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programming, drawing, photograpy etc.
Wet Green Leaves

As you might have heard, it’s been raining hard in Bangalore for the last I don’t know how many days. We do get a respite from it for a few hours but then it starts all over again. Nice excuse to stay indoors and rolled up in a blanket. The rain does have a way of bringing out the vibrant greens all over the place.

So here’s a photo I took of the middle-aged tree just outside the balcony. It has some glorious leaves. Most of the times it is the little things that bring the greatest …

How I started drawing (again)...

(I’ll be writing about my experiences with drawing, but I believe what follows is applicable to many of the fine or performing arts)

Drawing is fun

When I first started drawing I must have been tiny and I don’t remember it at all. Kids draw with whatever they get and they draw whatever they see around them or they just scribble. They are not very good at it, even if the parents think they gave birth to a Monet or Van Gogh 🙈. Who can blame the parents though, here’s Jackson Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm”. All I’ll …

Arrival of the Art Noob

What?

Hello there 🙋‍♂️🙏! I’m Abhishek Mishra and this is The Art Noob, a newsletter about learning to draw and paint.

I started learning drawing and painting late in life, and the journey so far has been so interesting that I decided to document it in a blog/newsletter so that others may benefit or learn from it…

Bob Ross - Happy Accidents

or maybe just have fun laughing over my blundering, bungling, inept, klutzy, gauche efforts …

Phoebe laughing

Why?

I’ve been doodling for years, and I’m a hobbyist photographer for close to 15 years. A couple of years ago I was with my mom …

PicoTurtle Java program to draw a groovy tunnel

I've also added Java support to picoturtle. Here's a program to draw a rather groovy tunnel. Java code follows.

import in.abhishekmishra.picoturtle.Turtle;
import in.abhishekmishra.picoturtle.TurtleState;

public class Tunnel
{
    public static void cuboid(Turtle t, double b, double w, double h) {
        t.forward(b);

        t.right(-45);
        t.forward(h);
        t.back(h);
        t.left(-45);

        t.left(90);
        t.forward(w);

        t.left(-45);
        t.forward(h);
        t.back(h);
        t.right(-45);

        t.left(90);
        t.forward(b);

        t.left(-135);
        t.forward(h);
        t.back(h);
        t.right(-135);

        t.left(90);
        t.forward …
PicoTurtle C# program to draw a wave

Recently I added C# .NET support to picoturtle. I was playing around generating waves... here's an example based on the sine function. And the C# Turtle code follows below.

using System;
using picoturtle;

namespace cspico
{
    class MainClass
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // Create the turtle before using
            Turtle t = picoturtle.Turtle.CreateTurtle(args);

            if (t != null) {
                // Your code goes here

                t.penup();
                t.setx(0);
                t.sety(250);

                for(double i = 0; i < 500; i+=0.25) {
                    t.setx(i);
                    double sin = Math.Sin(i/15);
                    double y = sin * 100;
                    t.forward(y);
                    t.pendown();
                    int col = Math.Abs …
PicoTurtle released

This week I built the first release of PicoTurtle - a turtle program built on REST/HTTP APIs, allowing programs written in potentially any programming language to draw turtle graphics with it. The desktop editor is built using electron. Download it at PicoTurtle Homepage.

I'll make follow-up posts about how the program works, but here's a dragon curve drawn using picoturtle...

And here's the code... (based on the entry on dragon curve in wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_curve#Code)

from picoturtle import *
create_turtle()

### Your code goes here ###

def dragonCurve(order, length):
    right(order * 45)
    dragonCurveRecursive(order, length, 1 …
VS Code Extension - timed-themes

VS Code is now my primary IDE, it's the IDE I use the most and really like. At home I use a laptop hooked to a large monitor. This setup is in a room with lots of windows and skylights. So during the day, the room lights up a lot and there are a lot of reflections on the screen. So I use a dark theme with lots of contrast during the day. But at night I use a lighter theme with less contrast. I used to switch manually with a two lines in my settings for the IDE theme …

Install gcloud-sdk and Docker on Ubuntu 16.04 on VirtualBox

I use Windows 10 Home on my laptop, so docker integration is a challenge, espescially running all the builds written in shell scripts won't run nicely on Ubuntu on Windows or MSYS2.

So I've had to fallback on installing ubuntu on virtualbox, with docker and gcloud-sdk. I've documented the steps below.

Get VirtualBox

Download VirtualBox

Install Ubuntu on VirtualBox

Get Xubuntu 16.04 ISO. Xubuntu is lightweight and provides a standard desktop. Ubuntu or other flavours should also work.

Download Xubuntu LTS

VirtualBox Guest Config

Config suggested for guest: 1. Min Disk: 30GB 2. RAM: 2GB 3. LVM Partitioning 4 …