, random, or haphazardly. Depending on which word the random algorithm chose next, this could have gone in completely different directions. It went back to random, but it could also have chosen something like careless. I wonder how long it will take until it reaches the word orderly.

I’m pretty happy with the website. It looks focused, and I think it will look even better after a few months, years, decades. You can follow the progress via The Daily Synonym RSS Feed if that’s your thing. For the rest of you I created a Daily Synonym twitter account, which looks pretty good as well, if you ask me.

Some notes for the fundamentalist synonymists among you: for practical reasons I accept not only synonyms, but also similar terms, and even related terms. There would simply not be enough results if I didn’t. And if for whatever reason there are no results for a certain word — for instance, there are no synonyms for the word entity — it starts with random again.

Just the properties

I think Hay Kranen wondered if an entity is still an entity if you only show its properties. Even if I didn’t get it, I find his new project fascinating to look at. Unfortunately it doesn’t work on my old Blackberry Playbook. So instead I use a redundant iPhone — with the iCab browser in kiosk mode — as an art frame.

I look at it every now and then. And then I see something like “This is a scientific journal”, and I think about what the journal could be about. I’ll never know. Another one was about someone who was born in Montreal. Would it be Mike? I haven’t seen him in 10 years. I recently found out that his old e-mail address doesn’t work anymore. When I meet Canadians I always ask them if they know this Guy from Canada called Mike.

And when I read this one — he died on 01-01-2005, he’s an art historian — I thought no he isn’t. This amuses me more than it should.

If you like stuff like this as well you should learn Dutch and subscribe to Hay Kranen’s newsletter.

Random words

Computers are pretty good at generating random numbers. This fact can be used to generate things like logo’s for us. Yesterday I created a little tool that does just that. I needed this tool because I want to print the word Minimalism onto a t-shirt. It styles every letter as random as possible every time you refresh the page.

But computers can do much more than styling stuff for us. They can also create unique content. Katie Rose Pipkin and Loren Schmidt created this wonderful site that describes a different city every time you refresh the page.

This somehow reminded me of the Drunk Men Work Here Weblog Service, with its unique Zero-Click™ posting technology. I created a blog there many years ago which has been posting things every day since, but I can’t remember its name. It’s somewhere in this list.

A Photon, Sturgeon’s law, and the size of everything

There’s this video of the solar system where you travel away from the sun at the speed of light, like a photon. After three minutes this photon reaches the first planet, Mercury, which looks like a small marble. It takes more than eight minutes to reach Earth. It goes on and on for 45 minutes through empty space, passing a little ball every now and then. Alphonse Swinehart took a few liberties while creating this video. First of all, there is no sound in space — which can be emulated by switching off the sound of your device. But more importantly, all planets in our solar system seem to be perfectly aligned. Which in reality they are not. Which made me realise that almost every photon that leaves the sun will never meet anything at all.

I had to think of this video while I was watching the Universal Slide Show in the Image Section on the incredible Library of Babel. The Library of Babel contains all texts that have ever been written, and all texts that will ever be written. It also contains all pictures that have ever been created, all pictures that will ever be created, and even all pictures that have never been taken: every portrait of every person who has ever lived is in there somewhere. The Universal Slide Show shows all of the images, one at a time. I’ve been watching the slide show for quite a while, and so far, all of the images look similar: an image of random noise. This made me wonder. What are the chances of hitting an image of something that can be recognised? Would it be a similar change as a photon traveling from the sun passing by something in the solar system?

This made me think of the ultimate conclusion of Sturgeon’s law. Sturgeon’s law states that 90% of everything is crap. You could apply Sturgeon’s law to the remaining 10%, and conclude that 90% of the things that aren’t crap, turn out to be crap after all. And so on, ad infinitum. When you replace crap with emptiness, you have the changes of a photon passing a rock: very close to zero, but it happens. And if you replace crap with noise you have the chances of seeing a recognisable image on the Universal Slide Show, or finding a readable text in the Library.

The universe is filled with countless stars, and filled with even more planets and other stuff. But the chances of a photon ever hitting one are almost zero. The Library is filled with incredible amounts of readable stuff, and almost unimaginable amounts of recognisable images, yet the chances of stumbling upon one are almost zero.

And then I read that the Library of Babel is bigger than the Universe.

All the books ever, for free

If I wait long enough — and I keep paying my hosting bills the next six trillion years — my server will generate all possible different rectangles in my Daily Rectangle project. It is a long term project.

Jonathan Basile is not as patient as I am. He created this project that is much bigger in size and ambition than my simple rectangles. He created — and finished — the Library of Babel.

At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 104677 books

And yes of course, it also contains this blog post.

Train masonry

A few weeks ago I saw this image of train doors that were closed by a brick wall. I grinned and moved on. I definitely didn’t think about how much work would go into vandalising a train with masonry. Today I saw the making of. Two people took a lot of effort to create this wonderful piece of uselessness.

The Greek Time Clock

When you ask somebody in Greece to wait, you don’t ask them to wait a minute, you ask them to wait two minutes. The interpretation of these two minutes in Greece is different than two minutes in, for instance, The Netherlands. In The Netherlands people are pretty strict about time. Two minutes will be exactly two minutes, or a bit less. In Greece on the other hand, two minutes can be anything from five seconds to two hours, or more. The perception of time in Greece is different. If you say you’ll meet at seven, nobody is really surprised if you show up at eight. I have to say, I enjoy time much more in Greece than here in The Netherlands. I want to enjoy time here as well.

I fixed it

So I created this Greek Time Clock. It shows you the exact time, give or take one hour. And it updates every two minutes.

Random white images

More than 629 days ago I created a site called One Nothing A Day for an ex-colleague of mine who went freelancing; the thing I remember most vividly about freelancing is the fact that you can do nothing for long periods of time. I loved that. Hence this site. Every day it generates the word nothing, set in a randomish font and displayed in a randomish color. The font and the color are based on the date and the time. I was discussing this site with another colleague of mine, Maarten P. Kappert — the mastermind behind the first version of Minimalissimo, which was absolutely brilliant.

Minimalism

Maarten is an aesthetic minimalist, and we always joke about everything that’s not white. I even copied every post from his blog for a while, replacing his comments with criticism on everything that’s not white in the picture. We’ve been playing with the idea of extreme minimalism for a while now, so you may understand that we both considered the One Nothing A Day site to be inaccurate, to say the least. So we created a new blog.

Amor vacui

On this blog we wanted to publish white images. We tried search engines, and sites like Flickr, to find these images for us, but alas, there was no way to make sure that all these images were solid #FFFFFF. So I created the whole thing myself. Every night around midnight a cronjob is fired that generates a new, white image. Its dimensions are based on the last four numbers of the Unix epoch time, which will probably result in a unique image every day. In order to not distract the viewer, the images are displayed on a white background with — carefully measured — enough white-space between them. In a few years this will be a very very long page.

The details

A while ago on Twitter I asked people when they think a site is finished. Most people said never, which is often true, but Peter Gasston said that a site is finished when all supporting elements are in place; 404 page, icons, metadata, page titles. So we added a page title. I created a 404 — not suitable for people who are afraid of non-white. I added an enormous list of white icons of different sizes so you can all bookmark the site to the homescreen of your particular device. It will look wonderful. I even made sure that the code looks nice if you view the source, with plenty of white-space, so even nerds will be happy. In the source you might have seen that the images are perfectly accessible to everybody, even to people who can’t see them. The alt text neatly explains that it’s a white image of certain dimensions.

Follow nothing

Of course you can stay updated. The site has its own RSS feed, and all images are also posted on Twitter on Mastodon and Flickr. They should all get updated somewhere in the middle of the night, when it’s dark; when true minimalists need their dose of white images the most.

I had a wonderful day yesterday designing this whole site together with Maarten, with all these tiny details, with all the things in place. I finally created a true site about nothing. I created a website that looks white.

A URL as a present

Yesterday I read about the art that Constant Dullaart makes. Many of his creations are actually websites, and if you want to buy the work, you buy the domain, with the content. After you’ve bought it, it’s your responsibility to take care of it, to make sure that it doesn’t break. Just like physical art. This solves a problem many digital artists might have with using the web as a medium. You can just sell the domain. Once the maecenases get used to the idea of owning and hosting a website we can start making real web art. Wonderful. This realisation came right on time.

Why?

In the beautifully designed Mobile Book you can find some illustrations by Mike Kus. The chapter about responsive design is illustrated by a work I particularly like. My wife liked it too, we didn’t like one of our walls in our hall, so we decided to paint the illustration on that wall. I ordered some stencils, painted the illustration onto the wall, cursed the inflexibility of the physical world, ordered some new, slightly smaller stencils, and finally repainted the illustration.

What

Now, I didn’t ask Mike for permission, I just painted his work onto my wall. So the least I could do was thank him for creating such a beautiful thing. I thought about sending him a book. But that’s boring. I thought about sending him a poster, but I don’t think these salads compare to the fantastic work he’s created. So when I read about the possibility of selling URLs, I realised that I could also give away a URL. I decided to create a semantically correct, responsive version of Mike’s illustration and give it to him. This is how it works: People with very old browsers will see a purely textual representation of the work while people with other less capable browsers will see the colours that have been used as well. Isn’t that nice?

Native web art

In one of his fantastic talks Bret Victor defines computer art as without behaviour, it’s not native. I changed that quote slightly to Without adaption, it’s not the Web. Anything on the web needs to adapt to the possibilities of the device and browser the visitor chose to use. If it doesn’t it’s not webby. Back to the illustration.

For people with big, modern browsers I used somewhat modern CSS to style the semantic HTML in such a way that it looks like the original illustration: Same layout, same order. For people with a smaller screen, the illustration is reflowed to fit within three columns. The illustration is laid out over two columns on the smallest screens. By my definition — since it adapts to its environment — this version of the work is webby. If you resize your browser window continuously, you are interacting with the work, and the work shows behaviour by reflowing the layout. So in Bret Victor’s terms, this is native computer art. Could it really be that this present is real, native web art?

Happy

I’m very happy that Mike actually likes the things I did to his work. He was excited about the painting, and he was excited about the semantically correct, responsive web version too. I was a bit concerned that he might not have liked it, you never know how people react. In that case I would have kept the painting on my wall, and I would still have given him the URL with its content. But I would not have written about it. And if he wanted to, he could have just deleted all of it. Just like physical art.

Rijks Vasilis

Behind every QR-code is a picture of a wonderful work of art. That’s what my five year old daughter thought for a while. She has an old Ixus camera and a few days ago she was making pictures of something on our wall. She wasn’t happy with the results so she asked to use my iPhone. Again she was not happy with the results, and she gave up. Later, when I was looking at the photos on my phone I saw that she had taken pictures of QR-codes. They didn’t do what she expected. The day before I had shown her that you could find amazing pictures behind these weird blocks. She didn’t know it doesn’t just work with every camera.

The thing on our wall that she was taking pictures of is a work of art, called RIJKS VASILIS. A while ago I came home and it was just there, without any explanation. A big triangle, pointing towards the words RIJKS VASILIS. The triangle consist of 28 QR-codes that direct you towards some lovely works of art, and to one picture of a salad. To truly understand this work, you have to know that I hate QR-codes and that I love the new website of the Rijksmuseum. This work is made by my beloved friends Robert-Jan Verkade, Marrije Schaake and Maaike de Laat with the help of my even more beloved wife Katrien Vermeulen. I’ve tried to figure out why exactly they made it elsewhere.

It’s a weird object. While I think QR-codes are among the most ugly inventions ever made by humans, this thing is actually nice to look at. The repeating pattern is nice, but the geometric shape is a bit clumsy, which makes it human: The codes are all the same size, but the borders around them are of various widths. And then, the distance between them varies too. Compulsive people should probably not look at it for too long, but others might agree with me that exact symmetry and perfection are boring: even without a QR-scanner this is a fascinating thing to look at.

There is a website of this work, with all the QR-codes on it, so you can enjoy the works too. The website lacks the sloppiness, but does have some wonderful things to think about. For instance, I love opening the URL in the browser on my phone. And not because it looks so nice. The only way to actually see the pictures behind the QR-codes is by using an app on another phone. And I don’t have another phone. But I do have my memory so I just look at the codes and imagine looking at The Nachtwacht. Or that weird Japanese print of a giant cucumber with a cricket on it. Or the inspiring painting of the household of Jan Steen. Who would have ever thought that, to amuse myself, I would be looking at QR-codes.

Finally the weather is getting better here in The Netherlands, so my daughter and I were playing outside, on the doorstep. Suddenly my daughter cried out with joy! Close to us a van was parked with a QR-code printed on it. Would it be a beautiful painting of a swan? Would it be that marvellous statuette of a rabbit? Would it be the salad or one of the amazing old Japanese prints? She still doesn’t get it. Why would anyone, ever, want to point towards a crappy contractor’s site?

Nothing has happened

This wonderful site has been neglected for a over year. I’ve been busy with very useful things, like work, design, publishing, and talking. My mind was filled with functional stuff. There was not much room for my beloved nonsense. But a few weeks ago it started itching again. Badly. All the stuff I was doing made so much sense! Yes, sensible stuff can be interesting too, but at the same time it is so boring! I started thinking about art again. About the fact that we miss the influence of non-practical thinking on the web. I had some fantastic evenings with some fine artists, talking about this and other stuff. Stuff that has a function, but in a completely other way than the economic, efficient function that everything is valued by. I met with my old arts teacher and we had an incredibly inspiring evening. Me listening, him and his wife talking about art. So inspiring.

The last post I wrote on this blog was about Nothing, and after that post, nothing happened here. On the site one nothing a day, more than 400 nothings have been published since, though. It is by far the most active project I’ve ever made. And the most lazy project: It updates itself while I procrastinate. Or while I do useful stuff. I still think it’s a wonderful site and every night still get a bit excited when I click on yet another fresh, random nothing.

A while ago I was curious about all the different colours that were generated in the past year. So I created this page with just the colours, not the letters. The function I wrote to pick a random colour is not so random. Several patterns can be found by resizing the browser window, or by scrolling the page. Colours are clearly not chosen randomly and there are dark and light periods, and maybe even more and less saturated periods too. We could investigate why exactly this happens. Or we could just enjoy resizing our browser window in an endless procrastination loop.

I hope this post will inspire me to write more about my dear nonsense.

One Nothing a day

The most pleasant memories I have about the time that I was a freelance web developer are the memories of me doing absolutely nothing. Not just for an hour or two, but for days and days or even weeks in a row. I like doing nothing. I think idling is a good thing, it’s pretty scary to see what negative connotations the word nothing has, just look at those synonyms! If there’s anything I miss about freelancing it’s not the liberty, the money, the responsibility or the pride (and certainly not the angst for lack of work or the insane hours you make when you’re busy), it’s Nothing that I miss.

Nothing

It’s always the last button

As we gain knowledge over the years about the things we design, the design get better and better. When you look at the first web sites and compare them to the things we create today you can say that we made some improvements. This rule, that design gets better over the years, does not apply to remote controls for DVD players.

There are a few things I want to do with a remote control for a DVD player: skip unskippable trailers, go to the menu, and play the damn movie, finally. You’d think that three buttons would be sufficient. Mine has 33.

33 buttons

Random nonsense

I’m working on some lengthy posts about nonsense and they take much more time than I expected – nonsense can be quiet complex! So in the meantime here’s some random nonsense for your well being. We all know On Kawara – well, you do now – who documented everything he did and everywhere he went. Evan Drolet Cook documents the places where he hasn’t been. He might go there one day, but as ever, we don’t know what the future looks like. We’re curious though, so we’re guessing; we’ve always been guessing, and luckily we’ve mostly been wrong. But we’re not just wrong about the future, sometimes it’s hard to get the facts right about our recent history. Back then every man had a moustache. I predict we will all have one in the future.

What pasta should look like

Yes, I do love nonsense but some things are just too absurd, they get in my way. In these rare cases action needs to be taken. You’d think that evolution would get rid of things that just don’t work but apparently evolution really doesn’t exist in god fearing Italy: for as long as I can remember the packaging of all pasta has been flawed.

Pasta?

Blabjuration

Legal disclaimers, long, hard to read documents in which lawyers say, with too many words, something like Ich Habe Es Nicht Gewußt, have no legal status in The Netherlands. In the United States they do, I guess, even though they are meaningless: most disclaimers contain a sentence which states that “we are allowed to change this disclaimer at any time”, which means that tomorrow it can say the exact opposite of what it says today.

Blah blah

Behavioral artgeting

A while ago I read a paper (why do they call a PDF a paper? Ghehehe) about cookies, behavioral targeting and privacy. For those of you who don’t understand what the paper is about: it’s about clever online advertisements and the privacy issues surrounding them – not funny at all and the paper is very useful, not something I should be writing about on this blog. But. In this paper I read this sentence that somehow confused me: The success of behavioral targeting is apparent. Advertisers, publishers and consumers are benefiting. I do understand that advertisers and publishers are benefiting from a successful advertising method, but consumers? I really don’t understand how they benefit in any way from any advertisement, actually.

Where’s the nonsense?

Thirty thousand logos

There are over ten thousand lakes – bigger than ten acres (that’s 40,000 m², for people who don’t understand medieval units) – in Minnesota, a state in the United States of America, and they all have a name, an incredible fact by itself. Nicole Meyer found out that if these ponds have a logo they have a tendency to be, well, fairly ugly. She decided to publish one new logo for one Minnesota lake every day. Until now she made one hundred logos which means she just has to make another 9,900 to finish. The project will be done in little over twenty seven years.

Read the rest of this entry »

Moar lasers

Lasers are the shit. All sharks have lasers, I’m sure you didn’t know that. Some of you might know that most women incorporate lasers but to most of you men it must come as a surprise. My loyal readers should know that the little creatures on this site are capable of shooting not just two but four lasers on command. But unfortunately most humans (well men anyways) don’t natively support lasers. Until today.
Today the evil geniuses Kilian Valkhof and Paul Chaplin, launched the Laser Eyes webservice which lets you add lasers to pictures you upload. Only robots who were sent from the future can create something like that! For this reason you will need a future proof browser (Firefox will do, Chrome will do but is very slow on Mac). I think this is the most incredible thing you will ever see. As far as I can tell the internet is finished.