Adam Benzan's Internet Concern

A Selection of Experiments

The Cruci-Verbalizer

The Cruci-Verbalizer is the project of almost a year's worth of weekends. It started off as a simple crossword grid editor, then evolved the ablility to suggest words for zones. As the weekends passed unnecessary features died off while stronger features survived. It is comprised of a hodgepodge of scripts utilizing all manner of language. In its current state, it represents a robust ecosystem of cruciverbal activities, including but not limited to: a fairly full-featured crossword builder with the ability to automatically fill in a partial grid, a player written in Javascript (which acts as a frontend to crosswords that are either generated by players, procedurally created, or imported from books), an AJAX crossword dictionary, and an online PUZ file player.

The Intor.net

This app formats bits of text that are specified in a URL (anything before ".theintor.net") and modifies it based on whatever follows that URL (anything after ".theintor.net"). This is some automated documentation generated from the modifier classes for URLs. As such, it might be a little weird. These modifiers are applied to the URLs by following the domain with any number of these things, separated with slashes. So if we wanted a message of size 150 that was both uppercased and bolded, the url would be: http://sample-message.theintor.net/b/uc/s150. Relationships between URLs can get kind of interesting to look at. /g/ generates a graph based on the relationships found and /r/ lists the immediate relationships with links.

Canvas Curiosities

Most of my quick visual experiments are hacked up on the Canvas element. I'll generally hack more data-based ideas out in Python.

Recently I've typed up a WebGL Terrain Generator / Maze Generator / A* Pathfinder, an oddly horrifying petri dish simulation, an app that adds sunglasses to arbitrary image URLs using the face detection in OpenCV, a terrible collaborative editor to have an excuse to mess around with websockets, an Ulam spiral visualization that takes arbitrary rotation, a thing that attempts to visualize idea transfer in society based on a viral model, and an image 'editor' on the Canvas with some interesting filters.

Learning Experiments

Morser

An iPhone app that turns taps into words. Strangely my most well-followed Github repository.

Spacer

A confusing game with a beginning, middle and end. Coded up to explore Unity3D.

I'm Googling!

An Android app that does very little. Created because I apparently pretend to google things a lot.

BlowSpin

An idea I had for using the microphone as a game controller.