iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

This album has been growing on me a lot lately... Do we call this style "worldbeat", "hiphop", "alternative"? #chineseman www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz5p...

youtube.com

Chinese Man - The Groove Sessions (Full Album)

YouTube video by Chinese Man

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

"The solution? Start selling hardware with less RAM, apparently." Counterpoint - that might actually be the answer. Challenge tech to stop bloatware to free up memory - it probably means removing ads, IAP's, and AI, but that might be good. #bloatware #software #ram kotaku.com/the-ram-is-a...

kotaku.com

The RAMapocalypse Just Got Its Most Dire Warning Yet

Also: Black Ops quietly won the summer

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

What the web has become is an embarrassment. 5 ads for Adobe and a pop up combined with poor page layout leaving a sizable portion of the page blank. The actual content I am trying to read is maybe 15% of the displayed page. #webDesign #oldManShoutsAtTheSky

A screen shot of a news page where the vast majority of the page space is advertisements for the same company

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

I guess Inc can't use words like "enshittification", but that's exactly what they are describing here, OpenAI transitioning to the next stage: www.inc.com/jason-aten/o...

inc.com

OpenAI Just Declared ChatGPT as You Know It Dead

The company's desktop makes it clear that free ChatGPT users are not its focus.

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Spent the weekend working out the bugs and Pawn-Up! is officially live on Itch: golden-tamarin.itch.io/pawn-up This means I've launched apps on Apple's App Store, Steam, and Itch.io. Pawn-Up! - pay what you want, even if that's nothing😂 #cards #indiedev #chesslike

golden-tamarin.itch.io

Pawn-Up! by golden-tamarin

Kinda like Poker - Kinda like Chess

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Rewatched Devs - its not a perfect show, but its pretty good and definitely has its moments. Well acted - Alex Garland is good at what he does - after watching Civil War and Alien: Romulus, seeing Cailee Spaeny as Lyndon 🤯 www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoBm...

youtube.com

Devs - E02 Opening scene

YouTube video by TheOncomingStorm

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Waah - I'm a profitable $400 BILLION dollar company and can't help but raise my prices!! Boo hoo - take a pay cut, Tim Cook... We all spent the last 10-20 years reading about how Apple was one of the most profitable companies of all time... #apple thehill.com/policy/techn...

thehill.com

Apple raising prices, CEO says

Apple CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that his company is raising its prices. In an interview published Wednesday by the Journal, Cook said the tech company is set to incr…

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Perhaps its time for *consumers* to dictate the level of machine they are willing to pay for and *software devs* to constrain themselves to that spec. This cost death-spiral is driven by manufacturers and large software publishers determining the specs and consumers stuck in the middle #boycott

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

So if you have a grid of textureRects and you want to display things by coloring them, you can take what you want to display, send it to an offscreen subviewport, resize it to your grid of textureRects, extract it as an image and check each pixel to drive which rects to display #godot

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Alien3 is probably my least favorite of the movies, but the acting saves it - Charles Dutton does a great job at owning his role #alien #alien3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2cm...

youtube.com

I ain't much for BEGGING! Nobody ever gave me NOTHIN!

YouTube video by Majin Yojimbo

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

All textureRects and tweens with a tiny bit 'o math #godot

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Discovery #1 for today: Amazon charges double what Microcenter does for a #raspberrypi zero 2, but they'll give you free shipping on that 100% markup (that you also pay for via your Prime account) #amazon #enshittification Discovery #2 - my #godot clock app does not run on a pi zero 2 (not shocked)

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

I had been avoiding using shaders for vfx to keep things easy on the #raspberrypi, but I wanted something "lava-lampy" so I tried and its totally fine. The shader is a simple dual-texture overlay with warping, so its still fairly simple, but it works. #godot #clocks #shaders

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jHY... - its nice when you stumble across something like this from 15 years ago (album released 2009) #music

youtube.com

My Body's a Zombie For You

YouTube video by Dead Man's Bones - Topic

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Perhaps someone has a better approach. In #godot I have a label with text and a randomly selected font which I want maximized in size to visually fill the label. So I determine the % diff of the label size to the font's text size and then multiply the font size to that %. #fonts

Screen shot of the following code:

# final font sizing
# tmpRect == label, only attempt if label has text or get_string_size will error
if tmpRect.text != "":
# set font to a starting size, doesn't matter what
tmpRect.label_settings.font_size = 20
var string_size
# if single line, use get_string_size - if long enough to be multiline, use get_multiline_string_size
if tmpRect.text.length() < 14:
string_size = tmpRect.label_settings.font.get_string_size(tmpRect.text, HORIZONTAL_ALIGNMENT_CENTER, tmpRect.size.x, tmpRect.label_settings.font_size)
# pad the value slightly for better results
string_size.y += 10
else:
string_size = tmpRect.label_settings.font.get_multiline_string_size(tmpRect.text, HORIZONTAL_ALIGNMENT_CENTER, tmpRect.size.x, tmpRect.label_settings.font_size)
# pad the value slightly for better results
string_size.y += 15
# compute the percent size difference for X and Y axes
var tmpX = tmpRect.size.x/string_size.x
var tmpY = tmpRect.size.y/string_size.y
# sort of average them to get a resizing multiplier (.5 results were too big, so downsized to .35 via trial and error)
var fontMultiplier = (tmpX + tmpY)*.35
# apply the multiplier to the font size
tmpRect.label_settings.font_size *= fontMultiplier

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Lesson about #clocks and #raspberrypi's - Pi's don't actually have a persistent clock - like many SBC's, they rely on network time to update their clocks on boot-up - so if you boot without a network, it has no idea what actual time it is. The solution is to attach a hardware clock to the GPIO pins.

Picture of raspberry pi board with a hardware clock attached to it.

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Trying to see how far I can take a text-only experience in #godot. This is all labels and tweens and math behinds the scenes. #Fonts really make it visually interesting, but they also introduce a ton of placement variability and issues - font-sizes are very inconsistent. #clock #raspberrypi

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Now that I've got a "clock face" that's an RSS news reader, its making me wonder if I want it😬 I tried to make everything else uplifting or meditative and this is like pouring a bucket of darkness in the swimming pool... #godot #rss #raspberrypi #news

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Huh... #godot XMLParser is a SAX parser - somehow was expecting it to be DOM. Maybe no one cares anymore 🥴

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Tip: #godot has a good built-in file/directory chooser, but when your project is running on a #raspberrypi with a 3.5" screen, the file listing scroll bar winds up being like 3 pixels wide and nearly impossible to use via touch - you can create a theme override though to make it much wider.

Screen shot of godot file chooser with tiny scrollbar

Screen shot of Godot file chooser with wide scroll bar

Screen shot of Godot theme manager setting an override on VScrollBar

Screen grab of Godot StyleBoxFlat settings highlighting content margins

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

[audio] Why have just one spectral analyzer when you can have two for the same price? 😀 Creates some nice glitchiness - still runs like a charm on a RP4... #godot #raspberrypi #audioplayers #mp3player #vfx

030

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

A quick demo of clocky playing an externally loaded mp3 file with playback debug parameters showing - its mostly just taking a series of geometric patterns, applying spectral strength as a modifier, randomizing colors/sizes, and tweening it all. #godot #music #raspberrypi #classicRock

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

I've noticed while working on Clocky that recurring adjustments to font settings in #godot script winds up loosing memory (i.e. this discussion: tinyurl.com/mv6njbr3) - which apparently is not so much a "leak" as "over-caching". Adding this func and calling it before font adjustments helps a lot.

func font_size_cache_clear(font : FontFile):
for i : int in range(font.get_cache_count()):
for size_cache : Vector2i in font.get_size_cache_list(i):
font.remove_size_cache(i, size_cache)

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Watching Ralph Fiennes trudging through life muttering the lyrics to Girls on Film 😂 ...and I thought I was the only one... really enjoyed 28 Years Later: Bone Temple #BoneTemple #duranduran

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Apparently in Godot you can't just set the HSV values on a color, even though they are exposed - you have to use the from_hsv method off the color class. HSV is nice for creating a spread of colors cause you can just iterate over the H value instead of triangulating RGB's #godot #color #hsv #clocks

030

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

[sound] And now we use our old friend "lerp" to help transition line and 2D mesh positions when shifting between display models and bring them all together #music #spectral #godot #clock #lerp

020

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

[sound] Redid this effect as a 2DMultiMesh and its much lighter weight (now runs on a Pi4 with plenty of processor room to spare) - originally this was done by instantiating ColorRects and queue_free'ing them, but ColorRects aren't free candy you can sprinkle everywhere🤔 #godot #raspberrypi #clock

110

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

...completely different approach using points on a line per track - going to have to keep yutzing with this, but its MUCH lighter-weight than what I was doing before and runs very smooth on the #raspberrypi 4 and 5. #clock #music #godot

030

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

[sound] Playing with the maths for a more interesting visual and making clocky show the #clock - also you might notice my janky #bpm syncing kicking in - first track (the guitar) controls the rhythm in this case. #godot #music #visualizations

140

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

[sound on] three separate looped tracks with circular spectral analyzers - holds up fine on desktop, but publishing to #raspberrypi I'm seeing 1 of the 3 visuals being dropped and HTOP tells me 1 of the 4 processors on the pi is maxed. Might be too much per frame for it. #godot #music

220

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Adding swiping actions to #clocky - left/right to change clock faces, up to set a timer. Buttons need to be chonky for a 3.5" screen otherwise otherwise my giant fingers can't type - trying to make this so it does not require a stylus. #godot #raspberrypi #cezanne #humansHaveChonkyFingers

051

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

(sound on) Testing a plain 'o spectral analyzer to make sure I have the mechanics right - this is two tracks each with their own spectrum_analyzer in #godotEngine and then sampling 250 separate frequency levels in each, coloring the tracks differently #audio #spectralAnalyzer

071

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

(volume on) Somehow I wasn't thinking of music when I was working on audio visualizations but it kind of works🤔 two tracks, separate visualizations, size driven by spectral strength, other behaviors controlled at the track level... #godot #spectralAnalyzer #music #western

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

Still experimenting with #clock displays loading on #raspberrypi - its very clear to me now how this could be data-driven, multiple clocks could talk to each other creating a mini-closed household communication hub, and how most digital #signage I've seen is pretty limited. #godot

071

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

I remember seeing this movie a few years after it came out and wasn't sure what to make of it - years later, it seems more prescient than people might have thought... Might as well say, "Hi, I'm Tilly Norwood. I'm the perfect female type, 18-25." www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoT-...

youtube.com

Looker (1981) Official Trailer - Albert Finney, James Coburn Sci-Fi Movie HD

YouTube video by Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

010

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

My "70's TV Era" clock - its kind of interesting how much you can do with 4 labels, cause that's all this is - 4 labels with colors, positions, text randomized following some formatting rules. #godot #clocks #1970s runs on #raspberrypi

151

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

Update on my #clock project - implemented an "artsy" background - its impressive how much animation you can do with just tweens 🤯 Every 10 minute slice of an hour has its own color scheme and animation type - this shows you a full hour's worth in 30 seconds. #godot #raspberrypi #abstractart

150

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

If you feel stuck, keep creating - its good exercise. Make something simple, like a painting or a skateboard or a clock, and see what you can do with it. #godot #clock #raspberrypi #creating

180

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

Same app, same build, same point in the program and here's the htop's across Raspberry Pi3, 4, and (now) 5. Big difference in performance, especially from 3 to 4. I'm also noticing that 3's were issued with 1gb ram while 4's and 5's got 4gb #raspberrypi #godot #performance

231

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

Attempting to run my Godot app on current Raspberian OS on a several year old Raspi-3 give me an "Unable to initialize OpenGL ES video driver" error - fortunately the next screen suggested launching from terminal passing in "--rendering-driver vulkan" which actually does work #godot #raspberrypi

240

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

(sound on) Perhaps its been working towards being a #zen #clock all along... Bringing good vibes and #positiveMessages

000

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

(audio on) Second test - making visuals follow a path if they are in close time proximity to the last SpectralAnalyzer event (200ms) - adds some continuity to the fx. Also here we have two separate tracks (Gulls and Waves) with different visuals and settings. #shore #godot #audio #spectralAnalysis

030

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

(sound on) If you take an audioStream and pass it through an AudioBus and add a SpectralAnalyzer to the AudioBus, you can pull the magnitude of that stream and trigger visual effects, in this case, scaled to that magnitude of the audio as it plays #godot #raspberrypi #birbs #birdsky

292

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

Always remember kids, if you want your #godot app to run on a #raspberrypi, select architecture #arm64 when you do your #linux export!

1103

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

So yesterday when I published my #godot app as a Web App, I shoved it in an iframe to constrain the display to the canvas size set in the app (otherwise it spread the elements as wide as the browser window) - there's a better setting for that: Canvas Resize Policy which can be set to "Project" 👍

040

aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Trying something a bit different and making the current version of Pawn-Up! available on the web as a Web App: www.golden-tamarin.com/apps/pawnup/ Hope you give it a whirl and enjoy it! 😀 Feedback always welcomed! #screenshotsaturday #godot #solodev #gamedev

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aaron-tamarin @aaron-tamarin.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

Always liked the icons for gravity on/off in #alienRomulus

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