iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Oooh, I've innovated a new method of making a display unfilmable.

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Oh my. trademe.tmcdn.co.nz/photoserver/...

A photo of a gorgeous old Braun 35mm slide projector, all dark plastic and leds, like a cross between Blade Runner's V-K and WarGames' WOPR

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I've been using this shamefully janky rig in basically every video since the first volumetric display. It pivots the camera around a single axis, and is a very cheap and simple way to get fluid orbiting shots. It never caused any comments before, but it's really doing so in the latest video.

A picture of a camera mounted on a rig, filming a cylindrical thingy on a table. The camera mount consists of a tripod under the table, with a haphazard collection of aluminium extrusion extending precariously out from the centre. The setup swivels around an arc with the camera remaining focused on the central axis.

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I finally (finally!) made volumetric Doom public. github.com/AncientJames... Exciting news to the approximately three people who have built one of my volumetric displays.

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Reposted by James Brown

Tim Aidley @tim.aidley.com · 21/09/2026

In 1999/2000 I wrote a WWI aerial combat game along with a couple of colleagues, and called 'Hunt for the Red Baron'. I've always had a soft spot for it, and I've finally got a port of it that runs in the browser; have a look here: tim.aidley.com/projects/hun... Best played with mouse and keyboard

tim.aidley.com

Hunt for the Red Baron - Resurrected!

Over a period of around 9 months in 1999/2000, I wrote a WWI aerial combat game. You can now play it live in a browser!

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I made a video about a homebrew 3D display that uses LEDs and rapidly spinng parts! www.youtube.com/watch?v=npmm...

youtube.com

Scanning Light Field Display

YouTube video by Ancient

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Reposted by James Brown

The Seldom Seen Kid @seldom-seen-kid.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

They're all dead, Dave.

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The usual apologies for resolution, colour depth, sync and so forth. But I tried raytracing a glass sphere to show the light field doing its thing.

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drewtoothpaste @drewtoothpaste.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

a baby spring peeper, much too late for spring, almost iridescent in my headlamp, brought home and released in my garden to eat berries and bugs

a tiny spring peeper frog, its orange skin almost glowing in the light

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

If you haven't yet subscribed to my YouTube channel www.youtube.com/@ancientjames (perhaps you have been in prison, or on a long ocean voyage), then be warned that you're about to lose the chance to grab one of those sweet sub-6-digit subscriber IDs. Be in to me now, before I'm mainstream.

@ancientjames 99.9k subscribers 72 videos

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

You raise the horn to your lips and blow. The exit does not respond. >

The exit from a parking structure. A sign reads “use horn on exit”.

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Starting to get the hang of filming this one

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I always complain about how hard it is to do justice to my 3D displays in 2D video, but this one really takes it to new levels. I think I've managed something here which gives a sense of what you see irl. The trick is to film it in potato vision - in high res 2D you only see the pixel grids.

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Found it! The one image I have of my first mechanical tv.

A 640x480 potato vision shot of a record mounted in a thin wooden frame in front of some red LEDs. Taken with my first digital camera, a Panasonic NV-DC1000

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

It makes me so happy to see another one of these displays out there in the world. Like it's a living thing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKgM...

youtube.com

#3dholographicdisplay #hologram #raspberrypi #livevisuals #audioreactive #creativetechnologist

YouTube video by Maya Khalil

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Reposted by James Brown

Richard Easther @rjme.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

I make this plot each year for our "intro to rocket science" course. It's remarkable that as many rockets go to orbit from New Zealand as from Russia – but on a per head basis we stand alone. This is an amazing place for a small country to find itself, and we should be making the most of it...

Two graphs, both showing the number of launches to orbit per country per year. New Zealand is 3rd= with Russia in terms of the absolute count, but way ahead in a per capita plot.

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 18/07/2026

In 1988 a company that made record turntables built its own CPU, because it hated its factory software. It failed. Every one of those ideas ships today. Hardware memory safety. Garbage collection in silicon. Persistent objects. Chips shaped to a workload. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/07/18/t...

negroniventurestudios.com

The computer at the bottom of a canal

Somewhere at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde Canal, buried in the silt, there is a box of custom silicon that was right about almost everything. Back in 1988 a Scottish hi-fi company shipped a proce...

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

I finally got round to uploading the modified Thumby firmware for this colour mod: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXtb... The video did very poorly, but it seems some people did follow along so here's the code: github.com/AncientJames...

youtube.com

Thumby Retrofit

YouTube video by Ancient

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ceej @ceej.online · 27/05/2024

It’s time we have a serious discussion about rebooting Crimson Skies

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Still going on the mechanical lightfield, and it's quite spectacularly unfilmable. Really struggling to convey what it looks like.

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 08/06/2026

"Something remarkable happened in April. For the first time in history, wind and solar generated more electricity than gas across the entire planet. Not in a country. Not in a region. Globally." Tons of great news here from Danny Kennedy (via @billmckibben.bsky.social's newsletter, which rules).

proelectrica.substack.com

Elite Cognitive Dissonance and the Asian Energy Disruption

Notes from the Field — Singapore & Indonesia, May 2026

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Always feel a bit guilty using floating point in a doom port, like my renovations aren’t in keeping with the historic character of the place.

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Just hit the stage of bringing up a new display device where it looks awful, and I'm not yet sure whether there's a bug or if that's just as good as it's going to get.

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

That’s what I call a framerate.

A closeup of debug text on a monitor: “panel: 39 microseconds; 25166 frames per second”

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

By using the same standard test images, different labs are able to compare results, both visually and quantitatively.

I'm attaching a diffuser panel to a contraption consisting of multiple low resolution led panels in an octagonal prism layout. The image behind it is blurry, but is unmistakaby Rick Astley in his widely celebrated music video.

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Reposted by James Brown

ModernDayNTK @modernday.ntk.net · 21/05/2026

as @robmanuel.b3ta.com‬ has noted, there was a lot of "you must get online" marketing in the early-ish years of the WWW - and before that, entire government campaigns to "make the most of the micro[computer]" in the 1980s. Yet neither Ofcom or DCMS have demanded a BBC LLM - sort it out you cowards!

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

I have a big blister on my thumb because I was filming myself tapping a whole lot of holes and didn't want to change my pose or break the rhythm. I always film myself tapping holes, and I've never once found the footage interesting or included it in the final edit.

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The Onion @theonion.com · 05/05/2026

Tips For Reducing Your Exposure to Microplastics theonion.com/tips-for-reducing-your…

Buy your children wooden toys instead of fun ones.

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

It took a surprising amount of effort to achieve this crappy result. It's rendering 4000 views simultaneously per frame (effectively 120000 fps), on a Pi 4. Complicated by no viewport arrays or layered rendering support, and clipping in the fragment shader added seconds to render time.

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

I just tried using the robot to write some 3D code. It didn't work at first, and when I pressed it, it said maybe it had got confused between column-major and row-major, and to transpose it and see if that worked. That's it. I've been replaced.

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Jolisa Gracewood @nzdodo.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Uh-oh. Do we need a new version of @magnets.eurosky.social’s brilliant observation about how climate change will manifest? In a surreal twist, people are now doubting footage that is both very real and very close to home—a result of AI imagery poisoning the waters: www.tickaroo.com/e/GCRysAwNeu...

tickaroo.com

Image of Wellington floods so incredible people couldn't believe it was real

Image of Wellington floods so incredible people couldn't believe it was real An image of a street in Wellington's Berhampore suburb shows cars being swallowed by flood water.The photo was taken by Bib...

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

You like videos of flickery low res displays that I assure you are 3D? Here's a mechanically scanned lightfield.

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

I bought some cheap "Mitutoyo" calipers from AliExpress, and they're really good. The effort they put into making them convincing paid off. Would recommend.

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

Lovely morning in Wellington, if you're above 250m.

A view from a hilltop in the morning sun; blue sky above, a layer of clouds below, mountains on the horizon. Another hill pokes through the clouds in the foreground. Wellington harbour patchily visible underneath.

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Breaking out the swivelcam again.

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

Looking at a listing on AliExpress which describes some dark glasses as "anti radiation glasses". I mean, fair enough.

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

80% of my time spent using a node based editor consists of fuming at the concept of node based editors.

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Kate Evans @kategevans.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Some good news for anyone depressed about the world right now: the kakapo are getting it onnnnn thespinoff.co.nz/science/13-0...

thespinoff.co.nz

Good news: It’s kākāpō fuck season

The world is going to hell in a handbasket but at least the kākāpō are going hog wild.

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rezmason @rezmason.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

@ancient.bsky.social Thanks for the diversion ✏️👾

A person holding a refurbished Nokia LCD screen with their thumb and forefinger; the image displayed is a cropped low resolution rendition of Michaelangelo's "The Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel, and the word "PHONE" below

On the left, a cropped, grayscale copy of the previous image, serving as the reference for a pixel-perfect copy on the right

The finished 1-bit 84x48 recreated image

The recreated image, composited in such a way as to mimic an LCD screen

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

"Animated Bokeh" has been on my whiteboard for a long time, and this is the result. I thought it would just be for cheesy novelty effects, but it also does lightfield manipulation that was cooler than I expected. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_2...

youtube.com

Digital Iris

YouTube video by Ancient

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James Brown @ancient.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

I now have a channel on MakerTube: makertube.net/c/ancient/vi... I've uploaded the build videos from my youtube channel. I'm curious to see what sort of life there is there.

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