Folio Red
Projects and other artefacts by Leon Mika.
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Side Scroller 95

I haven't been doing much work on new projects recently. Mainly, I've been perusing my archives looking for interesting things to play around with. Some of them needed some light work to get working again but really I just wanted to experience them. I did come across one old projects which I'll talk about here: a game I called Side Scroller 95.  And yes, the "95" refers to Windows 95. This was a remake of Side Scroller, a QBasic game I made back in the day. Having played around with Delphi programming after a while, and finding a bunch of...
May 26th, 2024

Small Calculator

Date: Unknown, but probably around 2005 Status: Retired Give me Delphi 7, a terminal control, and an expression parser, and of course I'm going to build a silly little REPL program. I can't really remember why I though this was worth spending time on, but I was always interested in little languages (still am), and I guess I though having a desk calculator that used one was worth having. I was using a parser library I found on Torry's Delphi Pages (the best site at the time to get free controls for Delphi) for something else, and after getting a...
April 7th, 2024

Alto

Date: 2020 — present Status: Rockin' The year was 2020. The pandemic was just beginning and I was stuck at home, not being able to do much of anything. Worse, rumours came around that Google was shutting down Google Play Music, my music player of choice. They were going to force everyone onto their streaming service instead. Oh, they may have a place for all the music you've downloaded (or written) yourself, but not in the first version. Maybe they'll get to it later. "Well, fuck that", I said to myself. "I've been battered around by Google shutting down things...
March 11th, 2024

Message Simulator Client

Years: 2017 — 2020 Status: Gone I once worked at a company that was responsible for sending SMS messages via an API. Think one time passwords when you log into websites, before time-based OTP apps were a thing. And yeah, this did involve some "marketing" messages, although we were pretty strict about outright spam or phishing messages. Anyway, since sending messages costed us money, we had a simulator setup in our non-prod environments which we used for testing. The features were pretty minimal: basically get the list of messages sent through the API, send a status message back, and simulating...
February 17th, 2024

Build Indicators

AKA: Das Blinkenlights Date: 2017 — now Status: Steady Green I sometimes envy those that work in hardware. To be able to build something that one can hold and touch. It's something you really cannot do with software. And yeah, I dabbled a little with Arduino, setting up sketches that would run on prebuilt shields, but I never went beyond the point of building something that, however trivial or crappy, I could call my own. Except for this one time. And I admit that this thing is pretty trivial and crappy: little more than some controllable LEDs. But the ultimate...
January 29th, 2024

Broadtail

Date: 2021 – 2022 Status: Paused First project I'll talk about is Broadtail. I think I talked about this one before, or at least I posted screenshot of it. I started work on this in 2021. The pandemic was still raging, and much of my downtime was watching YouTube videos. We were coming up to a federal election, and I was getting frustrated with seeing YouTube ads from political parties that offend me. This was before YouTube Premium so there was no real way to avoid these ads. Or was there? A Frontend For youtube-dl I had some experience with...
January 23rd, 2024

Phograms

“Pho-gram (n): a false or fanciful image or prose, usually generated by AI*” There's nothing like a new blog. So much possibility, so much expectation of quality posts shared with the world. It's like that feeling of a new journal or notebook: you're almost afraid to sally it with what you think is not worthy of it. Well, let's set expectations right now, with a posting of a few AI generated images. 😜 Yes, yes, I know. No one wants to see images from DALL-E and Stable Diffusion that you didn't make yourself. And yeah, I should acknowledge that these...
January 18th, 2024

New Name, Icon, and Purpose

I've been thinking about what I'm hoping to use this blog for. Surprise, surprise, I've been thinking about using it to record things I've worked on. But this time, it'll be a record of things that are either finished, or have reached a natural stopping point. My existing blog will be used for work in progress. This one will be for work that's done (and I won't feel bad about writing about it). I've also been thinking about the name. While I like the name Folio, it's a tad tricky to find a suitable domain for it (yes, I admit...
January 16th, 2024

Name And Icon

This blog has a name, at least for the moment: Folio. Not entirely sure what I hope to write here, but it'll probably be random things I build that I want to document. I'm kinda hoping that the private posts will be added, as I'd like to be able to use those for things not quite for public consumption. And Folio now has an icon, generated using DALL-E: Except, I didn't like the drop shadow. So after a few minutes in Acorn, I was able to remove it and replace it with a transparent background: Yeah, that'll work.
January 15th, 2024

First Post

Hello! Here's my inaugural post on Scribbles, Vincent's blogging platform. Not that I personally need another one, but is there such a thing as having too many blogging platforms? And heaven knows I'm attracted to these things like a moth to a flame. But after hearing that Scribbles was opened for early access, I had to give it a try. And so far, it's been great. I really get that 37 Signals vibe from it. The editor feels good too. Now trying image uploads, and that seems to be working as well. And built-in support for captions! Day One can...
January 15th, 2024