Giving every warrior a body
How ZoreWars turns Core War programs into creatures that fight on screen: one body part per instruction, shots that fly from the instruction that fired them, and conversions you can watch happen.
Journal
Writing
Build notes, architecture, product thinking, and lessons learned while making Stagware projects.
Testing a new game against forty years of Core War warriors
How ZoreWars was built in a few days with an AI coding agent, checked against pMARS and more than a thousand historical warriors, and kept clear of GPL code with a clean-room process.
Adding a Z axis to Core War
How ZoreWars turns Core War's single ring of memory into a plane and a 3D volume without breaking the classic game, and what changed about which warriors win.
From Lumimail to Picket
How my Lumimail fork became Picket, from connected mailboxes and a new identity to import recovery, Mail insights, and configurable categorization.
Teaching the EleksWFD clock to ignore a quiet room
Using a recorded microphone trace to tune an adaptive noise floor, a loudness gate, and smooth LED decay on an ESP32 desk clock.
Weather drawings on the EleksWFD clock
How current weather and daylight select nine animated scenes for a 7×7 LED grid, and how the firmware draws them a few pixels at a time.
Building custom firmware for the EleksWFD clock
Reverse engineering an LED desk clock, mapping its display, and building replacement firmware with an optional Rust companion app.
What Timbre taught me about Windows audio and working with coding agents
Shared control buffers, missing processing, and a failed service handoff made us test Timbre at several levels. Here is how we kept the claims tied to the evidence.
Why I built Timbre to keep my audio hardware useful
Trouble getting EPOS Gaming Suite led me to investigate the hardware I already owned. Along the way, I found that my working GSX 300 was missing a whole group of features.
Seventeen million writes a week, for a tool only I use
My personal browsing tool was writing about 17 million rows a week to Cloudflare D1, almost all of it data that hadn't changed. This is how I traced each write, the two real bugs that turned up on the way, and what a week of production data showed.
Preparing Mantle for the Next Gemini Model Change
A code-level look at the seams, configuration, validation, and tests that make Mantle's Gemini models easier to replace.