[krilnon]

I used Sikuli back in 2011-12 for some random automaton tasks, and often wish I would remember to use it more.

- Advisor wanted a one button way to run a convoluted research prototype I had made, and I didn't want to have to dig into Cocoa to figure out how to programmatically click/select options in a few desktop apps.

- Worked at a company and there was silly employee training slideshow+quiz, so I had Sikuli wait for the next arrow to show up once the audio was finished and click it.

- Wanted to heat up my GPU to warm a brownie, so I opened one of those WebGL water demos and had Sikuli repeatedly pick up a ball and drop it in the water.

[AceJohnny2]

> - Wanted to heat up my GPU to warm a brownie

Please elaborate.

[krilnon]

Sure thing. I was an intern at Adobe working on a new programming language. The office has a cafeteria, and I would often buy lunch there and get a brownie to save for later.

I like brownies better when they're warm, so I came up with a few ways to warm the pre-packaged treats while still sitting in my office. I first tried sitting the brownie atop my laptop charger: http://images.reclipse.net/warmed_brownie.jpg

This worked fairly well, but the charger was less hot when my laptop was at 100% charge, so I sought alternate methods for heating up the brownie. For some reason, I had stumbled across some recent WebGL demos at the time, and noticed that the fan on my laptop would spin up on that particular demo. (http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/)

This provided a more consistent heat than the charger, since usually my laptops would be completely charged by the end of lunchtime. I had my own laptop and a company-provided laptop, so it wasn't hard to set one of them aside as a brownie warmer.

[habosa]

Wow. I thought the "to warm a brownie" thing was a joke about WebGL performance. That's a hilarious story.

[krilnon]

Nah, it's real. Adobe had a WebGL competitor, Stage3D, at the time, but I didn't work on that at all. As an intern, I would run a few useful benchmarks per day, but it was more reliable to run things I knew would heat up a laptop instantly, so I used WebGL demos.

Brownie-wise, I would wait a while because lunch would fill me up. But at 3 or 4 pm, I'd be hungry again and something the size of a brownie would really hit the spot.

[_pmf_]

Low hanging fruits.

[yzzxy]

> - Wanted to heat up my GPU to warm a brownie, so I opened one of those WebGL water demos and had Sikuli repeatedly pick up a ball and drop it in the water.

I'm not sure why this is like nails on a chalkboard for me. Maybe it's the programmer equivalent of dog-earing book pages.

[krilnon]

It was just for fun. Part of my job at the time was evaluating benchmarks, so things like the water simulation were on my mind. I don't remember if there were microwaves on each floor that I might have used instead.

I don't dog-ear book pages, if that makes you feel any better.

[yzzxy]

Reminds me of the Wired bitcoin miner[0]. They bought an early ASIC miner and used it to heat coffee on a livestream.

[0] http://www.wired.com/2013/05/butterfly_live/

(also I dog ear pages so we're even)

[Ygg2]

I'm gonna post this XKCD, because it's eerily appropriate (once WebGL manages to fix any performance bugs): http://xkcd.com/1172/

[krilnon]

I haven't worked anywhere with tasty nearby brownies since then. =-/ I know I ate something unhealthy often at the Stata Center's cafe, but I think it was a large cookie that didn't need to be heated.

[Ygg2]

:,( You can buy brownies before or after, no?