Andrei Ciobanu

Software Engineer from Eastern Europe.

This place is my garden of curiosities, or a chocolate factory, or artifacts from an alternative Internet that never quite happened.

This section is a work in progress, and if the number of links increases, I will need to find a better solution to manage them.

Algorithms and Data Structures

Art & Computers & Mathematics

  • A stacked clock
    • A clock where the hands were connected end-to-tip instead of all being connected to the center of the clock, making a sort of time arm (second hand starting where minute hand ended, etc)
  • Ben Kovach
    • “With procedural generation, I can save my stylistic choices and re-use them later. I can add a nearly infinite amount of detail to any artwork. I can explore quickly and seamlessly, figuring out which ideas work and which ones don’t in a short period of time. Randomized outputs can be unpredictable, so I’m constantly surprised by even my own work.”
  • Bees And Bombs
    • Dave Whyte, motion graphic design.
  • bleuje’s animations
    • Animations since 2017. They look fantastic. Thank you, Etienne Jacob!
  • broider
    • This a tool for making “9-patch” borders.
  • Dans Les Nuages
    • “I enjoy the possibility of relative anonymity to regain a freedom of experimentation that some closed ecosystems cheerfully took away, by their elitism or traditionalism.”
  • e4494s
    • “This is where I make art, games, generators, simulations, and other random things to waste time on. Sometimes I make kinda cool stuff.”
  • Fractal Jigsaw Puzzle
  • Fractals On Google Earth
    • “The following is a “photographic” gallery of fractal patterns found while exploring the planet with Google Earth”
  • Finite Curve
    • A web app to draw any photo with a single line.
  • Field Lines
  • Glitch2
    • Glitch images in creative ways.
  • hexeosis
    • “The hexeosis art style is deeply rooted in the principles of geometry, symmetry, and infinity, expressed through mesmerizing animated geometric looping GIFs.”
  • Jean-Michel Jarre’s Classic ‘Oxygene 4’ Recreated With 19KB Of Javascript
    • While many have attempted over the years to recreate Jean-Michel Jarre‘s classic Oxygène 4 using classic and vintage gear, Dittytoy user srtuss is the first that we’re aware of to do it using mind-bullets, aka 19KB of Javascript code.
  • junkiyoshi.com/
    • Personal site of Jun Kiyoshi. Computer-generated art.
  • Labyrnth
    • “I love Mazes and Labyrinths! That includes creating them, solving them, sharing with other enthusiasts, and most everything else. This site is dedicated to Mazes and Labyrinths, and features interactive Maze software, information on the movie “Labyrinth”, galleries of Mazes, pictures of life size Mazes and Labyrinths, and more. Labyrinthink! :-)”
  • Labyrinths and Mazes
    • Labyrinths and mazes cradle millennia of legend and lore in their twisted articulations and are often considered mankind’s first creation borne purely of human imagination.
  • Le Jeune Renard
    • “Sean Zellmer is a creative technologist whose goal is for you to discover the complexity of reality. He gives abstract concepts and objects form via technology, opening a window into a different dimension and building a semantic bridge to you.”
  • Mandelbox
    • Mandelbox in Jelly.
  • Mario Carillo
    • The generative art of Mario Carillo.
  • Motion Cells
    • Drawing lines by following a changing vector field.
  • Mutable Gallery
    • A collection of generative artworks by Heydon Pickering.
  • Unicode Maze Generator
    • This script will generate mazes in plain unicode text.
  • Visualising the beauty of PI
    • Looking at the number PI from different angles: PI on a grid, a random walk of PI digits, a circular web-walk of PI, and the probability histogram of PI.
  • Virtual Insanity but it’s played on an oscilloscope
    • Eventually, I’ve decided to include this in the category of arts.
  • Sandspiel
  • The Lorentz Attractor
    • Not exactly art, but you can consider it so.
  • The story about Little Bird
    • Crossing the river.
  • Travelling Salesman Art
  • Weavesilk
    • Interactive generative art. It has a soothing effect.
  • Zoomquilt
    • Fractal to infinity.

Blogging

Books

C Programming

Command Line

  • explain shell
    • Write down a command-line to see the help text that matches each argument.
  • lsix
    • Like ls, but for images. Shows thumbnails in terminal using sixel graphics.
  • Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim
  • thirsty
    • “If you’re like me and you spend a lot of time programming with the command line open, chances are that you forget about everything for hours, which includes drinking water. At the end of the day I used to realise that I had not consumed enough water. Hence I created a bash/zsh script to remind me to drink water right on my command line.”

Esoteric

  • esolangs
    • This wiki is dedicated to the fostering and documentation of programming languages designed to be unique, difficult to program in, or just plain weird.
  • How to write a self-printing program
    • “A self-printing program – also called a quine – is a program that prints out its own source code.”
  • Quine Relay
    • QR.rb is a Ruby program that generates a Rust program that generates a Scala program that generates …(through 128 languages in total)… a REXX program that generates the original Ruby code again.
  • Hull: An alternative to shell that I’ll never have time to implement
    • “Here’s an idea. It’s kind of crazy but it’s also fun to think about.”
  • Learn Prolog Now!
    • “We wanted to do two things with this course. First, we wanted to provide a text that was relatively self contained, a text that would permit someone with little or no knowledge of computing to pick up the basics of Prolog with the minimum of fuss. We also wanted the text to be clear enough to make it useful for self study. We believe that if you read the text, and do the associated exercises, you will gain a useful partial entry to the world of Prolog.”
  • Self-printing Game of Life in C#
    • “I wrote a little C# program that contains a Game-of-Life grid. The program advances the game grid to the next generation and prints out a copy of itself, with the grid updated. You can take the output, compile it with a C# compiler, run it, and you’ll get the next generation of the game. You can iterate the process, or change the initial grid state manually.”
  • tio.run
    • TIO is a family of online interpreters for an evergrowing list of practical and recreational programming languages. It knows how to run a few of the most popular esoteric programming languages.
  • tryapl
    • APL is an array-oriented programming language that will change the way you think about problems and data.
  • uiua
    • Uiua lets you write code that is as short as possible while remaining readable, so you can focus on problems rather than ceremony.

Essays

Funny

Games

  • A dark room
    • One interesting text-adventure game
  • A slower speed of light
    • A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments.
  • Bonsai Builder
    • “To grow a bonsai is to cultivate the essence of a tree in miniature. Take your time and enjoy the calming atmosphere. Explore the possibilities and share what you find with the community.”
  • Can’t Unsee
    • Select the design that “is the most correct”.
  • Collosal Cave Adventure Page
    • You can play the game here
    • The user would thus be a part of an ongoing story in a fantasy setting — in this case, an exploration of Colossal Cave in Kentucky. But this Colossal Cave, though remarkably similar to its real-life counterpart, was also very different: Magic was afoot in the cave…
  • Cube Composer
    • Solve puzzles by thinking like a “Functional Programmer”
  • DOS Games
    • 21st century DOS games.
  • Dune 2 (Web Version)
    • The first RTS game I’ve played, now on WEB.
  • Fantasy Map Generator
  • Flexbox Adventure
    • Learn CSS by playing the Flexbox Adventure.
  • Open Source Games
    • This is a list of different open-source video games and commercial video games open-source remakes.
  • ORB Farm
    • This is your personal aquatic ecosystem to nurture, sculpt, and observe.
  • paku paku
    • 1-D pacman.
  • puzzle script
    • PuzzleScript is an open-source HTML5 puzzle game engine.
  • Quantum Soccer
    • In the game of Quantum Soccer, the aim is to shape the wave function of a quantum-mechanical “ball” so that the probability of it being inside one of the goals rises above a set threshold.
  • Retrogrames.cz
    • An online museum of old video games.
  • Retromags
    • This site is set up to digitally preserve video game magazines from 10 years ago and earlier.
  • Rogue
    • This is the original game, not a rogue-like.
  • Sandtris
    • A tetris game that plays with sand.
  • Snake Google Maps
    • Play snake on “Google Maps”.
  • Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection
    • Introduction This page contains a collection of small computer programs which implement one-player puzzle games.
  • Synesthesia
    • Very creative.
  • TIC-80
    • TIC-80 is a free and open source fantasy computer for making, playing and sharing tiny games.
  • The noise control game
    • You need to cancel the noise.
  • The sinusoidal tetris
    • Let’s play Tetris but with a twist: you control a Sinusoid.
  • The SQL Murder Mystery
    • “There’s been a Murder in SQL City! The SQL Murder Mystery is designed to be both a self-directed lesson to learn SQL concepts and commands and a fun game for experienced SQL users to solve an intriguing crime.”
  • The Universe is Dark
    • You are a ball in dark space. Can you light up the universe?
  • Truncate
    • A words strategy game
  • Zork
    • “Welcome to ZORK.”

Low Level

Math

Others

  • Ancient Greek
    • Information about the language and culture of the people of Ancient Greece
  • Atlas Obscura
    • Atlas Obscura is a magazine about curious and wondrous travel destinations.
  • ASK HN: Is there a point in school (2010)
    • “Even if you think the university will teach you nothing, you’ve got a one-time offer from society that we’re going to subsidize anything you do for the next four years and not have any expectation that you’ll work for a living during that time. This offer is essentially only good once. Take it!”
  • ASK HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?
    • Honestly, just one thing, and I only need to go back to the early 90s.
  • Dear Photograph
    • “The idea is simple: hold up a photograph from the past in front of the place where it was originally taken, take a second photograph, and add a sentence of dedication about what the photograph means to you. The results, however, are astounding, which is why millions have flocked to dearphotograph.com and thousands have submitted their own Dear Photographs.”
  • Grandpa’s Photos
    • “This is Grandpa, otherwise known as Stephen Clarke. He was great at so many things. One of those was being a Grandpa. He was a WWII Air Force navigator, a husband, a Dad and we also discovered he was a great photographer.”
  • How games are used to control you
  • Victorian Research
    • The aim of the Victoria Research Web is to assist scholars, at whatever stage of their studies, in making their way through the complex and ever-changing landscape of research resources pertinent to the long nineteenth century.
  • Wiby
    • A search engine targeting the “old web”. Click on surprise me to get surprised.

Physics

  • Reflections On Relativity, Kevin Brown
    • “We ordinarily take for granted the existence through time of objects moving according to fixed laws in three-dimensional space, but this is a highly abstract model of the objective world, far removed from the raw sense impressions that comprise our actual experience.”
  • So You Want to Learn Physics…
    • “Nearly six years ago, I sat down at my desk and typed up a detailed guide for anyone who wanted to learn physics on their own.”

Programming Languages & Compilers

Tools

  • carbon
    • Create and share beautiful images of your source code.
  • dittytoy
    • Create your generative music online using a simple Javascript API.
  • ImHex
    • A Hex Editor for Reverse Engineers, Programmers and people who value their retinas when working at 3 AM.
  • Markdown TOC generator
    • As the title suggests.
  • meli
    • BSD/Linux/macos terminal email client with support for multiple accounts and Maildir / mbox / notmuch / IMAP / JMAP / NNTP (Usenet).
  • numcalc
    • Scientific Java Script calculator.
  • Paper HN
    • Read hacker news as an old paper.
  • Random HackerNews
    • Redirecting to a random date’s front page.

Webrings & Blogrolls

  • 512kb Club
    • The 512KB Club is a collection of performance-focused web pages from across the Internet.
  • bukmark.club/
    • To be eligible for a listing in this directory, a website must have a curated collection of bookmarks and/or links to other websites. I did my part.
  • Blogroll
    • You are viewing a humanly curated list of fine personal & independent blogs that are updated regularly. No algorithms ever!
  • collection.mataroa.blog
    • Curated list of personal blogs on any topic.
  • hn blogroll
    • Personal blogs of hn users.
  • Pointless Sites
    • We aim to list only pointless and useless sites that are completely pointless, don’t have pop ads, are original, are useless, are not offensive and make you smile - family friendly fun.
  • tilde.club/
  • webring.xxiivv.com/
    • This webring is an attempt to inspire artists & developers to build their websites and share traffic amongst each other. The ring welcomes hand-crafted wikis and portfolios.
  • Wiby
    • A search engine for the classic web.

Wikipedia & TIL