That familiar SVG (scalar vector graphics) image of a tiger is the Ghostscript tiger: a vector image that has shipped with the Ghostscript PostScript interpreter for decades. The artwork itself predates its Ghostscript fame. The original tiger.ps / tiger.eps file says it was created in Adobe Illustrator 1.2d4 for OpenWindows 2 on April 12, 1990. The file does not identify the artist, and its exact origin is still unclear. (source)

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A minimal, offline mermaid diagram renderer contained in a single HTML file. I generated this because I wanted a simple mermaid diagram editor without ads. Think of it as a text editor with a mermaid diagram preview, along with some examples to help remember mermaid diagram syntax. Paste the mermaid diagram source, open or drop an .mmd file, inspect the result in a sandboxed preview, pan and zoom, tidy the source, and export the image again as SVG, PNG, or WebP. Run the app in your browser. This app works offline and you own it forever. No ads. No registration. No subscriptions. No trackers. Just right-click and save the .html page.

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A minimal, offline SVG viewer contained in a single HTML file. I generated this because I needed a quick app to view, zomm in on, and make minor edits to SVGs without having to launch InkScape. Think of it as a text editor with an SVG preview, but it also has some basic SVG examples to refresh your memory on SVG syntax. Paste SVG source, open or drop an .svg file, inspect the result in a sandboxndered preview, pan and zoom, tidy the source, and export the image again as SVG, PNG, or WebP. Run the app in your browser. This app works offline and you own it forever. No ads. No registration. No subscriptions. No trackers. Just right-click and save the .html page.

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I am now... of a certain age... and there's a ton of anecdotes in the history of computer science and software development that I've heard, but I wondered if there's more. I had an LLM compiler a list (though I've carefully reviewed and fixed a bunch of the links). Many of these I had heard before but some were new to me. Click through them if you're interested. Most of the links go to Wikipedia; I've made sure the links at least don't go to slop content farm websites.

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I wanted to get a local mirror copy of a website, but there's a lot of Python packages (as of August 2026) to do this. I decided to test 21 of them. This blog post is a human-written report of my experience using each one of these packages (as of August 2026). After reviewing them, I recommend website-downloader because it's a simple tool that does a simple task simply.

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Try out Mars Globe in your browser. This is an browser app that gives you a Mars globe with several labelled landmarks. The landmarks have links to their respective Wikipedia pages. The app has several customizations for what to display, and you could simply have it as a full screen rotating Mars globe for science displays. There is no registration or subscriptions. It just works. Git repo.

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Try out Make It Tiny in your browser. This is an browser app that shrinks the file sizes of images. You can optimize png, webp, jpg, and avif images in your browser without having to upload them to somebody else's server. Your images stay on your machine. There is no registration or subscriptions. It just works. Git repo. To run on your machine, you'll need to download make-it-tiny-offline.html and the other support .wasm and .js files from the git repo.

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I generated a cheat sheet page for the Python datetime.datetime.strftime() and strptime() functions. I always have to look them up. But I also have it include an interactive test prompt so you can verify the output immediately, as well as several common format strings: https://inventwithpython.com/strftime

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I've been getting more interest in making zines and short-run DIY publishing since using Python to make my Choose Your Own Adventure Tic-Tac-Toe zine.. I've been trying to find local zine fests and book fairs but had trouble finding an entire list. ChatGPT came up with the following 2026 events (mostly in Japan, England, and New York) but I wanted to repost the results here. The primary sources seem to be mostly ArtBookFairs.com, Zindies.co, and Distromat.co.uk which likely have more events than the ones here. I've human-reviewed the links to make sure they go to the correct event page and the event still looks current.

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For more vibe coding experiments, I used Claude Opus 4.8 to generate some generic games in a variety of programming languages and platforms. Some work decently, others are rough, others fail altogether. The git repo is called "vibe arcade". They have varying degrees of polish and none of them are close to a commercial quality (I wouldn't pay 99 cents for them in an app store.) This design gap reminds me of the excellent talk, "Juice It or Lose It" talk at the Nordic Game Jam. The successful generations include Python and Pygame games for Asteroids, Connect Four, 2048, Memory, Othello / Reversi, Top-Down Shooter, 15 Slide Tile Puzzle, Snake, Snood, Solitaire, Space Invaders, Super Hexagon, Tetris, Whack a Mole, 2D Maze, Kirby's Avalanche, Brick Breaker, Dodge, Endless Runner, Floodit. I also generated some games in Python using the turtle module: Snake and Tetris.

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