I made a simrig for my youngest, with his help, out of the timber from an old bunk-bed, a car-seat from a wreckers, and some donated heavy duty locking casters that were the inspiration for the job. It was designed so the pedal area slid under the seat to make it more compact when not in use. All fully adjustable so it’d fit him as he grew. I was a bit miffed when he sold it, wheel and pedals included for $50. He could have got 4 times that.

(Table with TV not part of the rig. That’s part of my rig that I’ve previously posted)

I made a pipe out of the stalk of a cannabis plant I grew

I’m in the process of remaking my “Doom Pumpkin” for Halloween as well. If connects to my HomeAssistant setup and has four 12v car horns, a speaker to play audio, LED’s for eyes, a big red arcade button for a nose, motion sensors in front and back to interact with kids (it tells them it farts fireballs if they walk behind it) and an anti theft mode where if it’s picked up the horns start going off. Press the button and a random sequence of horns will go off. It also will randomly set a horn off if it hasn’t been touched in a while. And when it senses someone in front it will taunt them to press the button. Since it’s built in to HomeAssistant I can set when certain functions work and for a couple days before Halloween it will be outside taunting the neighborhood during the day.

The first version was a couple horns powered by an arduino uno and would just randomly activate 2 horns in different ways. The new one added two more horns (one is a little beep beep forklift horn, the other is an oooogah horn) to go with the high tone and low tone car horn.

I’ve mad myself sad and/or angry countless times. Thankfully I’ve also made my significant other happy and/or thankfull multiple times also so there’s that.

I’m in the process of building a device that lets you plug a landline telephone to a standard sound system. It’s just so I can use it on stage, I wanna pick up the phone and sing with that vintage crackling voice.

Sadly, it is not “made” yet because I suck at electronics but I’ve got all the components I need and some time on my hands.

I won’t post pics because I don’t want to doxx myself and my family but, my brother, my dad and I built a racecar and I did most of the painting. We even ended up in the paper because we were one of the few people who still paint our car instead of vinyl wrap everything.

I made a Homemade Tablet Digital Art Keyboard for my Surface Pro 3 when i was using it for drawing daily.

The tablet is garbage, and I’m sad I’ll probably never buy a tablet pc again but i would like to see if i can adapt this for an iPad one day. For now it’ll remain in this state until i can figure something else out with it.

I made a random team generator for Final Fantasy Rennaissance, a FF1 fan game built from scratch with the stated goal of including as many classes as possible from across the franchise.

I also built a random team generator for Fire Emblem Engage.

I do ham radio. Probably the coolest thing I’ve “made” is a setup where I can send email without the need for an internet connection on my end. I use a small laptop connected to a transceiver to send out high-frequency sounds (VARA) on very low power (5-10 watts) to towers around the world that will decode the signals, convert it to a regular email, and send it to the recipient (bob@overthere.com). Then reverse the process when I check for a reply. The whole setup fits in a small backpack and I can use a piece of speaker wire for the antenna. It’s about as fast as dial-up used to be, but it works!

I made a batch of really good salsa over the weekend. It took me hours (I’m disabled atm), but it was a really good batch with incredibly fresh local tomatoes, peppers and onions.

Love to a woman.

I have a podcast called Almost Plausible where a couple of friends and I take an ordinary object and create a movie plot based on that object.

I’ve made contributions* to the OEIS, but since they require real names over there, and I like my anonymity here, I won’t say which entries have my mark on them. Bow ties Number sequences are cool.

You’re better off visiting the whole thing anyway.

* Mathematical, not financial, though I’d do the latter too if I had much to spare.

Many years ago I wrote a program that accepted DECWriter print jobs, parsed the escape sequences, and output them as PostScript.

We had an application that ran on an OpenVMS system. The application could only support DEC printers, so we couldn’t use any modern devices. The DEC printers were no longer made so all our printers were either purchased refurbished, or Frankenstein printers one of our guys assembled from the carcasses of dead printers.

My program could be used as a print filter in a Linux LPT queue. This allowed us to replace DEC printers with any printer that could natively support PostScript and any printer that had ghostscript support.

When I first started in the job, my predecessor told me about the issue with the printers and it seemed like an interesting project.

First test was to ensure I could convert barcodes in the print jobs. The print jobs for the DEC printers sent the barcodes as SIXEL graphics. SIXEL graphics were bitmaps sent as rows of six vertical pixels.

Once I verified that could work, it was just a matter of writing the parser for all the rest of the escape sequences that controlled the formatting. That and learning how to produce the PostScript.

At the time I asked my boss if he wanted me to implement it, but he said we were going to migrate to a new system very soon, so it wasn’t worth the effort.

I still thought it was an interesting project, so I kept working on it on my own.

Several years passed, and we were still using the old system. The man who maintained our printers died, which led to a problem. Without him to maintain the printers, they started failing faster than we could replace them. In a meeting to discuss how we would respond printer issue, I mentioned that I had continued working on my filter at home and I only needed a a few weeks of focused effort to get a functional print filter. This time my boss told me to proceed.

We very quickly replaced all our old DEC impact printers with modern laser printers.

We had some forms on tractor feed paper, so I converted the forms to PostScript and added that to the filter. I was also able to get it working with Zebra label printers.

I had a problem with the barcodes. My script generated perfect barcodes, but our barcode pens couldn’t scan them. After looking at the barcodes that the DEC printers made and comparing them to what my filter produced, the only difference I could see was that the DEC barcodes looked like crap. Jittery dots instead of perfect, straight lines. So I modified my script to make the graphics produced look just a little bit worse, and they started working.

That print filter continued working flawlessly in production for several more years until we finally managed to migrate to the new system.

I’ve recorded a few audiobooks for Librivox, a group that releases free recordings of public domain books. I use my government name for them, so I won’t say which ones, but you might have heard my voice if you picked the right one from !audiobooks@literature.cafe