I’m plotting again after an August hiatus. The new Gondola Plotter is super quiet, so nice! I’ve made a few refinements to the software stack of course… The usual.
I found a bunch of really cool engravings in some very old books I found in the abandoned house. These books are worthy of some discussion on their own much like the old vinyls, but this isn’t the time.
I got ChatGPT to make me a few SVG handling tools that are really incredibly well done and will help me shed some of the apps I was using. With SVGs there really is not a single app that does all the things, so I drag a collection around just to use 1 or 2 of their function. AI is helping me write scripts to explore algorithms and replace more trivial functionality from apps.
Case in point: this super cool recursive inset fill algorithm to turn fills into something a plotter can do.
I’ve been wanting to write this one for a while, but I knew it’d take me a good few days to nail it. That got turned into 30 minutes with AI. Jaw dropping. I love the effect as it echoes a lot of bored fillings of shapes I’d do as a kid getting bored in class. The cookstove above is filled with it, but it’s far too dense at this size and so it really looks like a actual fill rather than a particular effect.
A lot of my tooling these days is Python which has good libraries for handling SVGs. I used to dislike Python for their dumb purist move from 2.7 to 3 which wasted everyone’s time, and because they had managed to reimplement library hell. But I have to say venv is a successful redress to the later.