About

Hashblot is a simple site / tool / library / function / method for hash visualization, created by Stuart P. Bentley.

What it does

Hashblot runs any given string of characters through a hash function to produce a unique image based on the splines of its corresponding hash value.

Uses

• Generating abstract art from random phrases (if you like doing this, you may also like http://www.random-art.org/)
• Mashing the keyboard to generate random designs for inspiration
• Using your email address + the domain of a site to come up with a "correct horse battery staple"-style password
  • A site for storing reminders for passwords conceived using this method is being developed at blot.pw.

For nerds

hashblot is available as an NPM module (no bower yet, sorry):

npm install --save hashblot

The function hashblot.qp takes in any hexadecimal string with a length divisible by 8 and converts it to a series of SVG path instructions to draw quadratic Bézier curves (basically, just a 'Q' + decimal values for every 4 bytes, plus the last two at the beginning preceded with 'M' so the path closes correctly). The hashblot.sha1qp function takes a string, and returns the hashblot.qp output of the SHA-1 hash (to use it in the browser, you'll need to include jsSHA first). To draw this, create an <svg> element containing a <path>, then assign the return value to the 'd' attribute.