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Show HN: Monorail – Turn CSS animations into interactive SVG graphs

https://muffinman.io/monorail/

Hey HN,I needed a few simple graphs for a blog post [0]. Instead of slapping together a few SVGs and moving on, I decided to write a whole library to parse CSS keyframe animations and convert them to interactive graphs.It ended up being a rabbit hole, with a lot of caveats. But it was fun to make, and I'm really happy with the graphs it produces.I'm not sure how useful it will be for others. If...

( Read More... | no comments | 2 points | on HN )

Show HN: Bard – An Experiment in Robot Poetry

https://muffinman.io/bard/

Hey HN, This is a small project I made for a meetup (Creative Coding Amsterdam's poetry afternoon). With all the hype around LLMs these days, I wanted to create something silly and fun.I ended up with Glitchy BARD, which generates crappy poetry. It uses source text transformed into n-grams, while rhymes rely on the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary[0]. For the voice, I used the native SpeechSynthesis...

( Read More... | 1 comment | 5 points | on HN )
Re:Show HN: I made CSS-only glitch effect on Wednesday June 11, 2025 @05:48AM (#44245836)
I've figured it out. The error means that this call fails:

    const animation = animationElement.getAnimations()[0];
As Firefox supports `getAnimations` since 2020, I figured something else is messing up with it. I've tried to enable "reduced motion" in the system settings and it broke the animation!

It is because I had force-disabled all animations on the site when this option is enabled.

I patched it, it should work now. Thank you for your help!

EDIT: typo

EDIT2: I also added simple error handling to display a message if parsing the animation fails.

Re:Show HN: I made CSS-only glitch effect on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @10:12AM (#44237045)
Go for it, and share a link!
Re:Show HN: I made CSS-only glitch effect on Monday June 09, 2025 @05:37PM (#44229799)
Thanks for checking, I’ll try to see what is going on.
Re:Show HN: I made CSS-only glitch effect on Monday June 09, 2025 @01:47PM (#44227025)
That is weird, because it is HTML/CSS only. Do you see anything that would help me debug it? Could it be that an add-on (content blocker) messes up with it? I don't have an android device to test. I don't see any issues on desktop and ios though.
Re:A simple 16x16 dot animation from simple math rules on Saturday May 10, 2025 @11:32AM (#43946476)
Tixy is amazing! I built something very similar:

https://muffinman.io/pulsar/

I wanted to create animations for my LED matrix screen, and I couldn’t find tixy anywhere. Only after I built pulsar I found it again.

Another similar project is https://sliderland.blinry.org/ which uses HTML sliders.

Fun stuff!

Ask HN: How do you ensure you don't get locked from your email?

Big parts of our digital lives depend on our email address (personal, professional, financial…). I’m wondering how you've secured yourselves to prevent getting locked out of your email?Of course, using my own domain is a no brainer, but I’ve heard horror stories of people getting kicked from their domains.It feels like we are always at some company’s mercy, a mail provider, a domain service or...

( Read More... | 9 comments | 4 points | on HN )
Re:Kagi for Kids on Monday March 31, 2025 @06:26PM (#43540631)
I stumbled on this some time ago and saved it for when my kid grows up enough. It is a collection of a few thousands kid friendly videos. I think their curation is pretty good, but check it out for yourself.

https://thekidshouldseethis.com/

Re:Show HN: Image comparison slider in 6 lines of JavaScript on Thursday March 06, 2025 @11:29AM (#43282027)
Thank you! There is nothing wrong with large libraries. But you are right, there is something very satisfactory in solving a problem in a few lines of code.
Re:Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI on Thursday February 20, 2025 @05:13PM (#43120980)
Thank you, you made my day!
Re:Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI on Sunday February 16, 2025 @02:44PM (#43070995)
Thanks for the tip! Does it make paper shiny and stiff?
Re:Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI on Friday February 14, 2025 @12:38PM (#43050821)
This is awesome! I’ve seen it but forgot to bookmark it, thanks for sharing it again.
Re:Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI on Friday February 14, 2025 @12:05PM (#43050487)
Sure, I think the hard part is creating hand drawn animation. If you can draw or generate it, the rest is fairly straight forward.

I have an idea for somewhat different flip animation, stay tuned :)

Re:Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI on Friday February 14, 2025 @05:30AM (#43046976)
Actually that's my usual approach, but you should see the vector output from these. I tried doing it and than went back to cleaning up the raster images.
Re:Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI on Friday February 14, 2025 @04:43AM (#43046640)
For me, pen plotting is a lot of fun. There is something so satisfying in bringing digital work to the physical world.

As for the text, I have it on my todo list to create a few single line fonts, for some time now. The obvious one is my own handwriting, ideally with some randomness built in. I would like others to be less conventional to sprinkle them in my drawings, or like you mentioned, to create some pieces that are text only.

Re:Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI on Friday February 14, 2025 @04:17AM (#43046469)
That is correct. I use AxiDraw SE/A3 and I love it. One of the best purchases I ever made.

Show HN: The Tiny Book of Great Joys

https://muffinman.io/blog/the-tiny-book-of-great-joys/

Hey,I want to share a personal project: I made a tiny pen-plotted book for my wife. I did everything myself—drawings (with some help from Midjourney), plotting, cutting, and binding. I even used a 3D printer to make a helper tool.It's absolutely over-engineered, but I enjoyed it a lot. Multi-disciplinary projects, especially those with a physical output, are a lot of fun for me.The post covers...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )

Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI

https://muffinman.io/blog/the-tiny-book-of-great-joys/

Hey HN,I want to share a personal project: I made a tiny pen-plotted book for my wife. I did everything myself—drawings (with some help from Midjourney), plotting, cutting, and binding. I even used a 3D printer to make a helper tool.It's absolutely over-engineered, but I enjoyed it a lot. Multi-disciplinary projects, especially those with a physical output, are a lot of fun for me.The post...

( Read More... | 27 comments | 5 points | on HN )
Re:Native Dual-Range Input on Thursday December 05, 2024 @04:30PM (#42332985)
I just released a fix for it and updated the blog post.
Re:Native Dual-Range Input on Thursday December 05, 2024 @03:12PM (#42332205)
Honestly, I don't think that is a bug. All examples are quite dense and the thumb covers multiple steps on the track. Firefox then translates every click like you clicked directly on the track. The library doesn't interfere with it in any way, it is how Firefox works.
Re:Native Dual-Range Input on Thursday December 05, 2024 @10:06AM (#42328905)
If you can replicate this, please open a github issue [1].

Which browser and OS are you using? Because this library doesn't do anything regarding the scroll blocking (because it is using native inputs). On my phone (iOS) scroll is blocked on all input[type=range] elements, styled or not.

[1] https://github.com/Stanko/dual-range-input/issues

Re:Native Dual-Range Input on Thursday December 05, 2024 @10:03AM (#42328882)
I think it can be theoretically done, like it is mentioned in the comment above, but you would need a new block of CSS for every slider min/max/step combination. It feels it would be harder to maintain than the javascript version.
Re:Native Dual-Range Input on Thursday December 05, 2024 @10:02AM (#42328865)
Nice catch! Actually I thought of this and it works in Chrome and Firefox, but it seems that Safari is not triggering the focus event on mouse down, but only when you start moving the slider. Thank you for the report, I'll make sure to fix it.
Re:Native Dual-Range Input on Thursday December 05, 2024 @09:58AM (#42328834)
Thank you, comments like yours really make my day!
Re:Native Dual-Range Input on Wednesday December 04, 2024 @05:28PM (#42322750)
Hey, author here, glad to see it popping up on HN.

I see people started opening issues and leaving bug reports here. I’ll try to go through them tomorrow (it is getting late here).

I created it because I needed it for my generative drawings. I prefer dragging a slider and seeing how the image changes, more than typing in a number.

I really tried to keep it minimal.

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