Here are all of the wacky projects I’ve made over the years:
Port of Steam-Powered YouTube to HTML5
Steam-Powered YouTube was an early 2010s flash game which imagined YouTube, but steam powered. Like all flash applications, it met its end when Adobe discontinued flash player (though I’m sure the YouTube flash API had stopped working long before then), but I had fond memories of playing this as a kid, so I resurrected it. This is a recreation from a combination of memory, contemporary videos of the original I’ve found online, and assets extracted from the original flash app. Most flash web-toys have succumbed to the relentless march of time: forgotten, abandoned, and unloved, but there are always a few that slip through the reaper’s fingers, so go on, relive that 2012 nostalgia, and have fun.
One of my first ever programming projects. One day I was staring at my keyboard when I had the idea to assign each character a number based on its position in the QWERTY keyboard layout. Then I realized you could add the numbers of 2 characters together, then convert it back to a character, and you’d get a scrambled output. But if you knew the “key” – the sequence of numbers added to the original plaintext, you could recover the original message. And thus was born a new, very basic encryption algorithm, which I promptly implemented in the only programming language I knew: Scratch. I then produced a surprisingly regular series of updates and bugfixes for the encryptor, before finally porting it to JavaScript, bringing us to the page you can now see above. A far cry from the simplistic program I started with (which I believe is still public, by the way).
It’s a basic HTML editor with a preview function. What do you want me to say?
At school I saw a lot of teachers using YouTube videos for timers and I thought “That’s incredibly dumb. Why would anyone make or use these?” So to solve the problem, I decided to make my own timer app with a button to easily save (and embed) timers of a certain length for use in, say, slideshows. It didn’t occur to me that Google probably doesn’t let you embed any website you want in a slideshow for whatever reasons they may have. In any case it exists and it works, so that’s something.
I needed to generate some MAC addresses for some VMs, so I went online, and I got burned. The MAC address generator I picked generated a multicast address, which does not work for a virtual NIC! So I decided to make my own that actually generates valid unicast MAC addresses.
Hey look! It’s something I made for school! It’s a cute little 2D infinite vertical performer inspired by one of my favorite dumb games ever, Doodle Jump.
fidget…. spinner… spinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
(Java port coming soon to a PowerMac near you!)
(I’m not joking. I’m making a port of this toy to Java 1.1.8 to target Mac OS 9.)
That’s all for now, folks, but check back for more dumb projects in the future!