Chevy Ray goes into a lot of details on building her own tool to generate 175 (!!) pixel fonts. The post walks through the technical implementation including converting pixel clusters into TrueType contours, automatic kerning calculation, and deploying everything to itch.io with command-line scripts. Very cool read.

Recently, I have been working with the Discogs data dumps. Discogs uploads monthly dumps of their database in a gzipped XML format. They release dumps for: artists, labels, masters, and releases. I was curious about converting them to the Parquet file format. Parquet is a binary columnar file format heavily used in data engineering. It allows different compression algorithms per column and nested structures. It is also natively supported by databases such as ClickHouse or DuckDB. I was mostly curious about the size of a parquet file vs a compressed XML file. Would parquet files be smaller than a gzipped XML? If so, by how much? Also, what would be the conversion speed?

A 7-minute techno live set created entirely in GLSL shaders that fits in just 64KB. Yes, 64kb. This WebGL intro by 0b5vr was submitted to the Revision 2023 demoscene competition. Procedural visuals meets algorave meets extreme compression. My mind is blown.

I just released dgtools, a command line utility to work with the Discogs data dumps. This little endeavor was supposed to be a quick side quest, but it transformed into a rabbit hole.

Discogs is the go-to service for record collectors. They might have one of the biggest databases for physical music releases. On a monthly basis, they release a compressed XML of a subset of their database under a CC0 license. Tools already exist to import them into a PostgreSQL database, but I wanted the flexibility of a custom-built solution. I started building something in a Ruby on Rails app but quickly diverged to Go as I didn't want to pay the ActiveRecord performance cost.

OpenSimplex noise is a gradient noise function designed to avoid patent issues with simplex noise while fixing the directional artifacts in Perlin noise. It uses a different grid structure with stretched hypercubic honeycombs and larger kernel sizes, making it smoother but slower than simplex noise.