I’m working on writing a soundtrack to a video game! It’s not finished yet but I’m extremely proud of the music so far. I also wrote this song recently just for fun. :) Made for the Gameboy using Carillon Editor.

https://youtu.be/vPVU6f2KhEA

I’ve made an app for Lemmy and I’m quite proud of how it turned out :)

In a more artistic way, few photos that are worthy to be on my wall, but I still can’t find time to print them. Always envy fancy photographers who make photobooks with their stuff

Volunteered at an international school in the IT dept. and at the time I noticed that the students had to type out a long address in order to connect to their personal drives. This was only necessary when using MacOS.

The head person who brought me on never had time to simplify the process. He said it was like that when he got there. So, I decided to look into it and try to simplify things. Prior to this I never had any experience with macs at all. It took me a while to learn the basics of how to write a script for Mac and how to navigate the OS.

After a bunch of research and videos, I was finally able to write something where all you had to do was click on an icon and you were automatically connected to your drives. This was roughly 10 years ago and about 5 years ago I learned that they were still using what I wrote!

For work I frequently need to look up information for patents. The specific data I need is spread around in multiple US Patent & Trademark Office databases. I created tool with Django/Python so I just have to copy/paste the patent numbers into a box and hit submit. It then returns exactly what I need in the exact format I need. It leaves me with more free time to play Cookie Clicker.

I composed a choral piece away from a piano at a coffee shop years ago. What I’m most proud of is that the voice leading works really well, and yet the chords are quite interesting. It also helps that I’m a professional musician, but I get a little thrill when I get to conduct or perform that piece.

I wrote an automatic teambalancer for Titanfall 2 Northstar, that solved a lot of proplems that match balancing was having before I made it.

Now it’s the go-to for making sure teams are even on a server. It takes into account a lot of things that might screw up balance, and is even able to actively compensate if players suddenly leave/join.

I’m really proud of this little piece of code.

I come from an extremely religious background. I made a rather cathartic and weird “music video.” It’s not exactly pleasant to watch, but that was kind of the point. As a bedroom musician/producer, I don’t get a ton of feedback, much less strong feedback, but this one has gotten some unexpectedly strong responses when sharing with close friends (like one guy getting pissed and leaving the room–never had that).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_KpkQWtfSU&feature=youtu.be

I do the photography for a small computer museum. I published this collection of black & white shots - mostly macro, leaning towards the abstract.

https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Machines-Dave-Fischer/dp/B09X557N52

I’ve made a few mods for games over the years that always make me feel a little happy when I remember they exist. Usually its the ones that I made for my own personal tastes that turned out to be things other people really liked, too.

Years ago, I used to write the monthly newsletter for a nonprofit I was part of. Most of this was just news aggregate kind of stuff, but I did get to have my little editorial section and write about whatever relevant content I wanted.

Thanks to a couple of people willing to boost my signal, I get to say my writing has been read on every continent (big thanks to a college friend of mine doing a summer geology thing in Antarctica).

Years ago as a stupid fresh college grad, I worked for the US Forest Service as a summer intern. I co-authored a study that showed that bighorn sheep were NOT limited by availability of lambing habitat.

This was a political hot button issue that pitted hunters against cattlemen. Cattlemen claimed that the sheep were not getting brucellosis from their cows and that the sheep populations were indeed limited by lambing habitat.

I was very surprised when, 15 years later, I visited the same ranger station to say hello and that same study was still being used as evidence in hearings to undercut the claims of the cattlemen that they didn’t need to vaccinate their cows to protect the sheep. That felt really good.

For me, maybe this even if I made one of the characters a little too big. And an Artfight attack I thought came out alright for more recent stuff.

When I was in college I was taking trigonometry and structural engineering. In structures we were studying trusses. In trig we were solving for angles and distances using systems of equations.

At the same time I was living in a little studio apartment with old fixtures, a creaky hardwood floor, a view over the street below. It had those multi-pane windows with white paint just slathered onto the muntins, and streaking the edges of the panes.

The kitchen lacked counter space, but also lacked space overall. So I built myself a folding countertop.

It’s a piece of plywood about two feet by three feet. Grain showing, stained with polyurethane. When it’s unfolded and ready to be used, there’s a straight wood bar with a hinged connection near the end of the plywood piece, attached underneath, and the other end is a hinged connection at the wall.

That would be a static truss if the counter were always extended open. Those hinges would never rotate because it’s a triangle.

The hinges made it a truss by offering no resistance to turning. The fact that it was a truss allowed me to calculate how much load it could hold. At the end of the countertop, I should have been able to apply 700 lbs of force straight down before it broke. (But the actual number was probably less; that’s what my gut says. I sat on it but I never wanted to bounce on it)

The trick was getting it to fold. See, to make it fold I had to put a hinge in the middle of that diagonal member (this structure was double, one on each side of the plywood, but I’ll just describe one).

I tried to set it up with angle hinges, like you’d see on a door. Two flat pieces connected by a line about which they rotate. But that didn’t work. I can’t recall why.

Instead I had to use an axle based hinge. The member coming from the plywood down was made of three pieces glued together, with the middle piece shorter to present a forked pair of layers. Those were circular at the end. In the center of that circle was a hold passing horizontally through the room. I built the hinge out of various washers and a big bolt. I had to keep the connection from being tight, like a bolted connection normally would be, because I didn’t want the upper wood squeezing the lower wood.

I can’t remember the exact sequence of the metal parts of that hinge, but it allowed the whole thing to loosely rotate without any part of it being in danger of eventually coming lose and unscrewing. The bolt extended into space after leaving the joint toward the inside, and that’s where the stabilizing bar comes down to hold that joint in place.

The stabilizing bar is quite thin. It doesn’t need to carry much load at all; it just keeps the long diagonal truss member from starting to buckle at the hinge I just described.

The exact position of that hinge along the main member was precisely constrained by this:

When extended, the sum of the two sub-members had to be the distance from the bottom of the wall attachment point, to the point where it met the plywood.

When folded, the difference between the two member lengths had to equal the distance between the lower wall attachment point and the connection with of the now-hanging plywood.

It was fun to make, and even if it was tiny I got to solve a system of equations to figure out the dimensions, and it expanded my ability to cook in that little kitchen, making my life better.

I baked cookies, hosted dinners, perfectly inoculated like 100 shroom cakes with one infection.

I think they made me remove it when I moved out. Went against code somehow.

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