new posts (album wallpaper, twitch irc bots)

_posts/2024-12-01-spotify-api-wallpaper-changer.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Spotify & Itunes API wallpaper changer
+date: 2024-12-01 19:48 +0000
+---
+![example #1](/assets/img/wallpaper-1.jpg){:width="200" .left}![example #2](/assets/img/wallpaper-2.jpg){:width="200" .left}
+
+
+[GitHub link](https://github.com/RynTurtle/album_wallpaper)
+<h3> How It started/What it does</h3>
+Before I started university I wanted to get a head start in learning C++, I had an idea in my mind about a program which uses the Spotify API to get the album covers from my liked song list and add that as my wallpaper, I originally created it with python just as a proof of concept and whilst testing I realised the covers were only 640x640 pixels which means the quality of the wallpaper would be pretty bad. After researching I found a post by [bendodson](https://bendodson.com/projects/itunes-artwork-finder/) this website seemed to have very high quality images so I wanted to find out how he did this. The website luckily had the source code linked on GitHub, after a while of poking around the php code I could see how he accomplished it.
+I saw he got the ID of the album then used a different link with the album id and it would return the higher quality image so I tested it in the python version of the wallpaper changer, when I got it working I decided to now try and recreate it in C++ with a more organised structure and better coding practices as best as I could at the time. 
+
+<h3> FFmpeg </h3>
+Another aspect of my wallpaper changer program is the blurred affect background behind the album image, this was done using [FFmpeg](https://ffmpeg.org/), a command line tool used processing of media including video, music, audio etc, FFmpeg is used in programs like OBS and streaming or video services like Twitch/Youtube.  The FFmpeg command I used included the -filter_complex flag which I inserted the original image and added the boxblur affect, After a while of changing the values I found  the nice blur affect I wanted. 
+
+<h3> Future of the project </h3>
+After starting University, I can now see I can improve the code and I intend to in the future, I should add more error handling to ensure the program doesn’t close since it does happen sometimes. 

_posts/2024-12-01-twitch-irc-bots.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Twitch IRC Bots
+date: 2024-12-01 19:47 +0000
+---
+<h3> start of my programming journey </h3>
+I began learning how to program whilst being heavily involved in the twitch streaming community and so it was natural to try to make an IRC chatbot to show off cool commands and have fun, as I got more involved into programming it became a very big reward to see my commands being used and enjoyed by other users on the platform. The bot I created was called SnappingBot which was hosted on a raspberry pi 4, it had various of fun [commands](https://github.com/RynTurtle/Snappingbot-Commands) As you can imagine since I was learning whilst creating the code was pretty bad but I did try to improve everyday finally ending with four versions of the bot each being better and cleaner than the previous. 
+
+<h3> GUI application turtlerino </h3>
+Whilst working on SnappingBot I thought “wouldn’t it be fun if users could use fun commands for themselves” and that’s when [turtlerino]( https://github.com/RynTurtle/turtlerino) was made, the name came from a very popular chat client [Chatterino](https://chatterino.com/) used by twitch users to enhance their chatting experience, turtlerino could do some cool things like rainbow usernames by typing /color {hexcode} after each message to show off to other users, a ratelimit to allow users to spam very fast based on twitch’s limits and custom commands that a user can invoke for a combination of messages being sent. 
+I used the GUI library tkinter and wanted to improve the look so I changed to PyQt5 and found it very interesting and fun to mess with. The IRC section was imported from a lot of the things I did whilst making SnappingBot so I had a nice head start which allowed me to focus on creating interesting unique commands. 
+
+<h3> End of twitch IRC bots </h3>
+The bot was enjoyed by 339 different channels, whilst becoming more popular I had to improve each time to handle all the data being received and handled which became a difficult and fun challenge. Sadly after multiple iterations of the bot and the constant challenges I became burnt out from all stress of trying to do better and therefore lost of motivation for the project and terminated the bot and added turtlerino to the archive, about a year later twitch implemented API restrictions to need more permissions for a lot of the commands I used so after time I moved onto other new and more exciting projects.