I’d been feeling a bit lost, so decided to throw myself into a small, contained project. It took a while to find the perfect idea, but I decided to create Earth Palettes, taking slices of satellite imagery and then pulling a colour palette from it. For me it was an exercise in trying to explore the intersection between nature, art, and technology.
Sourcing Data My first thought was finding an open access API feed and downloading 3- or 4-band true colour georectified images and then snipping out small segments.
Sometimes when I’ve had a break from personal tech projects for a while I want to get back into the saddle but don’t want to commit to something massive. I want a bite-sized, single evening project with a definite output and often a Twitter bot is the perfect creation to fill that niche. Once you have the basic formula down pat, the process is pretty easy, with most of the hassle being in convincing Twitter to give you developer access if you want to go the manual route.
Preamble A long time ago I built a Twitter bot which allowed you to play a text adventure game by tweeting commands at it and receiving personalised responses. I’ve always been interested in doing more with this project, but there’s been two major holdups:
I’ve lacked personal writing inspiration (and found no interested writers) to help with content for the game. The original code is an absolute mess. Eventually during a skint section of my life I had to get rid of the virtual machine that runs the bot and it’s remained dormant and inactive for years.