I may have just customized the starter page template and written my own css. It’s not too complicated. I like the simple wiki look more than a full featured website. Heavily inspired by the wonderful website of Inigo Quilez.
Andreas’ “gallery” plugin was a great way to share my photos. I believe I tweaked the code to read exif data from the jpegs to extract the comment/description and display it as a caption.
“Graphviz” was also wonderful for generating flowcharts and organization charts for my work.
My present website runs on dokuwiki, though it’s pretty bare bones and not doing anything fancy. Just an English-Japanese bilingual setup.
Maybe it seems a bit mundane, but I was moved to tears watching the live footage of the Artemis reentry shot out of the window. It’s an unedited 25 minutes of visuals and sounds that the astronauts saw and heard as they returned to Earth, and it has some of the most beautiful “real” things recorded for all to see.
Between the gorgeous blue planet and blackness of space you see the fiery reentry and flakes of spacecraft burning off into the distance as the capsule makes a mind-bending descent into the atmosphere. The video includes live telemetry about speed and G forces, as well as all the sounds of the maneuvering thrusters doing an algorithmic dance to keep the angles exactly as they need to be
It’s one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen, and makes me proud of all humanity has achieved.
A long time ago I wrote a little web app that takes a search string and finds all the words in the dictionary that have overlap with its spelling. Sort of a portmanteau generator. It was just a fun project at the time, but I have used it on countless occasions to brainstorm unique names for projects, websites, etc.
You can try it from the link below. Just type any word or name and it will populate the results.
I think kaomoji have been a thing in Japan even before unicode was invented. The Japanese encodings and IME (input method esitors) allowed them to type a wide variety of characters, punctuation and symbols that aren’t available in most western encodings, so I feel like the Japanese folks had a head start on creative use of typography.
For example, if you want an eyeball you can just type “do” (degrees), and the IME will pull up °, and “omega” gives you ω, so it’s pretty easy to make (°ω°).
I don’t know what technically constitutes the most troublesome username, but surely some of the kaomoji Japanese folks have come up with are up there. Good luck trying to type these.
Seeing Lower Decks has messed with my memory of the TNG episode to where I now could swear they were sassy and could speak.