I started this blog primarily to have a semi-anonymous space to speak freely about my tech-adjacent projects, eventually hopefully with others. Not really to document them or make formal project sites - I do that elsewhere (no I’m not linking, ask me nicely and I’ll consider linking you privately after we’re Friends) - but just to talk about them, to think out loud. To motivate me to work on them more when I have the mental bandwidth instead of sourly doing more Real Work and pushing myself closer to burnout.

GUI#

I am attempting to learn QT so I can create some of the wacky GUI ideas I’ve had in mind for a long time. The thing about GUI work is you have to learn so, so much other stuff around it before you can even approach any of your wacky ideas. Like in my case I am actually technically interested in making Linux desktop environments more aesthetic, which makes a deceptively simple topic like GUI into a scary massive topic involving getting deep into Linux internals.

I’ve been grinding at the fundamentals on this one for years and I’m pretty comfortable with the Linux desktop environment/window manager aspects so I’ve recently graduated to actually working with QT. Depending on how this goes I might also try messing with Dart and Flutter because conceptually I like those better than QT however I’ve invested so much mentally so far into figuring out effing KDE (which uses QT) that I am sort of gritting my teeth trying to make it through the entire stack before switching tracks.

Microcontrollers#

I think every computer person goes through a phase with microcontrollers right? They’re little computers! How cute! I recently graduated from Arduinos and Circuitpython to ‘real’ mcu boards like STM32 mostly because I was sick of dealing with training wheel type dev environment setups or 5v power issues for wireless projects. I’m mostly just trying to make HID devices right now. This often overlaps into 3d design/printing and CAD.

test engineering#

The two previous project groups are unified in this one: I’ve built a custom Raspberry Pi just for testing out my MCU projects, and this device testing interface includes a custom GUI I built out of QT and ElectricUI.

This one is the easiest to get stalled on because it periodically gets very close to my day job and I just can’t bring myself to focus on it outside of work when it does.

twine#

This one is the most purely ’leisure’ of all my projects. I keep getting distracted with bullshit associated with it though, like trying to make a Hugo theme that integrates the Twine library, instead of just writing Twine stories.