Making new Windows 3.1-style tiling desktop wallpapers

an image showing 13 different Windows 3.1-style tiling wallpapers, including sunflowers, mercury, fleurs-de-lis, a forest, compasses, and fish.

With the excellent Weavy platform, I used Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro AI model to create a bunch of new Windows 3.1 bitmap-style tiling desktop wallpapers.

From the 150 or so it generated, I selected the 38 best ones, and fixed them up in Photoshop.

(Not all of them came out tiling correctly, and some had weird artefacts or errors that could only be fixed by hand.)

The prompts I used were variations on this, with some classic bitmap tiling wallpapers attached for style inspiration:

Tileable background image in the style of the attached image – 1993, Microsoft Windows 3.1. 16-color bitmap. Pick appropriate theme, not technology. Image tiles correctly both vertically and horizontally. Color dithering rather than smooth anti-aliasing. Professionally-made, low pixel desktop wallpaper tile produced by major software company’s in-house design team for use with Windows 3.1. No text. No logo. Attached images are for inspiration only, do not reproduce.

You can download them all in one 7-Zip file here (~55MB).

Internet Archive Wayback Machine index extension for PopClip

If you don’t know PopClip, it’s a cool macOS app which pops up when you select text in any app.

By default, it just lets you Cut / Copy / Paste. But the power is that you can extend it to do almost anything with the selected text, like show a word count, or change the case of the text, or copy it as markdown, or turn it into a task in another app.

I often want to see what a webpage looked like in the past, for which I use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. In order to shortcut the process, I made this very simple PopClip extension which sends you to the Wayback Machine’s index page showing the timeline of captures for any highlighted URL:

#popclip
name: Wayback Machine
icon: square filled symbol:building.columns
requirements: [url]
javascript: popclip.openUrl("https://web.archive.org/web/*/" + popclip.input.text)

If you have PopClip, you can install it simply by highlighting the text above and clicking ‘Install Extension “Wayback Machine”‘.