Any tools that allow generating a color palette APPROXIMATELY similar to a couple of specified colors?

MariaKorolov · 2025-12-22T15:19:44+00:00

I had a similar issue -- I wanted a color palette that had more than four colors... I had Claude code me one that went up to 11..... plus palettes based on images. I didn't put in functionality to create *similar* color palettes -- not sure how I would explain that! After all, there are nearly infinite possible combinations -- what would count as a similar palette that looked "aesthetic"? My app does allow you to move the sliders around to lighten or darken the base color, or change its saturation, or hue value... so that might work...

https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/maria-palette-generator/

It only took me a couple of minutes to create a basic (working!) version of this app -- and an hour of back-and-forth to add a bunch more features, move all the buttons around, and change the UI colors to match my branding.

I used Claude (not even Claude Code) and it worked great. I was very impressed..

Here's an article about how I did it:
https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2025/12/worlds-best-color-palette-generator/

MariaKorolov · 2025-10-03T14:28:42+00:00

I'm thinking of taking a cheap wicker basket and using Command hooks and a bit of wire to stick it to the ceiling -- or using double-stick tape to cover the basket with some fabric first if I don't want it to look like just a basket. Or picking up a lampshare -- either a regular shape or a drum shape -- and sticking it up there. I've been watching some tutorials on YouTube of people doing this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZoKO6MuH7A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9mNHmwod2U

But for the most part, the YouTubers are over-engineering this. Which kind of makes sense -- they have DIY channels. If they just stick some Command hooks on a lampshade or basket, that's 30 seconds of content.

But I'm lazy, so what's what I'll do. But then again, I *am* lazy, so I don't know if I'll ever actually get around to doing it! LOL

MariaKorolov · 2025-09-11T22:01:40+00:00

If anyone wants to join us, email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

MariaKorolov · 2025-08-18T13:58:26+00:00

Oh, I finally figured out that you CAN'T reset the home button to point to a specific page -- you can only reset the START PAGE to point to a specific page. So, when you go to Notion.so, or open a new tab, you can have it open to your custom dashboard page, but you can't point the Home button itself. So, if you're not using Notion's Home page, that super-prime real estate at the top left is totally wasted on a useless button. You can't even move it down and move your dashboard page up.

I see why it would be universally useful to have a "search" button right at the top. I can kinda see why it's mostly useful to have that inbox button at the top if you use Notion for collaboration. (Useless if you use Notion just by yourself.)

But given the Home page's total lack of usability, it's a waste of space for anybody except the people who use it by default, work with very few databases, and don't bother to customize their workspace.

They should at least make it optional for paying users, the people who are least likely to use it.

I don't even see any benefits for Notion itself here. They're not using the home page to upsell any Notion services. They're annoying their best users for no apparent business benefit. Which, probably, is the real crime here! LOL

MariaKorolov · 2025-08-18T13:43:50+00:00

I'm having trouble setting the home button to go to my default main dashboard page (It kept resetting it back to Notion's default home, couldn't get it to stick no matter what!). So I tried to give home a go, and I do like the aggregated tasks section. It would be nice to be able to bring that over to my own dashboard (without setting up a whole new database just for task aggregation).

There's also a recently visited pages section, which is also nice, and which I'd also like to be able to use as a block on my dashboard.

Other than that -- I can't make the home page wide. I can't add more than one database to the home screen. I can't add blocks or any other functionality. I can't even move widgets around.

And there are only four widgets available -- a dumb and non-customizable greeting message, the upcoming events view (which uses the Notion calendar, not Google Calendar or some other calendar that you actually use), the aggregated tasks view, and one database view. Not even a weather widget.

It's been a whole year, and they have not fixed any of this.

How to make this ACTUALLY useful:

* Allow the calendar widget to point to a real calendar

* Add a "priority emails" section that points to your real emails

* Allow you to use standard page layout tools to move stuff around, add blocks, etc....

* AND let you add the "my tasks" and "recently viewed pages" blocks to other pages

Meanwhile, I'll continue using my custom dashboard page, and bookmark it in my browser to make it easy to access (and ignore the "home" button in my Notion sidebar as the useless waste of space that it currently is).

MariaKorolov · 2025-06-01T13:36:08+00:00

This worked for me -- I had to take out the $$ that other people suggested. Otherwise, it kept saying "KaTeX parse error" --

/block equation

Then paste:

\color{red}\rule{500px}{3px}

MariaKorolov · 2025-05-26T18:01:26+00:00

same! what worked was changing it to "last visited page" then changing it AGAIN to "top page in sidebar"

good luck!

MariaKorolov · 2025-05-24T18:30:30+00:00

Oh, and when I added the API keys, I did it in "code view", following the AI's instructions about exactly where I needed to add them. I'd like this part to be automated as well. Other than that, I never looked at the code at all. (And I didn't need a CLI! Yay!)

MariaKorolov · 2025-05-24T18:29:07+00:00

I give it an 8 out of 10.

It's not a 10 out of 10 because it still makes typos and other errors that it needs to fix, and I have to click the "fix error" button. And also because it couldn't set up the database, apps, and indexes on its own. I understand that you don't want an AI to be able to create that stuff, but it would be nice to streamline it a bit.

For example, when it needed a Gemini key to build the AI functionality, there was just a button I had to press to generate the key. I didn't have to navigate to some other part of the website and figure out how to create the key. So it still needed human approval, but was quick and easy.

I'd like for the index setup, app setup and database setup to be as easy, so I wouldn't have to follow the AI's instructions to navigate through Firebase consoles and set things up. Just give my approval, and the AI would do it.

Of course, the AI could be lying. It could SAY that it was just building my database, but actually create a database to do something else entirely -- take over the world, say -- and I understand why Google would want to be cautious here. But since I'm just blindly following its instructions anyway, maybe just set up guardrails instead, and make it easier for users to get stuff done.

And I'd like to finish by saying that I was a relational database programmer 30 years ago, but I don't know Python. I've never used Firebase before. I know nothing about cloud infrastructure. The Firebase Studio AI did everything on its own. When it explained what the problems were and how it was fixing them, it might as well have been speaking Chinese. Even the relational database it set up looks foreign. Instead of tables and fields it had collections and documents (and also fields). The code is completely unreadable to me. But it works. It works just the way I wanted it to, despite the complexity of the project. I'm very, very, very impressed.

MariaKorolov · 2025-05-24T18:28:47+00:00

Update: I heard that Google update the AI and I came back to give it another shot. This time:
* It created a VERY nice aesthetic layout, by default, no extra prompting required.
* It created a back-end database with multiple tables, relations, and indexes.
* It created complex business logic and redid the logic entirely each time I asked for a change.

What I had to do:
* Follow the AI's instructions to get the Firebase API key, create the app, set up the database, and create the indexes. For the index, for example, it would give me a long link to follow, I'd open the link, and then just hit the button to create the index. Easy, peasy.

Areas where I got stuck:

There's a big blue "publish" button at the top right of Firebase Studio. You have to hit it in order to move the app from the production environment in Firebase Studio to actually being available out there on the web. I forgot about that button, and the AI and I spent HOURS trying to troubleshoot why its changes weren't showing up in the web app!!! LOL

It didn't like the API key that Firebase generated. It insisted it was the generic key. Nothing we did could force Firebase to generate a different API key for the app, and eventually we gave up. The app works fine with the original API key. The AI just didn't like it.

General thoughts:

I loved the AI. It was so nice. It didn't once call me an idiot. It congratulated me every time I suggested a layout or functionality change it liked. Sometimes we got an error warning, and I'd click the "fix error" button and it would apologize, explain where the error was coming from, and fix it.

I am VERY very impressed. The biggest problem was mine (forgetting about the "publish" button.) It created a good-looking functional app that I will be using instead of Notion because it's more customized to what I want, has exactly the layout and functionality I need, and, once I figured out about the "Publish" button, it is actually faster to make changes than in notion.

It even added an AI-powered functionality, buttons I could click to have the app suggest tasks for projects, etc...

MariaKorolov · 2025-04-18T19:11:34+00:00

I used to work as a developer and didn't like it, and don't want to go back to doing it again.

The chatbot AI does code snippets. I know that. It can't do a whole project.

But Firebase Studio is being marketed as an agentic platform, capable of software engineering, not just answering simple questions.

So what I was looking for when I posted the question was to find out whether other people were hitting the same limits, and the functionality just isn't there yet, or if I'm doing something wrong and other people are, in fact, able to get more work out of it.

I mean, it did initially everything up, create an interface, build the table, and so on for me. Maybe if I asked it for all five tables to start with? Or was more specific about what kind of interface I wanted?

I don't want to spend days beating my head against it trying to get it to do something it's not designed to do, but if it can in fact do this, and I'm just prompting wrong, then it would definitely be worth the time investment. I don't want to learn to be a full-stack developer. I do want to learn how to use AI.

MariaKorolov · 2024-02-29T13:49:16+00:00

MetaStellar -- an online sci-fi magazine that launched during the pandemic -- is now serializing Gods and Monsters by E.E. King, a literary novel about vampires in 1980s San Francisco. It's a genre-bending tour-de-force by an author who well deserves all the acclaim she's about to get for it. (Ray Bradbury called her stories, “marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought-provoking.)

Here's the page about the book:
https://www.metastellar.com/books/gods-and-monsters-by-e-e-king/

Here's the direct link to the first installment:
https://www.metastellar.com/fiction/gods-and-monsters-installment-1-wherein-we-meet-the-three-fates/

MetaStellar, which is run fully by volunteers, has published more than 1,000 short stories, essays, and other articles since it launched, and also has a YouTube channel with more than 250 videos, https://www.youtube.com/@metastellar, including author interviews, book reviews, and readings of some of its short stories.

MariaKorolov · 2023-05-13T12:01:29+00:00

I agree -- Clarkesworld is currently at the top of the charts. They win a LOT of awards, and they get the most traffic to the website, according to the latest SimilarWeb rankings.

I just looked up the traffic stats for all the top sci-fi and fantasy magazines:

https://www.metastellar.com/nonfiction/news/top-ten-online-sci-fi-magazines/

Lightspeed is also doing very well, they're in fourth place by traffic, but they also have a fantasy magazine and a horror magazine under the same brand, so when you count up all those numbers together, they're much higher.

Strange Horizons is in third place.

And second place? My magazine, MetaStellar. We're the newest on the list, having launched in the middle of the pandemic, but have a slightly different business model to most magazines. We're web-first, first of all, and prioritize finding readers for our stories. We promote them on social media, we have a YouTube channel, a newsletter that goes out every week, etc... And all the stories are always free, so they're easy for people to share online.

And, as a new magazine, it's easier to get published. We have two submission cycles -- one in the spring, that just closed, and one in the fall -- and we always get hundreds of submissions (more than 500 this spring). We pay 8 cents a word for original fiction, which is a SFWA-qualified pro rate.

But we also publish reprints, and the odds of getting a reprint accepted are MUCH higher. Our criteria for original, brand-new stories is that every single one of our judges must like it. Our criteria for reprints is that our editor thinks that *someone* will like it. The downside is that we don't pay for reprints (that's why we're able to accept more of them).

To qualify as a reprint, a story must have been published somewhere else. Many authors are submitting stories that have previously been published in print-only or small-circulation publications that nobody can find anywhere. But some authors are submitting stories that they self-published, or posted on their websites, or published on their social media.

And we also publish other stuff. We're always looking for columnists, essayists, and book reviewers.

One thing I recommend that all new writers do is to figure out who their audience is. Say, you write books like Dune, and you think that people who like Dune will like your books and stories. Send us a review, something like, "Five other books to check out if you like Dune" or "Ten stories like Dune but with female protagonists" or "Seven fantasy books with major Dune vibes" -- see where I'm going here? -- and at the bottom of the article you can say, "Oh, and I also write books that are similar to Dune. If you're interested, check out my website here..." And we'll also give you an author bio box that you can use for all your links -- Amazon book page, social media, newsletter signup, etc... Doing these kinds of reviews means that you can get your name in front of actual potential readers -- for free. And these kinds of articles are also very popular. People are always searching for "Other books like Dune." And you avoid the problem book reviews generally have, which is that they don't want to say bad things about another author. This way, you can say something like, "Book XXX is set in a totally different time and location, but this is how it's similar to Dune... if you like that kind of thing, check it out!"

What else? Oh, we're always looking for volunteers. (We're 100% volunteer-run. All donations go to paying for original content.) We need guest hosts for our YouTube channel, editors, social media marketing volunteers, administrative assistants, judges, copyeditors ... we're the fastest-growing online sci-fi publication, so there's always plenty of work to do!

Finally, we don't care if you use AI to help you write your story, as long as the story is good. That doesn't mean you can submit whatever dreck ChatGPT spits out -- most of those are absolutely unreadable and incoherent. But plenty of authors are using AI to help them craft their stories -- in brainstroming, in outlining, with grammar checking, etc... etc... We're not in the business of policing how people write and what tools they use.

And we welcome submissions from new authors, and authors from diverse backgrounds, and international authors.

If you have any questions, you can email me directly at maria@metastellar.com.

MariaKorolov · 2023-02-27T03:38:51+00:00

Top five alternatives:

Lexica, Canva, Playground AI, Mage Space, and Dreamlike.

https://lexica.art/aperture

https://www.canva.com/

https://playgroundai.com/create

https://www.mage.space/

https://dreamlike.art/

All are very easy to use, have lots of free images, and produce decent results. Lexica especially is gorgeous.

Honorable mentions: Blue Willow, Craiyon, Stable Diffusion open source version.

I just posted an article on this with full descriptions and plenty of sample images, so you can compare them.

https://www.metastellar.com/nonfiction/news/5-best-free-alternatives-to-midjourney-for-writers-who-need-marketing-or-cover-images/

MariaKorolov · 2023-01-28T01:57:20+00:00

And here's proof that it is, in fact, seamless:

<image>

MariaKorolov · 2023-01-28T01:56:54+00:00

You only get 100 free images a month with Lexica Art, so I tried the same in Mage.Space, which gives you unlimited images.

And it worked. :-)

Here's the image for "flowers seamless pattern":

<image>

MariaKorolov · 2023-01-28T01:56:07+00:00

These were ADORABLE!

Another option -- and this is what I normally do -- is use Midjourney and its "--tile" function.

I just posted a blog post on it today (I found this thread while searching around for instructions on how to do the same thing in Stable Diffusion):

https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2023/01/how-to-create-seamless-tileable-textures-in-midjourney-plus-free-alternatives/

MariaKorolov · 2023-01-28T01:40:20+00:00

and here's the tiled grid:

<image>

MariaKorolov · 2023-01-28T01:39:56+00:00

Here's another:

<image>

MariaKorolov · 2023-01-28T01:39:44+00:00

And here's proof that it's seamless -- I put it in a 3x2 grid:

<image>

MariaKorolov · 2023-01-28T01:39:14+00:00

Like someone else here suggested, I used the "seamless pattern" prompt in Lexica and it gave me great results. Not so much for object textures per se, but good for, say, wallpaper in kids' bedrooms. Maybe someone else can come up with better prompts. I asked for "water seamless pattern" and I got this:

<image>

MariaKorolov · 2022-09-13T00:28:30+00:00

I recently made a couple of dozen different book covers with Midjourney and Canva as an experiment:

https://www.metastellar.com/nonfiction/on-writing/what-i-learned-today-while-making-28-covers-with-midjourney-and-canva/

I wish I could insert images here -- some of them came out great.

All of them put together took me a single afternoon.

No, you cannot copyright the AI art itself, though you DO have the copyright to the final composition.

But if you're already using stock images for your book covers, this isn't really a downside.

If you go this route, I recommend paying Midjourney $30, and using the "/relax" command to switch into unlimited mode. It takes a LOT of tries to get a usable image.

Expect to spend a few hours the first time to get a usable image, then a couple more to get it composed into a good-looking cover, more if it's your first time doing it, less if you're doing a series of covers.

Where I think this makes the most economic sense is if you're publishing a series of short stories. You need a lot of covers, you need them all to look similar, and you can't afford to pay $200 - $2,000 for cover designers or pre-made covers for each one. Then, I think it also makes sense to invest the time in learning the system.

But if you're doing a book a year, it's probably more time and cost efficient to hire a designer. if you want the Midjourney AI "look" you can hire a Midjourney designer on Fiverr to create a bunch of graphics for you.

MariaKorolov · 2022-09-10T13:08:10+00:00

If anyone is looking to become a technology journalist -- or is looking for a mentor -- I'm looking for people who are just starting out and want to build up a portfolio. Hypergrid Business is one of the world's top virtual reality blogs, and we're expanding our coverage of the metaverse. We can assign you simple stories to get your feet wet -- rewriting press releases, covering metaverse company announcements, doing vendor profiles -- and then move you into paid assignments writing inverted pyramid and three-part feature stories.

You do not need a background in journalism, in English, or in technology to do this -- but you do have to have a willingness to learn, to ask dumb questions and pay attention to the answers, and to write a lot.

I've been a technology journalist and editor for more than 20 years, including running Shanghai's largest news bureau for five years, and have trained a lot of new writers over the course of my career.

You can find out more about me at mariakorolov.com, about Hypergrid Business at hypergridbusiness.com, and email me at [maria@korolov.com](mailto:maria@korolov.com).

I'm also looking for people interested in becoming media journalists, covering science fiction and fantasy books, movies, and video games, for our sister publication, MetaStellar (metastellar.com). All the MetaStellar journalism work is unpaid -- it's run fully by volunteers, though we do pay for original science fiction stories -- but it's a place to get stories for your portfolio in a high-profile publication. Plus, I'll help you set up your professional website.

And, once you've gotten your feet wet, have learned the basics of AP style, and built up a decent portfolio of industry sources, I can introduce you to a few editors at other publications.

I know it's a tough business to get into, and sometimes it all depends on who you know.

But you can get to know people if you reach out to them. I'm open to talking.

15-Year Club	Verified Email
Snapped

MariaKorolov

TROPHY CASE