Ben Busby | Projects, writeups, ideas, announcements, other random junk


2022 Project News

Hi friends. I’ve had a few questions in the past couple months about the status of my ongoing projects, and I figured I’d make a short post here to clear everything up.

Open Source Projects

Whoogle development is going to continue (mostly) as usual, but will likely be at a slower pace this year as I continue to take on new projects. Part of this is due to my hesitancy to continually introduce new features. As many of you know, Whoogle was meant to stay as simple as possible, and I feel like I have caved to a few too many feature requests since the project’s inception. As a result, I would like to slow down development and focus my time on reviewing the occasional pull request and fixing bugs when I have time.

Ultimately it’s a tool I regularly use every day, so I’ll continue to make patches if a certain feature breaks or if there’s something I realize I need from the tool and can’t live without.

Also, if you’re interested in contributing, reach out! I’m always happy to help new contributors navigate the code base and figure out where they can improve things.

Colorstorm / Earthbound Themes

My “Earthbound Themes” repo has been a much bigger hit with people than I ever anticipated. As of writing, it has about ~15K installs on the VSCode Marketplace alone, as well as thousands more across Sublime, Atom, and Vim. It may seem strange then that I decided to ditch the Earthbound focus of the repo and turn the core color generation code into a standalone tool that others can use. It’s a work in progress, but I’m slowly getting closer to a full tool release that I hope to distribute as an easily installed binary for all platforms. The new tool, Colorstorm, is available for Arch Linux through the AUR, and will be rolled out to other platforms in the coming months.

As far as the old “Earthbound Themes” repo is concerned, my plan is to combine that with a larger theme set that I have in mind. I’ll be using Colorstorm to generate everything for this new theme set, so I’ll get to experience firsthand any issues or weirdness that can be ironed out before release.

Anomaly Mono

Unfortunately, I no longer use Anomaly Mono much anymore. There were some graphical issues with Alacritty that I couldn’t quickly figure out, so I switched to another font and haven’t changed back. I hope to have some spare time to investigate these issues and revisit the font, but I’m not sure when that will be. Originally the font was designed in Adobe Illustrator, but since I’m no longer interested in keeping an active Adobe product subscsription, I’ll need to figure out how to import and modify the font using a different tool. Sounds like fun…

Farside

Farside quickly became one of my favorite projects I’ve created, and I’ve been super happy with the support from the privacy community after its release. That said, I don’t have much planned for Farside beyond just general maintenance of the service. I’d like to spin up an onion version of Farside that redirects to onion instances of the services that Farside supports though, so keep an eye out for that in the near future.

Misc

I haven’t committed to anything just yet, but I’ve recently been using Sourcehut for my latest projects instead of GitHub, and have been considering migrating my current project roster over to Sourcehut as well. When I’m not at my desk, I’m typically using an older laptop that has a much easier time with Sourcehut’s web interface than GitHub’s. I would still likely continue to mirror repositories to GitHub since that’s where I get most of my traffic, but PRs and issue tracking would be done through Sourcehut instead. Again, not committed to this just yet, but seems likely to happen. I’d like to keep trying out Sourcehut for personal use for a few more months before commiting to moving everything over there.

Music

It’s been far too long since my last release of original music. My song “Oops” was featured on the DEF CON 28 Soundtrack, which brought in a wave of new listeners on various streaming platforms. I then proceeded to completely drop the ball by not releasing anything new after that, so once everyone got tired of the song, my listener count dropped pretty hard. I was pretty bummed about that, but it’s obviously nobody’s fault but my own.

On that note, I’m planning to begin releasing new music at least monthly, but preferably more often than that. I’m in the search for a new DAW (previously used Propellerhead Reason, but it crashes very frequently for me), so if you have one you’re passionate about, please reach out! My email is at the bottom of this page.

Games

Believe it or not, I’m back to working on games. The last “real” game I released was Life Lessons, which only sold a few hundred copies and just barely covered the monetary investment I had put into making it. Overall I’m happy I made it, but it’s definitely time to move on. I can’t say much about the game I’m working on now, but it’ll be a bigger undertaking than any of the games I’ve made so far.

Similarly to my music update, I’m interested in hearing from you if there’s a particular game engine that you’ve been using and want to talk about. In the last few weeks I’ve been trying out DragonRuby which might be a bit too bare bones for the project I have in mind, but has still been an enjoyable experience.



Questions? Comments? Reach out!
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