This is great! And thanks for the link to stuff about Lenia - that was new to me and looks freaking awesome. Next programming side project for sure.

I’ve also been meaning to properly get into using Shadertoy, and I think this was a great introduction through an interesting use case.

I’m planning to build a solar powered weather station soon - I feel like that’s a project I could have done in my old apartment and put out on the balcony.

VCV rack is awesome, if not the easiest to start from scratch with. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s basically a virtual modular analog synthesizer. You can build your own sound generating machines out of a huge selection of modules, including oscillators, filters, sequencers, etc. Some of the modules are based on real hardware modules that you can buy, but there’s a huge variety.

It’s fun to play around with, but if you’re new to modular synthesis then I recommend limiting your module selection to just the built-in ones to start because the full selection is pretty overwhelming if you don’t know a VFO from an ADSR evelope generator.

Reaper is an excellent Digital Audio Workstation with full Linux support

Pycharm debugger has been great for me recently, I love the feature where you can drop into an ipython repl and interact with your program state.