I have ported my Twitch Live browser extension for Google Chrome to Firefox. Twitch Live is a toolbar extension that makes it easy to see when your favorite streamers on Twitch are live.

There are options to open streams in a new window or tab, to enable notifications, as well as filter out vod casts / reruns.

You can install the extension from the Firefox Add-Ons site. If you have any issues, just ping me at @mesh on twitter.

I have been playing around with openFrameworks and some Perlin noise this weekend, and put together a quick project which autogenerates high resolution desktop wallpaper graphics. I grabbed a couple of my favorites and wanted to share them here to make them easy to download.

You can grab the code on my github page.

Here are the graphics. Just click through for the high resolution version.

Paper.js is currently the primary creative framework that I use for my creative coding. I really like its API, which is easy to use and extend, the ease in exporting vectors graphics from it (making it easy to create high resolution prints), and the general ease of development due to the use of JavaScript and running within the browser. While I do sometimes miss the higher performance that lower level frameworks like processing or openFrameworks provide, for the most part the advantages of Paper.js far outweighs the performance penalties of running in the browser.

I have put together a Google Chrome extension named Adobe Live on Behance which makes it easy to keep track of when Adobe is live streaming from Behance.

Install Adobe Live on Behance Chrome Extension.

To use, install the extension which will place a small Behance icon on the Chrome tool bar. When Adobe is live, the icon will turn blue, and show “LIVE”. Just click the icon, and the live stream will load.

I am working on creating a new Google Chrome extension, and needed a way to quickly test and iterate on toolbar badges and icons. So, I created a simple Google Chrome extension to make it easy to test Google Chrome extension toolbard icons.

The extension is called Chrome Extension Icon Tester and is avaliable as an open source project via Github.

The extension allows you to quickly test and iterate through multiple icons, as well as set and test badge overlays and test. Complete instructions are included on the project site.

I recently received my amateur radio general license and setup my station. One of the first formats I was interested in was JT65, as it provides good reception, even with poor signals, and it has a fairly structured format which makes it a bit easier to start with. So, what is JT65? From Wikipedia:

JT65, developed and released in late 2003,[3] is intended for extremely weak but slowly varying signals, such as those found on troposcatter or Earth-Moon-Earth (EME, or “moonbounce”) paths.[2] It can decode signals many decibels below the noise floor in a 2500 Hz band (note that SNR in a 2500 Hz band is approximately 28 dB lower than SNR in a 4 Hz band, which is closer to the channel bandwidth of an individual JT65 tone), and can often allow amateurs to successfully exchange contact information without signals being audible to the human ear. Like the other modes, multiple-frequency shift keying is employed; unlike the other modes, messages are transmitted as atomic units after being compressed and then encoded with a process known as forward error correction (or “FEC”). The FEC adds redundancy to the data, such that all of a message may be successfully recovered even if some bits are not received by the receiver. (The particular code used for JT65 is Reed-Solomon.) Because of this FEC process, messages are either decoded correctly or not decoded at all, with very high probability. After messages are encoded, they are transmitted using MFSK with 65 tones.

I have just released a project called pizone that uses a Raspberry PI, along with some NodeJS code to create a customer Nintendo Zone access point. This allows you to connect your Nintendo 3DS to the point, and get Spot and Street Passes (along with other game specific items) from players around the world.

You can see a quick video here:

Features include:

I am using a lot of Adobe Kuler Adobe Color themes in one of my projects. However, there is not a quick way to get the color theme information in a format that is easy to use in code (I have been manually copying and pasting each individual color value).

I was going to write a Chrome content script, but then found out it can’t read variables from the page. So, I put together a quick code snippet that you can paste into the Chrome developer console, which will grab the colors and format them so they are easy to use in code.

Recently I have been spending some time playing around with Paper.js, an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas, similar to CreateJS.

One of the cool features of Paper.js (and the reason I am using it) is that it has support for exporting its content via SVG. Among other things, this allows me to bring anything I create into Illustrator, and gives me the option to do resolution independent prints.

I recently completed migrating my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll (complete post on that soon). One of the main reasons for the move is that I didn’t want to continue to have to maintain MySQL, Apache, PHP and everything else required by Wordpress. However, before I shut everything down, I wanted to create a static archive of the entire Wordpress blog, in case I find some content in the future that did not export corectly to the Jekyll based blog.