I am Andrew Stephens, a New Zealand programmer living in Boston, USA. I write and occasionally do little projects to amuse myself.

Contact me: Email, Mastodon, LinkedIn.

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My Blog

The original purpose of this site. You can see all posts, filter by topic with the Tag Cloud, or see what other people have been reading at my Visitor Statistics page.

Games

Voyage of the Marigold is a choice-based web adventure with graphics where you captain a starship on a desperate mission. The intention was to allow the player to play through a series of Star Trek episodes. I am very proud of it - it was even nominated for a few awards. I also wrote a lengthy set of notes explaining some of the design choices I made during development.

The TV Opening Sequences Quiz is a game to test your knowledge of TV shows, both new and old. I consider this quite difficult but fair; see how you do against others who have played.

Planet From Doctor Who or Hair Care Product is a simple quiz where you have to decide which of these categories a made up name belongs to. Doctor Who knowledge and/or hair may help but are not strictly required.

Other Interactive Stuff

Watch a battle for survival play out over a few minutes on your screen. An allegory for existence? A meditation aid? An excuse to watch some colored balls bounce around for a minute or two? Dot Battle is all these things.

We all agree that today's computer displays are too colorful. Do you miss the old, crisp black-and-white display of the original Macintosh computers? Good news! I implemented a reusable web-component that dithers images in the same way. Play with the Atkinson Dithering demo and use your own images.

We all agree that media controls on audio files are too easy to use. Do you miss the old mechanical form-factor and clunking sounds of an audio cassette player? Good news! I implemented a reusable web-component that brings a cassette audio interface to your browser.

Boston Throughout the Seasons. I took some photos in the same spot over a couple of years to produce a demo of cross-fading between images using WebGL. Read my technical writeup.

You may remember back in 2017 people got very excited about the discovery of a potentially habitable exoplanet, TRAPPIST-1. I made this animated diagram showing the true distance which is disappointingly far. How Far is TRAPPIST-1.