An almost monthly life and project blog. I miss the old internet. If you're looking for something from my old project site, check the Internet Archive snapshot.

News

10/09/2026

First off, check out my online store: Above So Below where I have put up the demon core ponies that weren't sold in person and other items like stickers and shirts. I'll be focusing on getting some more electronics projects up on there soon, currently only a 12v adapter for high voltage ATTiny programming.

Wow, broke the record now with 5 months of silence. With how good LLM assisted coding is these days I'm tempted to build out a custom project blog, knowledge base thing again, sort of like what I had going on about 10 years ago with the old blog (same Internet Archive link as above).

So what have I been doing? A lot, I wish I could do more. I say that but then I get random ideas and then end up pursuing those too. For example, I wanted to test and see if Astra could be prompted to design a circuit, PCB and enclosure. I had pretty decent results using it to design an enclosure for the ESP32 tamagotchi (bonkgotchi), and saw tweets showing it routing a PCB. I had used older models to bounce circuit ideas around before, checking components, etc., but when I tried (very early, probably a Sonnet model) it couldn't really do it. I think I tested the early model by trying to have it design a circuit in SPICE to be modeled and verified, but this was before using harnesses like Claude Code or Codex... so I was just copy pasting SPICE directives and running sims to no avail.

This time the Codex harness was able to allow the model to directly access the internet (to search for parts, documentation, etc.) and KiCad to actually do the schematic and PCB design directly. I decided to have it design a VLF receiver. Incredibly it worked, there was a little bit of back and forth, like I manually rearranged the external antenna/ground jack so it was facing out of the same side as the 1/4" output jack, but I wanted to let it do as much as possible on it's own as an experiment in itself. Now that I know it works I will manually refine the design and PCB. I'll be editing together a short demo video soon.

Last post I mentioned doing automated trading with /MNQ, that was a bust unfortunately, and I've pivoted. Hoping this isn't a bust, same pattern as before though: looked promising in the beginning then the strategy's beginner's luck wore off. Fingers crossed I'll find some discriminatory alpha and I can get back to focusing more "actual" research and projects. Still scraping by, but who knows, feels like I need a miracle soon or else I'll have to GET A REAL JOB.

I'm not going to promise photos like I did last time and not post them, sorry about that... it's just a bit too much of a hassle with PMWiki.

Looking through my photos it doesn't look like I did too much outside of the convention, setting up the online store and the VLF receiver stuff, which I just recently took it out for a couple days for a field test. A lot of just working on software, a few bug fixes have been upstreamed to popular open source projects and I my own git repo activity has been basically solid activity since April (I have 2 personal forgejo instances, and the 2 projects I mentioned are on github and codeburg... so a lot of AI assisted coding stuff the past few months, it's been honestly sort of insane).

I do worry about my health a bit, my sleep is bad, my diet isn't the best either, my waist is getting larger and I'm not exercising as much. Just going out to listen to the VLF receiver made me a bit sore which is embarassing, but I guess that's what I get for 6 months of a very sedentary lifestyle. Hopefully the coming cool weather will inspire me to go push myself a bit more, like a camping trip would be good along with some hikes, biking and getting back into lifting weights.

I had begun messing with x-ray mutagenesis again, but my high voltage modules burned out, which I guess is a common thing with the cheap Chinese HV modules unfortunately. I have an idea for a stronger x-ray emitter, but that will require more time, money and space than I have at the moment (sorry dude). But I am looking forward to getting back into it when I can. Same with the bacteriophage work I left years ago. We were right on the edge of trying to amplify a phage culture when I left off and my life turned upside down. Really hope I can keep my life upright, but it feels like we're on quite shaky ground at the moment. Just need to keep pushing forward, turning projects into products and hopefully find some sustainable trading algo.

I'll leave it there, there's a lot more built that I could go on about, but I'll just keep building and deliver instead of writing about it!

05/15/2026

Again, another 4 months without a word. I've been working on a lot of stuff, shifting between a handful of things and it's time to blog it out:

Demon Core (Pony)

Figure mold making and decoration

Made quite a bit of progress since the last post. After 2 failed mold attempts on the pony figure (first was failure to cure, 2nd was using the wrong mold release spray for 2 part molds) I found success doing a 1 piece cut mold. I forget the exact number but it's over 20, but probably closer to 30 castings so far. I've stopped casting and have been doing some painting and the water slide decals. I have some opaque white water slide paper on it's way that I'm going to try to use in place of painting the whites of the eyes, being able to have it be precise and consistent should give better results.

Demon core PCBs

I made my first large (50) quantity order of PCBs from a Chinese company, JLC PCB, and was very satisfied with the results (and price! it was around $10 total with the first time coupon, they are tiny boards though).

I've assembled a little over 20 full demon core models now: Grey resin 3D print for the beryllium reflector and blue clear resin print for the core itself. The top part holds the PCB and is just friction fitted into the lower part and the demon core actuates the NANOT micro switch on the board (it's a tiny switch used in hearing aids!). Taking the time to sand down the outside of each one and spray it with Krylon gloss is pretty time consuming, but the results look great.

WLED + LedFX DJ Lights

I finally got to test the lights out with the full DJ rig. I went out camping on BLM land and let it rip. I did run into the setup freezing a couple times, but power cycling the Radxa 3C (a single board computer) brought everything back online. I had to tweak the audio settings so much to try and get it stable, but I guess there's still some problems. I'm sure just using my laptop as the WiFi AP + LedFX server would fix that. I also want to rework the attachment method, it worked, but it's janky and some of the badly designed 3D parts broke.

UV fluorescent rock hounding

While doing the DJ test camp I spent a couple nights looking for UV reactive rocks. I found what I think is flourite and calcite. Another thing off my bucket list, I always thought they were really cool and now I have a few specimens myself. It's difficult to take good pictures of the fluorescence, but here's one of my favorites:

VR stuff

I also had some time where I got excited about VR on Linux again. I had no idea about WiVRn and other projects that allow you to use reasonably priced Meta Quest headsets with Linux. I ended up getting a 3S ($250-299) since I wasn't sure how into it I would get (and if I would get distracted with other things, as I tend to do). I experimented with a Godot XR tutorial, but didn't actually try and make anything yet. I also played around a bit in VRChat and Overte (social VR platforms). More recently I picked up Half Life Alyx, but ran into an issue with the audio cutting out after a level load (other's have this problem too...) but I've sort of put it aside for now. I do want to experiment with VR market visualizations sometime, or make a game that uses market data in it, but that's far off for now.

Algo trading

More recently, for about a month now, I've been pouring a lot of time and effort into algo trading again. This time targeting the /MNQ micro futures contract, it's relatively small size makes experimentation much less painful on days where the trading system loses. I don't want to write too much about it, but it's something I've been working on a lot. Hopefully I can move up to full size /NQ Nasdaq100 mini contracts sometime once the system matures.

I'll wrap it up here, and if you're reading this wondering why there's no pictures, I'll upload some later.

01/21/2026

It's been almost 4 months, a whole third of a year without any updates, sorry! Here's a quick breakdown of where I'm at on various projects (both old and new):

ESP32 Gotchi

Nothing new since the revision 4 update. I haven't worked on software or case design or another revision of the PCB. Another revision of the PCB isn't really necessary, but as I was fondling it last night I was wishing it could be smaller. I have all surface mount components on one side which makes manufacture easy (just put the solder paste and components on and cook it on a hot plate) but there's a lot of wasted room on the other side. But on the other hand the battery and screen are the perfect size for the board so it's fine. The main things that should be worked on here is more software and a proper case design. I keep waffling about what the "game(s)" should be, it was just fun having a portable ESP32 SSID spammer and little goofy demos when I was testing it in the field. No real plans to really push hard on this project again just yet, should be fun to revisit later this year.

IR remote -> media control

Another abandoned project, same state as in August, right on the verge of working, just needs code work probably. No real urgency, was just a filler project to help fill time due to the slow development cycle of HW projects when doing the gotchi stuff.

Demon Core (pony)

This is probably the next one I'll be revisiting soon. I still haven't got a successful 2 part mold, I think I'll re-pose the character to be simpler to work with. The PCB with the 3rd screw hole works great, I still want to re-work the attachment method a bit on the demon core itself (open close to access battery)

DJ Lights (new!)

This has been a fun project. It started as I was shopping around for some portable lights that I could attach to my RCF J8 speakers and everything felt like an expensive compromise for what I wanted. I ended up finding the WLED project and first testing it on some strip RGB LEDs I got off ebay. I finally decided to get some wide (75mm) aluminum channel which could easily hold 3x 1 meter long strips of LEDs and had a nice plastic diffuser. The best deal was order a pack of 10, so I have 7 more, maybe I'll build them out and list it on ebay, could be a business! I also decided to make my own WLED ESP32 PCB (which worked first try) that takes 12v input and outputs a 3.3 -> 5v translated data signal to the LED strip. I experimented using REAPER and QLC+ to route midi to DMX light data streaming to the lights, which worked great, but was too much work and I found LedFX to be as reactive and interesting as I wanted without all the manual programming. Check a video of LedFX on 3 of the light units here: Attach:ledfx_wled_demo_sm.mp4

As of now I'm trying to come up with a stand alone LedFX setup that accepts audio from my DJ decks, creates and AP for the WLED lights to connect to and sends data to everything. I was thinking of using something like a raspberry pi SBC, still up in the air though.

In closing

Ah, looking over my calendar it looks like I did take a road trip to Texas about a week after that post. That was a pretty good time. I was planning on bringing my DJ setup, but my Jackery battery suddenly wouldn't power on, luckily they took care of it (after I made a video and packed and shipped it back to them). Besides the projects listed above I'm doing the regular maintenance of VPS stuff, etc. Experimenting with local AI again, had some fun adding noise to LLM model files (different amounts, different layers) and so on. Hope I update sooner than later for my next post, until then <3

10/02/2025

Revision 4 of the virtual pet (gotchi) project is assembled. Finally got the power redirection mosfet/diode circuitry working, I haven't checked temperatures, but the battery charging IC is reporting a full charge reliably now. I had to use 2 separate voltage dividers: 1 for the mosfet and another on the GPIO pin to detect when it was plugged in. I also made another revision of the simple demon core PCB, placing the ATTiny10 at a 45 degree angle so I could fit a third screw hole which should make things much more stable. I still haven't updated the core model to accommodate the extra screw. Today I added vent "sprues" to the pony model, printed it off, sanded and gave a clear gloss coat. I picked up some tin cure silicone to try because of the curing issues with platinum cure. I'm going to attempt a 2 part mold which should make painting the inside of the mold for the eyes simpler. A lot of firsts, it's been fun getting back into mold making.

Honestly, not much else to update that I can think of. Hopefully I'll have an update with pictures ready for November, I've been traveling a bit, so that and recovering from illness (and other "real life" things) have taken quite a few days from the project grind, but it's nice to see things are moving along.

08/05/2025

Earlier this year I almost didn't update for a month or 2 because I felt like I didn't have much to report, skipping the July update was sort of the opposite. I just didn't make time to write an update. The ESP32 virtual pet is on revision 4, the image I posted last time was still using tactile switches, the 2nd revision swapped those out for a micro joystick along with USB-C to USB-B micro (just for ease of soldering). Revision 2 to 3 mostly fixed a mirrored RGB LED footprint and 3 to 4 will fix a regression where I left the charging IC output connected to ground when flipping the battery jack. I was at least able to bodge wire fix that mistake. All the peripherals are working, acceleromter, LCD screen, speaker, LED, joystick, power circuitry (monitoring, charging). I had Claude code up a snake game and a way to play a pentatonic scale on the joystick. I plan to wrap my head around FreeRTOS and get coding on the "final product" soon. The demon core project has evolved to be even smaller, going from the CR2032 battery to a 1220 (or 1225 -- 12.5mm diameter) battery. I'm glad I ditched the original project of trying to simulate the super-critical reaction. It works as I imagined, you can push the translucent demoncore and change to different lighting modes. I also painted up a 3D printed pony figure to hold the screwdriver (video of that here: demon_core_pony.mp4) and designed some water slide decals in inkscape for the eyes and cutie mark which turned out really well.

The last PCB project, the IR remote decoder, was put together, but I didn't get it to work fully yet. I suspect it might be as simple as having the wrong GPIO pin assigned, but after I plugged it in and successfully flashed it I never got around to debugging. I was just happy to see that it worked at that level for the moment.

The tomato plants are looking pretty sickly, it might be the heat, it might be all these little white bugs that were swarming around them when I was harvesting -- it might be both. I did get quite a good harvest though, better than anything else I tried growing here the past few years. I was able to make a batch of tomato sauce which I used on my cast iron pizzas. I also made a batch of hot sauce with them (just did the tomato sauce recipe with habaneros etc. from the store). The last remaining chiltepin plant has been growing like crazy. This picture is showing it right after a growth spurt and it's even larger with it's first set of flower buds right now. It's been repotted, and I try and take it inside if it seems too hot, I really don't want to lose this one too!

I'll wrap this up here and hopefully will have more progress for next time!

06/06/2025

I finally feel like I'm actually working on stuff again! Opened up Kicad and have designed a couple circuits, the first PCB should be arriving this weekend for a ESP32 based virtual pet. I'm sure I'll open source it soon enough, along with the IR remote decoder to USB HID media (or anything) key mapper for media center use. There's a device called a "Flirc" that, but I took a look at the configuration software and it seemed lacking, along with a long terms of service agreement I thought it should be easy enough to create an open source version, I think it was Claude that suggested I use a Raspberry Pi 2040 chip ($0.70 at qty 1), it seems really interesting with the PIO functionality. Before I get those boards made up I'm going to prototype it on a Pico board.

The tomatoes are finally ripening up and I'm starting to get to harvest a little. The garden looks like a forest for the first time ever too!

I've also done a little coding, connected LibreTranslate to my fediverse instance front end. Surprised how quickly that went together. Since it's such a large sprawling project I did most of it myself just querying the LLM as I went. I did get Claude to write up a Yggdrasil vanity address generator and was amazed that it produced something that "worked" right away (it compiled, but when I ran it overnight finding keys I discovered it's derivation pipeline was incorrect... but it did figure it out and fix it when I pointed it to the correct implementation), gotta be careful with those things!

I'm still playing go, usually at least one game a day and it seems like I'm back at the strength I was years ago if not better. I might install KGS, I have good memories playing there, the problem with IGS/PandaNet is that at the end of the game we have to mark stones dead manually and it can get weird, especially in situations like a seki that wasn't played out until the end. I honestly don't remember if KGS is manual, but I do remember you can go back and play out things the players don't agree on, that's not possible on PandaNet. Today and yesterday I was able to beat the "Human like bot 7K", onward to 1D and higher?!

05/05/2025

Skipped the April update, no big excuses except yet again I felt like I hadn't really done much of note. The tomatoes are starting to fruit here and there, no where near harvest time though. I also did some CAD and 3D printing, made a headboard headphone holder.

I also did a 3D sketch of a nonagon gazebo structure for my cousin. Replaced an outdoor GFCI outlet that kept getting tripped when it rained with a weather resistant one, and a enclosure. Started reading "The Lazy Universe" thanks to this Veritasium video. I've got about halfway through and I'm doubting I'll be able to "debunk" what I think is bunk in that video (the experiment with the diffraction grating film showing that light is actually taking the virtual paths, maybe I need to watch the video again too, or maybe look into Feynman lectures on the subject of action and light). With debunking brought up, another book arrived today, "Why Materialism Is Baloney", I read a couple pages so far and it feels very self indulgent (to me, the reader) because everything he's written so far matches with what I've been thinking for years now and I don't know how valuable reading something that just re-iterates what I already think will be, who knows though, there's over 200 pages, maybe I'll run into something challenging or revelatory.

Computer stuff, I haven't started anything big. Did an 'emergency' migration when I noticed a link between 2 of the VPS servers was basically down. "Vibe coded" a sample audition app (let's you quickly listen to samples and copy ones you want to a new directory), decided to call it Sample Neko playing off SampleCat which I couldn't get to compile.

I haven't made any plans for the summer, just off the top of my head I'm hoping to clean up the house a bit, continue getting rid of junk (took a whole car full of cardboard boxes I let pile up over the years to the recycling center). Maybe make some music, there's some gear I picked up that I haven't really played around with yet. I feel like it's going to be time to recenter, build up some plans and strike out again soon.

I've also been playing go again, made an account on PandaNet (which reminds me of this patcher I published for their client). I started mostly by playing bots on online-go.com then someone suggested I try out PandaNet. They have some good bots there, the human games I've played so far haven't been the best but the integration with AI Sensei has really helped me get back into the game. I've been reviewing most of my games with it, and it's really helpful.

I've also been slacking on the recordings (and reading scripture in general). I did start reading Mark in the KJV translation which has been fun, especially being familiar with the modern translations (NIV, NLT). I've been thinking of reading (and recording) the Donald Hoffman book "The Case Against Reality", but maybe I should do that with the materialism book first, I have a feeling the Hoffman book will go into more difficult ideas that require more thought than reading straight through -- same problem I had with the Lazy Universe book. It's funny how people are checking for EM dash usage to see how much ChatGPT has infiltrated a corpus.

I guess it's time to wrap this post up, hope to have felt like I've done something worth reporting next time. Thanks for tuning in!

03/15/2025

I thought I hadn't done much since last post, but I was wrong. Sometimes I guess you get busy and it feels like nothing is really getting done, but there is motion.

So I did get the tent out for a night at a different camp ground, desert camping can be a bit of a pain with all the cactus and burrs, but the equipment setup worked pretty well! Tent was in good shape and not missing any parts (I did forget a hammer so I had to bang in all the stakes with a rock)

I also forgot to take a picture outside the tent. Next time.

I drove out to ETH Denver, mostly to attend a side event and was also able to get in on a turbo-ish poker tournament. I had to drive back pretty quickly because of a family medical emergency, and that has been a big priority (still)

Still doing server stuff, I ran into problems with the NVMe USB enclosure that I mentioned last time so I just gave up on using the ThinkCentre for the crypto nodes and picked up an Intel NUC. The heatsink wouldn't fit in this one either (it has a built in heatsink), and the NVMe temp seems to be staying reasonable, just under 40C, but some other temps are pretty high...

Also maintaining services on VPSs, had some intense troubleshooting last night on the fedi instance. I haven't been doing any (or much) coding, just admin stuff. The garden is shaping up, I got the rest of the tomatoes planted in the ground (had to replace 2 that didn't survive from the previous picture). They aren't growing too fast, so I added some fertilizer too. We're still reading Paradise Lost, just finished book 8, it's been pretty interesting if you can get through the old English style and words. I'm not sure what to read next, but I did pick up "The Lazy Universe" by Jennifer Coopersmith after watching this Veritasium video and being realllly intrigued by the concept/model of "action" and wanted to dig in. That might be more of a slow private read than something I could read and record. Maybe do something of a summary book report instead.

Oh yeah, also got around to installing non-janky security cameras around here finally. I guess I'll wrap this up here, been pretty busy helping family out, but also having a good time lately.

Until next time, peace

02/11/2025

One thing I do to remind myself of what I've done over the last month is look through my photos. It looks like I replaced the garage door opener finally. That was a project that wasn't as horrible as it could have been. I discovered the previous installation was missing the retaining nuts on one side and was just held up by the weight binding the bolt to the frame. Lots of jank. Ideally I would have completely replaced the bracket attached to the ceiling, but doing it by myself and trying to get it done in one day I made do with what was there and everything worked out in the end. It's been nice not getting out of the car and manually lifting the door anymore.

I did end up picking up a couple M70q ThinkCentres off eBay, one of them is running my blockchain nodes (geth/lighthouse, monerod) and the other one is doing everything else so far. One problem I ran into was the heatsinked NVMe drive wouldn't fit in the small form factor, so I had to remove the extra bulk, but that caused the temp to rise to ~70C when under heavy load. I ended up moving it to an external actively cooled enclosure. It was interesting learning about the UEFI system, which inspired me to work on a bootable demo (think demoscene) for a few hours one day. Maybe next month I'll share that.

I still haven't pushed myself to go out for another camping test run, but I'm ready. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow just to see how it goes. I did do a write up on the gear I've collected and put together.

The tomato seedlings have grown up, and I just planted a row of them in the garden today. It was nice seeing that it's remained moist enough that there's earth worms out there! The 2 chitlepin plants are still alive, and I've moved them outside after it's warmed up some along with the tomatoes. They seem to like it so far, will probably just leave them in those pots until they grow a bit bigger. I went to the local gardening meetup thing at the library and gave away 6 of my tomato plants since I had more than enough, met an interesting guy and will probably go check his setup out sometime once spring really gets going.

I found some art at Goodwill that I butchered to frame a Paul Laffoley print I had in storage for a long time. Another eBay deal. I had to disassemble everything (a lot more glue than I expected) and after trimming the matting to size I was able to get a pretty decent finished product.

That's it for the pictures, I did go for a couple hikes, but like always I spent the majority of my time in front of the computer. I recently started using aider plugged into Claude Sonnet for AI assisted coding. Been sort of finding the limits of what it can do, with aider I find myself going too far off the rails and can hit API limits if I'm not careful. Blockchain stuff can get pretty complex. I also setup my own Forgejo git instance so I can keep private repos, but have also put up some of the scripts on a codeberg account, including the image hash miner I mentioned last month. I've still got a bunch of little projects that aren't published anywhere yet, but I'm sure I'll keep at it as I think to do it.

As for readings, we've done both of the explanations of the epistles (Galatians and Ephesians) by Bl. Theophylact, and just finished reading a fairly dry commentary on the Acts of the Apostles by Archbishop Averky. I'm a couple days into reading Paradise Lost by John Milton, a bit off from the regular path, but I've been wanting to sort of expand into reading other things for a while.

I guess that's about it for now, should be a fairly busy month doing a bit more running around than I'm used to, here's hoping everything goes well. Until next time <3

... News Archive

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Mind's Forge