Experimental Projects Studio

• Gazette - A Personal Newspaper
  • A newspaper tailored to my personal interests, fed by RSS feeds and various other interesting sources of information.
  • My attempt at a calm digital stream I can consume at my own pace.
• Family Recipes and Gastronomic Observations
  • A recipe site styled the way I want all recipes to be presented... minimal cruft, with no ads, popups, popovers, or calls to action.
  • Legible on any screen size with the ingredients and steps shown up front, followed by personal notes and learnings where appropriate.
• Personal Wiki
  • Based on TiddlyWiki, customized as a computer-aided Zettelkasten. No longer served publicly.
• Cubby - A web-native object store
  • An internet accessible object store to simplify persistence for experimental web projects.
  • Cubby aims for a high "practical usage" to "conceptual complexity" ratio, deferring to existing HTTP concepts and patterns wherever possible.
  • See more information in the Github repo.
• Article Scribe
  • Article readability as a service, optimized for mobile reading.
  • My attempt at a more personalized Pocket.
  • Integrated with various other personal tooling and workflows.
• Cork - Minimalist static site generator
  • Attempt to write the simplest possible static site generator that satisfies my own personal use cases.
  • Native support for Markdown, Mustache, and Dartlang.
  • Not meant as a general purpose solution like Jekyll or Hugo.
• Scratchpad
  • A browser based, web first, vim backed, AI assisted scratchpad for quick notes, brainstorming, and brain dumping.
  • Includes persistence of buffers, commands, settings and more in browser local storage.
  • Supports native javascript and python (via pyodide) code execution.
  • Contains various AI assisted functionality and easter eggs.
• Momentum Maze
  • A short, infinite puzzle game based off of Ricochet Robots.
  • Built as a fun way to exercise my lateral thinking/ spatial reasoning skills.
  • Ideation and game mechanics explained by me, and then predominantly implemented by Gemini2.5 Pro.
• Sketchnotes
  • Generates sketchnotes from user supplied raw text notes through the power of multi-modal LLM language processing and image generation.
  • For years I have been interested in taking more engaging, handwritten notes, and even bought the original sketchnote handbook when it first came out in 2013.
  • Having been stymied in that original endeavor by my inability to draw, this project is an attempt to turn the type of notes I do take well (typed out bullet points and markdown) into the type of notes I want to consume.
• Line Drawing Generator
  • Generates Picasso-style line drawings of user supplied subjects using AI image generation.
  • Predominantly built as a way to improve my drawing skills to appease my daughter.
• Sherlock Holmes LLM Stories
  • Experiments with Large Language Models (LLMs) and text generation using Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes corpus as a starting point.
• Browser-native OCR Tool
  • Fully local, in-browser Optical Character Recognition utility to easily extract text from PDFs and images.
  • Inspired by Simon Willison's OCR tool.
• Literate Dev Notebook
  • In-browser literate programming notebook (in the style of iPython) for shareable, editable, runnable code snippets.
  • This is a fork of Starboard with native support for my personal stack and tooling.
• Diagramming Tool
  • Self hosted diagramming tool using the wonderful Mermaid library
  • Creates various diagram types via a custom text DSL, allowing easy creation, diffing, updating, and maintenance of the result.
  • Useful diagram types:
    • Flowcharts
    • Sequence diagrams
    • Class diagrams
    • State diagrams
    • Entity relationships
    • Gantt charts
• Yearly Calendar
  • Minimalist yearly calendar view that displays all of the dates in a single view. Great for high level planning, and resizes automatically to print on any size paper (for best results use "landscape" mode).
• Whiskey Dilution Calculator
  • Simple utility to calculate the amount of water to add to (barrel strength) whiskey to dilute it to a desired proof. Technically works with any spirit and any proof...
• Tea Timer
  • Straightfoward tea steeping timer with preset steep times and a subtle alarm sound.
• Wall Clock
  • Themeable analog clock to display on screen.
• Unix Timestamp Converter
  • Simple utility to convert from Unix time to a human readable timestamp.
• Json Formatter
  • Simple utility to pretty-print JSON blobs.
  • Usually I'd use something like JQ, but sometimes it's easier to just copy paste into a browser tab, and this way I know my data isn't being siphoned off.
• Snake Game
  • First foray into writing games with web technologies, by way of recreating the well known game Snake
• AI Bird Watcher
  • Experiment with machine learning to identify the birds I take pictures of while quarantining during Covid-19
• Smart Security Camera
  • Proof of concept to enable easily turning old phones and computers with webcams into a mesh security camera network
  • Uses machine learning to identify interesting objects (people, pets, etc), and auto-record when they enter the frame
• SQS Message Redriving Utility
  • Command line utility to "redrive" SQS messages.
  • Useful for high throughput services with dead-letter queues
• Sequences Mirror
  • Browser (and mobile) friendly version of the rationalist bible (aka The Sequences) by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
• SICP Mirror
  • Browser (and mobile) friendly version of the legendary computer science text Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Spelling Bee Solver
  • Solver for the addictive New York Times Spelling Bee game
• Pomodoro Timer
  • Minimalist Pomodoro Timer with a RESTful UI
• Password Generator
  • Simple, client-side password generator using cryptographically secure randomly generated characters
• Hooggaa POC
  • Proof of concept onboarding flow for Hooggaa startup (now disabled)
• Paste
  • A serverless, secure, personal pastebin.
• Kron
  • Implementation of cron, with modern features like retries and job dependancies (unfinished)
• BankTorrent
  • A third app to track shared expenses, this time CLI focused (2013)
• Transactor
  • Another webapp to track shared expenses, focused on couples (2013)
• CommonCents
  • Webapp to track shared expenses between friends (2012, predating the rise of SplitWise ;-)
• Foosball Monkey
  • Webapp to track office Foosball rankings (2012)
• Computer vision lung nodule volume estimation project (2011)
• Unscramble
  • Small utility (with UI) to unscramble letters into valid words (ala Scrabble, Words with Friends, etc.)
• Simple MongoDB Benchmarking Suite
  • (unsupported as of 2011)

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