Subways, airports, grocery stores - even cities and the sea. Wayfinding is about reading the environment to get where you are going. In the past this would involve knowing the stars, following migrations, using a map and compass. Now wayfinding is GPS and a multitude of signs. More than that, it’s a sort of language to help guide people. Think about color coded parking garage levels or neighborhoods with matching street signs throughout.

In some ways, this exists in cyberspace with iconography, typography, and color on the web. But often those elements are in the service of branding more than wayfinding. That said, most sites have their own wayfinding elements such as site maps, searches, breadcrumbs, and other navigation aids.

The idea started out with Ogham - animating Ogham as the symbols follow curves, and to use that for displaying informaiton on-screen.

In case you don’t know, Ogham is an alphabet that started out to write early Irish. Here is "nundrum" using the alphabet so you can see how it looks:

That is a striking look, but would be utterly indecepherable! I don’t want to refer to a code chart just to read the screen.

So I started playing around with writing the Latin alphabet connected by a baseline. That was also a great reason to break out the new fountian pen and bottle of ink. Yes, I have a glowing fountain pen and journal.

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.