I am building a system that connects texts (books, research papers, etc.) in a meaningful way to help people decide what to read and be aware of how texts relate to each other.

A proportional width font terminal. "i" and "w" shouldn't take up the same amount of horizontal space. We used to have to do that because computers were slow and we counted cycles and every bits mattered. We live in a land of plenty now though so we can spend cycles doing math so that ls -l/top/etc table output is still aligned but "i" and "w" can take up the appropriate amount of horizontal space.

Outside of my day job, I've been working on:

- hermitator, a tool to run multiple isolated AI agents for WhatsApp on a single machine, with idle agents using no RAM: https://www.encona.com/posts/hermitator/

- showntell, which allows your coding agent to explain things to you with a video that starts playing within a few seconds of you asking: https://www.encona.com/posts/showntell/

- a philosophy tutor (testing in private for now) that does 2:1 live philosophy lessons, each exploring a single topic (aimed at ~10yo kids). I've tested this successfully (i.e. two kids did an hour and they want to do it again), and am trying to make improvements.

- some other education-related things

- a jmail-style mailbox viewer: https://www.encona.com/posts/mailbox-viewer/

working on apyhub mcp: to enable all apyhub apis to be available for agents. https://apyhub.com/mcp

I've been working on an Obsidian plugin to quickly enter caloric and nutritional data (https://www.github.com/Krishna-Sivakumar/joule). The core features are done (A DSL and a runtime for finding and resolving formulae recursively), and I need to work on documentation and some convenience features. Hoping to finish it this month!

Maintaining my indie social network for tech people https://stackness.dev/ (currently struggling to keep users on the platform, even games and achievements didn't help, can you believe that? :D)

and this weekend I'll finally launch a tool for guitarists and their friends https://kantamigo.com/

Still working away on my book (and library book) recommendations service https://leafle.org

It has if nothing else been very useful for me (it has correctly deduced that I would get something out of borrowing Grief is the Thing With Feathers, the Dispossessed, and Cosmicomics, none of which I would have thought of reading). Plus it has been a fun opportunity to play around with LLMs as an interface and a research and reverse engineering tool; as well as Jev for non-user facing quality work like banning crap openrouter providers based on their output before putting it in front of a user.

Most recently I’ve been dropping off flyers for it at a few local libraries in my area.

A suite of high-dopamine games which use smart exercise bikes as the control interface.

When playing Zwift, Rouvy, etc, I find that I get too competitive and ruin longer workouts by trying to keep up with or sprint past people who are much faster than me over long distances.

This is bad for building stamina and endurance, but I get bored, and it's hard to fight boredom and physical strain both at once.

I do not get bored sitting in front of Balatro, Raccoin, Tetris - anything with bright colours and satisfying noises and combos.

The first finished prototype game is very simple: you sort coloured marbles. Higher watt output from the bike means marbles are blown, by wind, upwards as they roll across the screen. Lower watt output means they fall. Steady watt output means they move horizontally. Marble goes into correct hole -> satisfying noise. It rewards steady watt output over time, with minor adjustments, which is what I'm trying to work on right now.

I was pretty amazed by how engaging I found it (total iPad baby brain). The miles really fly by - I get tired before I get bored.

I think that next I'll either do a tower defence game, or a less-dopamine-rewarding game in the style of Kerbal Space Program. Taking your actual weight and watt output, putting a bike with wings into a physics engine, and the gameplay loop being unlocking increasingly large airplane pieces, and designing - then flying - increasingly ridiculous airborne bicycles seems like a compelling idea, though less good for fitness.

The control surface being so limited - essentially one measurement which can either go up or down - is a really fun constraint for creativity.

For years, I struggled to make any headway with Linux - I get so frustrated at how obscure, inscrutable, and unintuitive TUIs are! God I don’t want to waste my life typing esoteric strings of commands into the terminal. When I started with computers that was all there was, and once GUIs happened I never looked back.

Good news though, these days Claude will just do it for me!

I’ve been working on setting up a home media server, using headless Debian on a pi - I’ve got it set up to stream music and videos, hold all my ROMs, I’ve got it automatically standardizing file names and handling tagging and subtitles - all attached to a big 6-drive enclosure that I just stuffed all my random old HDDs into.

Even though I haven’t written more than a dozen lines of code or commands for the whole thing, I am pretty fuckin pleased that now I can just wave a magic wand and say “I want all my video game soundtracks filed under the game name rather than the artist” and Claude uh finds a way to grant my wish. I spend about an hour each night tweaking it and it’s so easy to customize to be exactly what I need.

I’m still working on https://feedsync.net, a tool to push RSS feed updates to Discord.

It’s been getting a decent number of sign ups despite me not really posting it anywhere or doing any marketing.

Ultimately a fun project, and useful for myself and a few friends, so I’m happy others are even interested in trying it.

I’ve started to regret using Phoenix LiveView, as it’s only deployed in one region, so high latency far from there. I’m exploring a SPA as a better alternative.

Otherwise, I’ve been playing around with a Lua engine to build feeds for websites that don’t support them, using AI to build the Lua as a once-off. It works reasonably well, but isn’t ready for prime time just yet.