Programmers do various sorts of hobbies when they get free time. Some programmers like to play musical instruments. Meanwhile, some programmers enjoy watching movies, tech talks, and documentaries. However, every programmer likes to experiment and write some code just for fun. The following tech-projects are done by programmers just for fun. But, these tech projects undoubtedly can impress any programmer in the world.
ASCIImation
A digital video has a set of frames and those frames are displayed in chronological order to make moving objects in the video. Also, each frame is made out of pixels that have different color values. Similarly, the ASCIImation concept has a set of frames that are made with ASCII characters. Each ASCII-based frame is played chronologically to produce the animation called ASCIImation. The developer of this concept made the ASCIImation version of the Star Wars movie to demonstrate how it works.
Of course, each frame consists of a set of ASCII characters as shown below.
Full source frames of the Star Wars ASCIImation movie can be found here. Also, this can be played with the following telnet command.
$ telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Webamp
I can remember how I played music files around 11 years ago using Winamp which had various sorts of graphical skins. But now, we do all the things including listening to music using the web browser. We all could still remember Winamp and I am pretty sure that a few people still use it happily. A programmer made a web version of Winamp and named it Webamp by adding almost all the basic features we used in the past. Furthermore, Webamp supports Winamp skins that are coming as .wsz files and many graphical skins can be found here.
JS Paint
When Windows XP and the earlier versions were popular every child who started learning computers began with Microsoft Paint program because it gave a great foundation for doing mouse actions for them. But now, Paint is like a deprecated component of the Windows platform since Microsoft introduced a new improved version called Paint 3D. The first version of Paint was released in 1985 with Windows 1.0, and at that time it was called Paintbrush.
A programmer recreated an earlier version of the Paint program using JavaScript. The UI components such as buttons and menus are implemented as HTML elements and the drawing area was built using an HTML canvas. JS Paint consists of almost all features of the old Paint program. Besides, it has some additional features like dark mode too.
WinXP desktop recreation
Windows XP is undoubtedly the favorite operating system of every die-hard Windows fan. It was fast for any low-end computer too. A decade ago I used it with just 128 megabytes of physical memory and a Pentium-III processor. Almost all programmers who were born in the 90s compiled their first hello-world-program on Windows XP. There is a Win98 desktop recreation already but a programmer recreated Windows XP desktop too using the React front-end library because Windows XP was a memorable operating system too.
This Windows XP desktop recreation has Webamp and JS Paint too to remind our golden past days with computers.
img2css
A digital image generally consists of a matrix of pixel properties such as color intensity values (Red, Green, and Blue) and an opacity value known as the alpha value. Similarly, everything we see on the computer screen is constructed using tiny light pixels. Meanwhile, a programmer made a way to display images on the browser just using a single div element. The particular div is styled with the box-shadow CSS property to render each pixel of the image. img2css website will take an image as the input and will produce a CSS version of the particular image by generating the value for the box-shadow property automatically.
This div element has a 1-pixel width and 1-pixel height. Thereafter, if box-shadow property is set for a specific position with a color value, a pixel can be rendered to the screen. For example, the following CSS snippet will render two red pixels on the screen.
div {
width: 1px;
height: 1px;
box-shadow: red 200px 200px, red 0px 200px;
}
Likewise, the img2css web application will construct all the pixels of the given image.
JSFuck
Nowadays, JavaScript is everywhere. Earlier it was started as a simple scripting language to make dynamic web pages. But now, JavaScript can be used to build back-ends for web applications, desktop applications, mobile applications, and embedded systems. Of course, JavaScript is sometimes appearing as a mysterious language because it will generate some confusing things (For example, remind typeof null problem).
This is a nice way to write JavaScript using just 6 characters. For example, !![] can be used instead of true . Similarly, other things of a source code also can be converted into this 6-character format using this website.
