Welcome to Marc Dickenson's Blog Page

Blog: 07-13-2025: Pixelated Passion: An Abstract Exploration of Red Hues and Forms

The image shows a square artwork composed of smaller square tiles, arranged in a grid pattern. The tiles are painted in varying shades of red, purple, and white, with darker hues along the edges, creating a central focal point. Some tiles have visible brushstrokes, suggesting an impasto painting technique. A piece of adhesive tape is affixed to the artwork near the upper-left quadrant. The artwork rests on a light wood surface, possibly a table or floor.

I was inspired by a picture my youngest was painting and decided to pull this half completed painting out of the shed. For me, it turns out that painting decent squares is actually quite difficult. This piece has been in the shed for a solid five years plus. However, it sure would be nice to complete this Blinky picture from the Pac-Man video game. My plan is to gather some materials and make this a mixed media piece

Blog: 07-13-2025: Vibe coding Session 12 , nearly fully functional chess game available after (5 of N sessions to develop a chess game).

Today we made some more progress with the layout and castling. Now after this commit the chess game is operational and looks better visually. Play it in its current state here. Attempt to run the tests here.

A lesson learned today with Gemini CLI is that CTRL-U is a more efficient way than backspacing when a command in the chat window is no longer needed as further explained by Gemini itself:

To clear the current text input line in most command-line interfaces (including where you might be interacting with a Gemini CLI, if it's a standard terminal application), you typically use the following keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl + U: This is the most common shortcut for clearing the entire line from the cursor's current position to the beginning of the line. If your cursor is at the end of the line, it will clear the entire line.

I also experimented with a better layout for this blog and experienced some hallucinations when binary content was present in an input file.

Blog: 07-10-2025: Vibe coding Session 11 , partially working chess game available after (4 of N sessions to develop a chess game).

Today we made some more progress with drag and dropping pieces after this commit and the chess game is operational. It does load off screen as shown so to see it all we need to zoom out . Play it in its current state here

Blog: 07-10-2025: Waterline skyscraper Austin, Texas, July 10, 2025.

The grayscale image depicts a partially constructed high-rise building, presumably a skyscraper, topped with a construction crane. The building's unfinished facade shows exposed structural elements, suggesting an early phase of construction. The crane, positioned above the building, is a key tool for material handling and lifting. The background features cloudy skies, indicating atmospheric conditions during image capture. The overall scene illustrates urban development and construction activities in progress.

The crown of this building is starting to give me stone hinge vibes. I like it.

Blog: 07-09-2025: Vibe coding Session 10 , partially working chess game available after (3 of N sessions to develop a chess game).

The image shows a digital representation of a chess game in progress. The chessboard displays a standard starting arrangement of pieces: rooks, knights, bishops, queen, king, and pawns for both white and black. The chess clock indicates White has 8 minutes and 10 seconds, while Black has 10 minutes. Text below the board indicates it is White's turn to move. Menu options for a "New Game," "Takeback," "Resign," and "Help" are displayed, suggesting an interactive digital chess interface.

So as of commit the chess game is once again operational and the pieces move! Wow. Play it in its current state here

Blog: 07-08-2025: Jenga Blocks: A Staircase of Wood.

The image depicts a series of Jenga blocks arranged to form a step-like structure on a dark surface.

This was inspired by this Scientific American Article, four block solution.

Blog: 07-08-2025: Wooden Blocks Cascade, A Precarious Balancing Act.

The image depicts a stack of Jenga wooden blocks arranged in a descending stair-like pattern, with each block horizontally displaced from the one below.

The stunning answer is that the stacked bridge can stretch forever. In principle, a freestanding stack of blocks can span the Grand Canyon, no glue required. I am fascinated.

Blog: 07-07-2025: Testing an apple news link

testing 1.2.3... I studied this command line utility to list notes on macOS that is researched here. I am considering a workflow where I may share a note from my phone with a news story and then the use AI to automatically summarize the news story and add a link to my blog.

Blog: 07-06-2025: The Chuy's Fish. A Cool Red Fish Wearing Sunglasses Blubbing Bubbles in the Sea.

The image displays a stylized, red fish with exaggerated features. The fish has a tall dorsal fin and prominent pectoral and pelvic fins. It is wearing large, white-framed sunglasses with black lenses. A black outline defines the shape of the fish and its fins, with internal black hatch marks suggesting texture. A small cluster of three bubbles floats above the fish. The image is set against a plain white background.

Blog: 07-06-2025: Vibrant Pride of Barbados: A Burst of Fiery Beauty.

The image showcases a Pride of Barbados plant (Caesalpinia pulcherrima) in bloom. The flowers exhibit vibrant yellow and red petals, with prominent red filaments extending beyond the petals. Immature buds are visible at the top of the flower stalk. A seed pod hangs beneath the blooms. The plant is surrounded by greenery, indicating an outdoor setting, and small rocks are visible on the ground. The shallow depth of field suggests a close-up perspective.

Blog: 07-06-2025: Chess game continued...eighth vibecoding session

In the eighth vibecoding session, we continued developing a chess game for the website. It looks like it went a bit south. It seemed to refactor the architecture a bit much vs. just focussing on getting it working as requested. Here were all the commits it did ending with this commit .

However we still have not reached a working functional state. I wonder how many sessions it will take to get to a functional state.

Blog: 07-06-2025: Developing a Chess game for Vibe Coding Session Seven

In the seventh vibecoding session, we started developing a chess game for the website. Here was the initial prompt below. Side note: please see here for a discussion about whether to say we are vibe coding or I am vibecoding.

This time I asked it to commit each change and it committed about 21 commits before running out of tokens. After session one the app was not in a working state.

There were a couple times this session where the CLI got stuck printing out the same message over and over again. I had to press escape to get out of that loop.

Here was another spot that it got stuck in a loop. At times, I also had to remind it to commit each change as it seemed to forget about that requirement.

As you may have noticed sessions five and six are missing. For session five and six I tried to restart an in progress session the next day and ran into troubles as Gemini went a completely different route the next day. The output ended up being unuseable after two sessions so I hit pause on that after this commit. I am holding my overall review for a few more sessions. However, my initial take away is that vibecoding is very fun at times and also frustrating at times. It is not as easy as just sitting back and letting the computer do everything as far as I can tell. From my perspective it feels like quite a bit of work at times babysitting the tool.

Blog: 07-04-2025: Buttonbush Close-Up

This image showcases the intricate detail of a Cephalanthus occidentalis, commonly known as buttonbush. The spherical flower head is composed of numerous tiny, densely packed florets. Each floret features a slender, elongated style extending outwards, creating a pincushion-like appearance. The styles are tipped with yellowish stigmas, receptive to pollen. The overall color of the flower head is a creamy white, though some individual florets may exhibit subtle variations in hue. These spherical blooms attract pollinators such as butterflies and hummingbirds. The surrounding green foliage provides a contrasting backdrop, highlighting the unique morphology of this native plant. The tight aggregation of florets maximizes pollination efficiency.

Blog: 07-02-2025: Vibe Coding Session 4

In today's Vibe coding session with GeminiCLI, I was trying to create a choose your own adventure game. After vibe coding for about one hour, I ran out of tokens. However, my main concern is that I am still running this directly on my native system. Even better would be if I was running this in a protected containerized environment so that it couldn't possibly destroy my computer. The result of today's session was two partially working choose your own adventure games.

On my first attempt for today, Gemini CLI created the game Voidbound. The biggest struggle it seemed to have was getting a working help menu. I asked it repeatedly in different ways and it didn't seem to understand that the help menu was not working. We went back-and-forth. At times it had some buttons to choose the adventure and then it had the ability for the user to input commands - but the playability was poor. Play the voidbound game yourself that we created by clicking right here!.

Spoiler alert... I do have to say I love the grand celebration that Gemini created for when the game is won. Check it out below:

Then I refined my prompt and tried again and it worked for about five minutes before running out of tokens and created a different game called Echoes-of-the-void . Play the Echoes-of-the-void game yourself that we created by clicking right here!. I have not even tried it yet myself!

Lastly, here were the 429 errors and stats for the session. You may have also noticed that I skipped vibecoding session 3. The output of that session was not usable. I was trying to create a planning poker application and was not happy with the output. Speaking of missing vibecoding sessions… You probably also noticed that vibecoding session one is missing. In that case, it was too good. In fact, I was starting to worry about copyright issues. We may never see the missing vibecoding session one output. It may remain a mystery forever.

│  Agent powering down. Goodbye!     │
│                                    │
│                                    │
│  Cumulative Stats (14 Turns)       │
│                                    │
│  Input Tokens           6,139,700  │
│  Output Tokens            100,160  │
│  Thoughts Tokens           14,045  │
│  Cached Tokens  3,835,383 (61.3%)  │
│  ────────────────────────────────  │
│  Total Tokens           6,253,905  │
│                                    │
│  Total duration (API)     26m 34s  │
│  Total duration (wall)   1h 9m 8s  │

Blog: 07-01-2025: Vibe Coding Quantum Tic Tac Toe with Gemini CLI

Here is my second vibe coding session with Gemini CLI. This was an hour long session and I asked the Gemini CLI to create a new updated version of tic-tac-toe. I really like what it came up with overall and it seems very creative. The challenges we encountered were primarily surrounding adding music to the game and frequent regressions being injected into the game. For the music, I asked it multiple times to add music and debugged the problems for Gemini multiple times including 404, SSL certificate errors and the format of mp3 files, however despite our best attempts we were not successful to add music to the game during this session. In a previous session, it added music very easily so I'm not sure why it had so much difficulty with music this time. Another interesting thing was asking it to be more transparent with what it was doing. After that, it displayed a lot more output of its inner workings and processing. My last key takeaway from this second session is that I need to run this in a protected container so that it does not have full access to do bad things to my computer. Give the game that we created in under an hour a try for yourself : click here to play Quantum Tic Tac Toe! from our Vibe Coding session bugs and all!

Stats for this Gemini CLI session below. This is all free to use right now...

│                                      │
│  Cumulative Stats (25 Turns)         │
│                                      │
│  Input Tokens             3,339,906  │
│  Output Tokens               67,564  │
│  Thoughts Tokens             36,496  │
│  Cached Tokens    2,755,475 (80.0%)  │
│  ──────────────────────────────────  │
│  Total Tokens             3,443,966  │
│                                      │
│  Total duration (API)       20m 49s  │
│  Total duration (wall)  20h 54m 53s  │
│                                      │

Blog: 06-29-2025: My new baby

Feeling really fortunate to have a new computer of my own. The image below is an HEIC file of its first moments opening its eyes. I understand that the .HEIC file format will not render on Windows . Still , for experimental purposes, I want to add it in here. Update 7.25.25: In future we can use picture element to select the most efficient image format format based on what is supported in the browser. Below if you are on a mondern browser you will get the heic image, but if you are on chrome you likely will get the gif image...boo...

I observed that for this small sample that .HEIC files were much smaller than .jpg, .png, and .gif files and still appears visually higher quality.

-rw-r--r--@ 1 *********** staff 319899 Jun 29 13:32 IMG_1513.HEIC
-rw-r--r--@ 1 *********** staff 519510 Jun 29 13:36 IMG_1513.jpg
-rw-r--r--@ 1 *********** staff 1215778 Jun 29 13:37 IMG_1513.gif
-rw-r--r--@ 1 *********** staff 2365779 Jun 29 13:35 IMG_1513.png

In particular the .gif file is much larger and still appears visually less quality.

In my extremely small sample size above, I observe that .HEIC format is quite a bit more efficient and smaller than some other popular formats. I wondered how much engergy we could save if the entire internet made the switch and asked GPT-4o mini to tell us more about HEIC and try to answer that question below.

HEIC (High Efficiency Image Coding) files are generally smaller than JPG, GIF, and PNG files due to their advanced compression techniques. Here's a comparison of the average size differences: HEIC vs. JPG: HEIC files can be about 50% smaller than JPG files while maintaining similar or better image quality. For example, a JPG file that is 2 MB might be compressed to around 1 MB in HEIC format. HEIC vs. GIF: GIF files are typically larger than HEIC files, especially for images with many colors or complex animations. HEIC files can be significantly smaller, often by 60% or more, depending on the content. HEIC vs. PNG: PNG files are lossless and can be larger than HEIC files, especially for images with high color depth or transparency. HEIC files can be around 30-50% smaller than PNG files, depending on the image complexity. Overall, HEIC files offer a more efficient compression method, making them a preferred choice for storing high-quality images in a smaller file size.

While it's challenging to provide an exact figure without detailed data, a switch to HEIC could lead to significant energy savings across the internet, potentially reducing the overall carbon footprint associated with data transmission and storage.
Author: GPT-4o mini

Long story short GPT-4o mini estimated potential savings at 1.5 trillion kWh annually for a switch to HEIC for entire internet. Whoah. After probing further it later summarized it like this:

The potential power savings from converting all images on the internet to HEIC format would be approximately 0.0009% of total global energy consumption. This indicates that while the savings from switching to HEIC could be significant in terms of data storage and transmission, the overall impact on global energy consumption would be relatively small.

Blog: 06-29-2025: Aquarena Springs Surprise: Encountering the Texas Cichlid

We recently visited Aquarena Springs in San Marcos, Texas. We had the pleasure of viewing this fish in an aquarium at the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment experience. We went specifically for the The Glass-Bottom Boats Tour.

Herichthys cyanoguttatus, commonly known as the Texas Cichlid. This species is native to the Rio Grande basin in Texas and Mexico. This cichlid exhibits a distinctive appearance characterized by a grey body covered in iridescent blue or green spots. Males often develop a nuchal hump, adding to their robust build. Its notable features include a stout body, thick lips, and a rounded head. They are freshwater fish, and their presence is a testament to the unique aquatic ecosystem of the region. The Texas Cichlid is known for its aggressive behavior, especially during breeding season, and its omnivorous diet consists of invertebrates, algae, and small fish. They are an important part of the natural ecosystem and a unique attraction at Aquarena Springs.

Authored by Gemini

Blog: 06-25-2025: Vibe Coding in T-minus...

Blog: 06-25-2025: Yes Please! Gemini CLI: your open-source AI agent

Yes I would like a slice of this please. Thank you! Gemini CLI: your open-source AI agent . I will explore the Gemini CLI , and share my findings.

As part of my plans to continue exploring the Gemini API in my sandbox and incorporating some AI generated content into my site; I present the output of this image processing command below. The command used to generate this content was

python gemimg.for.marcdickenson.blog.py ~/Downloads/IMG_1404.jpg "Please focus on fact that this is a stalk of a plant with a fruiting inflorescence and explain scientific details related to that. Please also take credit for the output writing and cite yourself as the author. Please also start the blog with an engaging title."

The generated output is not quite clear on plant species so I will have to investigate this mystery further and collect more details, and I also asked Gemini what the font should look like for its output and it generated the gemini-font below for me, so that one may see when the AI is speaking and when a human is speaking in normal font.

Blog: 06-08-2025: The bees are pollenating our Leucophyllum frutescens

The bees are pollenating the Leucophyllum frutescens in front of our house today.

Blog: 06-07-2025: Behind the Clouds: Developing a Simple Roblox Obby

My daughter and I collaboratively developed an obby, which is short for obstacle course, Roblox game and published it on Roblox. With the help of Gemini we developed, tested, and published the game all in under an hour. We both learned a new technology that we had never used before Lua for the logic and implemented the entire game on the Roblox Studio platform thereby unleashing the power of the Roblox engine. My daughter's Roblox skills were vital during the testing phase to jump from one platform to another and manipulate the interfaces. Then for publishing the video below we used Handbrake to convert the video file from .mov to .mp4 format. It was really fun to collaborate with my daughter on this development project. Thanks, Gemini!

Here is a video of us testing the Roblox game. Note even this video took some Gemini magic to get it looking the way that I want below with the big play button in the middle. Gemini showed me how to do that with some JavaScript as the default video html tag does not have a centralized play button in the middle of the video .

Our Cloud Ascent Obby leverages the Roblox Engine and its Lua scripting language. Construction relies on BasePart instances with properties like Position and Anchored. Dynamic obstacles utilize Lua scripts attached to parts, employing event listeners like Touched and manipulating properties like Transparency and CanCollide. Checkpoints manage Player.RespawnLocation, potentially integrating Player.TeamColor for non-neutral spawns. That was one of the most challenging parts to debug setting the Player.TeamColor when the player reached the checkpoint is what fixed that bug in the code. Victory is celebrated client-side with ScreenGui manipulation orchestrated by server-side Lua within the victory trigger.

Blog: 06-01-2025: I am looking forward to exploring this api in my sandbox and incorporating some AI generated content into my site : Gemini API.

Blog: 06-01-2025: "So, yeah, helicopter's just doing its thing over Lady Bird Lake in Austin. Pretty standard. Looks like a couple of guys are suspended in a basket, messing with power lines. Seems like a hassle, but probably beats climbing poles. Just another Sunday, I guess." – Google Gemini's take on this group of images, with as requested Gen X vibe.

Blog: 06-01-2025: It's on the wall in all its glory.

Blog: 05-30-2025: The Sunflowers project is complete!

Blog: 05-28-2025: Step 33 of 34, only one step left.

Blog: 5/26/2025: Some local Hesperaloe parviflora that I saw on my walk today..

Blog: 5/26/2025: More info about the Lego art project, only two steps left.

Blog: 5/26/2025: Steps 1-32 of Lego art project are now complete. Now it is clear what the art is. Yes, it is Van Gogh's Sunflowers. I also used this montage command for the first time today to generate the 3x3 montage image below.

montage IMG_1098.jpg IMG_1090.jpg IMG_1087.jpg IMG_1113.jpg IMG_1112.jpg IMG_1106.jpg IMG_1122.jpg IMG_1121.jpg IMG_1115.jpg -tile 3x3 -geometry +0+0 -background white -border 0 -bordercolor black output_grid_with_options.jpg

Blog: 5/20/2025: Day two of Lego art project... what will it become?

Blog: 5/11/2025: Introducing my daughters to the world of investing has become a part of our family life and weekly routine this year, offering opportunities to discuss financial responsibility and the power of long-term growth. I love their curiosity, listening to their questions, and having open conversations about money has also helped me to strengthen my own understanding of financial topics. Together I believe we are laying a foundation for a successful financial future.

Blog: 5/11/2025: My updated resume is now available online. Dowload a copy of my resume here.

Blog: 5/4/2025: Gemini Deep Research: Software Development Productivity: A Product Manager's Perspective and Investigating types of graphs used for exploratory data analysis.

Blog: 5/3/2025: Gemini Deep Research: Measuring Software Development Quality: A Comprehensive Analysis

Blog: 5/3/2025: Gemini Deep Research: Software Development Productivity: Defining, Measuring, and Enhancing Team Performance