From my earliest days of using Linux, I was delighted by all of the hacks in XScreenSaver. My favorite was Substrate. Even now I wish I had a clue how it worked.

Off an on I had played with data art / generative art / data visualization and in general trying to make pretty or eye-catching displays. At one job I even used the Phosphor hack in XScreenSaver to turn my workstation into a low-tech monitor for a bunch of internal processes. And it had an ASCII version of the local radar map, too!

Then one day I had an idea for writing my own hack. Grabbed the source, read the docs, hacked hacked hacked, and came up with PidGrid. I’m pretty happy with it! It’s in rotation on most of my computers, even my tiny DevTerm rPi-based device. If you are a Mac-lover and could help make it run on MacOS, hit me up!

I thought about turning some of my other projects into XSS hacks, but trying to translate them to C would be an incredible slog. So of course I looked for ways to write hacks in other languages. You can read all about my journey in trying to make Clojure work with XScreenSaver in this post.

Now I’ve wrapped up all that work into a package:

If the look of this blog is not a clue already, let me just go ahead and say I love cyberpunk. And maybe plain old punk just a little bit, too.

I love going to Alchemy, or To The Moon. I’m frequently at the Atlanta Eagle. Sometimes you can even spot me at a goth night event. I already have cyberpunk-adjacent clothing and boots. OK, that’s a lie, the boots are straight-up cyberpunk.

So why not have more lovely cyberpunk gear? In leather, of course. I just happen to have an old leather jacket that needs some love.

But if this jacket is going to be cyberpunk it needs some glow. It needs some radios. Maybe input devices. Definitely LEDs.

Here’s the story of building the first component for the jacket.

Someone close to me says when looking at dangerous animals: "if not friend, then why friend shaped?" I feel like that about C. While C isn’t exactly dangerous, the slow write-compile-test cycle when when working on visual projects is a real drag.

Which is a shame because I’ve done a number of visual projects in Clojure over the years and have always wanted to incorporate them into XScreenSaver. I even wrote a hack for XScreenSaver once in C. Though it worked in the end, getting there was a slog. And in the end, JWZ wouldn’t accept it because it didn’t compile on his Mac.

The workings of an XScreenSaver hack aren’t complicated - the main xscreensaver daemon creates an empty window and then launches another process (the "hack") to draw remotely on the window. That’s easy to do in X11 by passing along the window id from the daemon to the hack.

Surely that can be done with Java/Clojure, right?

Well read on and see exactly how wrong I was.

The fool that I am decided to fork the startpage project from the previous post into two projects: one that’s static content suitable for sharing with the rest of the world, and one that’s more dynamic and relies on sources of data that are only available on my home network.

That meant really pinning down the features required for the simplified page before moving on to the fully-featured one.

The main features were limited by what could be served off of a local filesystem. That narrowed the options down to:

Why do I do this to myself? The idea, so easy. The implementation, such pain.

I wanted to build a custom startpage (aka "new tab page") in my usual cyberpunk style. There are dozens and dozens of startpages out there to choose from, many of which were very stylish. But none were the phosphor green-drenched (retro?) future-styled UI my heart desired.

Well, I’ve been on this ClojureScript journey, so why not continue it?

There were a few must-haves:

Then some stretch goals:

And two not-haves: a search bar and a clock. CTRL-k to search is a habit. And I friggin' hate clocks on my desktop. Long ago I learned they distract me.

Oh, this is going to be painful.