a digital playground
Last month I wrote about importing six thousand rural dispatch targets out of an old federal dataset like churches, cemeteries, dams, post offices, etc. to fix the small-town coverage gap. That post ended with a confession: the very first dispatch the new system produced sent me to Armstrong Lake Dam, which did not exist. There s [ ]
I wanted to build something that didn t just solve a math expression, but actually showed you what was happening at every stage, how the expression gets broken apart, and in what order the operations get resolved. The result is MathViz, a web-based expression evaluator that parses and solves math step by step. You can also run al local [ ]
I spend a fair amount of my spare time running AI models on my own hardware. Somewhere in there I got stuck on a question I couldn t put down: when people say an AI has a personality, is that a real thing, or just a number we made up and started believing? So I did [ ]
I built a little web app to solve a problem that sounds trivial until you actually need it: turning a highway milepost into GPS coordinates. The code is open source, available on GitHub, and a demo is available at mapsdemo.johnsonfarms.us. The problem If you ve ever had to say exactly where you are on a highway, [ ]
A game that sends you out into the real world, and quietly helps map it. Here is the pitch. A handler named Zero radios you an assignment, points you at a real landmark somewhere near you, and sends you out to photograph it as proof you were there. Maybe it is a mural two streets [ ]
If you ve been following along with my earlier Sebastian post, you know I ve been rebuilding our family AI assistant on a different foundation: Open WebUI + Ollama instead of our previous OpenClaw setup. The new stack has been running great, but there was one capability I knew I was going to miss: the ability to [ ]
I introduced Sebastian a while back, our Caribbean-accented, monocle-wearing crab of a family assistant who runs the household s digital plumbing. That version lived on OpenClaw, and we loved it. Still do. This post is the sequel: I ve spent the last stretch rebuilding the exact same assistant on completely different bones, as an experiment, to see [ ]
When I posted about Dispatch Zero a month ago, I mentioned that the app was built from a town of about four hundred people, and that small-town coverage was the part of the system that worried me most. The Wikipedia tier kept things from breaking entirely (every small town has at least something on Wikipedia, [ ]
If you ve got an AMD Ryzen 7040 or 8040 series chip — laptops, mini PCs, the Phoenix family of APUs — you ve got a Radeon 780M iGPU sitting there. gfx1103 in ROCm terminology. It s a perfectly capable RDNA3 GPU with about 16 GiB of usable memory once you count UMA + GTT. It would be a [ ]
I have a static HTML site — no React, no Vue, no bundler, no build step. cp is my deploy tool. I wanted to translate the whole thing into Japanese, Chinese, and French. Every i18n tutorial I could find assumed a framework. react-intl, vue-i18n, Next.js s next-i18next, formatjs — they all want either a component model [ ]