Ian Smith's Home Page

Welcome to my always out of date web site! The site design is from 1995 and it shows! :-)

Feel free to post questions or comments on the ian.org forums. (NEW!)

Always happy to have a visitor, feel free to email if you have any comments or questions. My permanent email address is which used to be hosted by North Coast Internet which was bought from Erie Computer by ErieNet which was then bought by Stargate Industries which eventually went bankrupt (after I left). I worked as a Sytems Administrator at all three before leaving to join Engage IT which employed many of my friends from Erie Computer and ErieNet. Engage IT eventually bought Erie Computer, started it's own ISP and then went out of business (after I left). A former employe bought Erie Computer from the remains of Engage IT and hired back several other former employees. Same with the Engage IT's ISP. Both are still alive and well. Confused yet?

I spent 8 fun years working for Sports Mogul, Inc. writing PC computer games before leaving to work for Berkeley Communications to do some more programming.

Below are my current projects. Current meaning anything I have done in the past 10 years. :-)
As the Amiga is currently, err, struggling... no further Amiga updates are planned, sadly.
Some links may be dead. I usually go through the old links about once a year. Or two. Or three...

Hard Drive Clock (NEW!)

This is a persistence of vision clock I made from an old hard drive, some LEDs and a microcontroller.
My favorite electronic creation.
Who doesn't love spinning colors?
Pictures, videos and instructions.

Magnetics Pages

Various magnets and projects I am playing with.
Included are diamagnetic levitation and halbach arrays.
Everybody loves things that levitate! And spin!
Science: Creating magnets that can break your fingers.

Liquid Metal

Safely 'playing' with mercury. Don't try this at home!
But feel free to look at my web pages about it.
Shiny: Why does everything shiny have to be dangerous?

Fractal eXtreme

My favorite Fractal generator program. I have some plugins and some pictures of places I found.

Plugins - I have written several vaguely interesting plugins.
Gallery - See some of my explorations.
Links to other Fractal eXtreme pages:
- Cygnus Software - The makers of FX.

Photos

Various photographs I have taken. I indexed a few of them, the rest are hidden for my friends.

Ok, thats the last of the current and almost up to date section.

Warning! Danger! Danger! The sections below are really, really old. But go ahead and look anyway.

Imagine 3D

Imagine was a 3D rendering program for the Amiga computer that was ported to DOS and eventually Windows. I do not think it is in active development anymore.

But, I still think the Bool texture is neat, even if it had some flaws. I have not worked on these since the 90's.

IIWTextures V1.0 - Four textures for Imagine for Windows.
IITextures V1.2.1 - Nine algorithmic Textures for the Amiga. I have compiled some for DOS as well.
IIUtilities V1.4 - Several support programs for Imagine files. Some I wrote in Amiga C and some in Rexx scripts.
Imagine 3.x Texture C interface and the TDDD object format (42K) from Impulse.
Dare to Imagine is a great list of hints and tips from the Imagine Mailing List.
The Imagine FAQ #8 in HTML format is online here.

Amiga ImageMaster R/T

ImageMaster was a Photoshop-like program for the Amiga in the early 90's that focused on image manipulation.

If anyone still uses this, here are some modules. Ahh, memories. Maybe I should write some Photoshop plugins someday...

IMEffects V1.0 - 12 various modules of mine to perform many functions.
IMandel V1.0 - A 24-bit mandelbrot generator.
IMUnFocus V1.0 - UnFocus and blur an image with many options.

HP48SX Calculator

The last of the great calculators from HP. The HP48 line was the end of HP's calculator line. It was a PDA before it's time, as well as the most advanced handheld calculator. I will sadly miss it.

BaseCalc V1.2 - My numerical base converter from base 2 to 62 with support for fractions and 64 bit percision.
LongMath V1.1 - Extended Percision Math Package with near infinite percision and many operations.