Mark's Project Blog

So I decided to build a bot in Mastodon that reports the damage you’re taking hourly.

I’ve been thinking as of late about the things that desktop computer users get that we’ve decided isn’t worth giving software engineers in their own infrastructure.

Related to my previous post, I needed to resolve the need to quickly take screenshots from Windows and put them in an org file in emacs.

Lately, I’ve been using Etherpad on Sandstorm to track notes and clues in the game Blue Prince.

In part 1, we discussed setting up Grafana, Loki, and Alloy.

Having gotten to three whole nodes in my home network, I’ve decided it’s about time to get some centralized monitoring going.

In my quest to back slowly towards the exits from total reliance on Google’s infrastructure, I’ve managed to stand up an instance of Sandstorm on a small ZimaBoard.

I’ve used multi-term for years in emacs as my primary terminal interface.

After not too much work, I was able to finish up the fireplace in our front room.

This is a followup to my previous post on building a shader based on Xflame.

Over the holiday, we had the fun idea to put a TV in front of the fireplace we never turn on so we can run fireplace images on it.

It’s the New Years season again, and that means resolutions.

On rare occasions, I end up needing to plug a second monitor into my laptop.

While I’m pretty happy with my recipe system, I recently learned about org-babel, which is now integreated into the core of org-mode.

A common pattern while working on computer projects is running through a sequence of “semi-automatic” operations, where you can’t quite automate all the steps fully, but the formula is basically the same every time.

The flash card viewer I’ve created a simple flash card viewer as a study aid.

In a previous post, I talked about things I really enjoy about Mastodon.

I’ve been maintaining my own Mastodon node for a few months now, enough to feel pretty moved-in, all things considered.

Recently after making some changes to my Mastodon server, I began suffering a host of 502 and 500 errors.

“We keep that name moving in the Overhead,” he said, and it seemed to Princess that the wind in the shutter arrays above her blew more forlornly, and the everlasting clicking of the shutters grew more urgent.

Out-of-the-box, Mastodon supports post translation using an external service.

Having put all the pieces in place, we’re now ready to modify the UI to display the attached note next to the user’s name.

This post is part 2 of a 3-part series on adding the ability to show notes about users on Mastodon next to their display names.

When I was younger, I expected everyone in the future would have computer handles we’d mostly go by, and names would be secondary.

Now that my Mastodon server is making regular backups, I want to preserve some of the backups on the off chance something goes desparately wrong with my configuration and I have to do a very large rollback.

My Mastodon server has reached the point where it’s complex enough that backing up would be prudent.

I recently set up a Mastodon node on a Raspberry Pi 4 in my home.

About four years and one detour through some self-teaching in control system theory later, I have returned to Donald Knuth’s famous tome, The Art of Computer Programming (volume 1).

React is a clever user interface library designed around a very functional paradigm, where the input is some state (represented as properties) and the output is a tree of renderable user interface components (represented as, usually, something that can be…

I bundled up the things I learned about driving a Brilliant Labs Monocle into a new Python package.

I recently got my hands on a Brilliant Labs Monocle, which is a nifty little tiny-screen device that connects to a host machine via Bluetooth Low-Energy protocol and offers a simple API for controlling its content and receiving input.

Recently, while working on the WPILib codebase, I found that my poor Linux laptop was not upgraded enough to do the heavy-lifting, as the codebase has pulled in a dependency on GLIBC 2.32 and I’m unwilling to risk my laptop upgrading from Ubuntu 20 to 22.

So I’m in Blender and I’m generating asteroids using the Add Mesh -> Rock Generator tool (part of the “Add Mesh: Extra Objects” add-on) with an Asteroid template. click Each of these rocks is created using a few overlapped mathematical algorithms.

So I have found myself in the market for a new job recently.

An announcement by FIRST Robotics earlier this year revealed an interesting bit of news: next year’s kit would include AprilTags as vision targets.

Having created a new empty custom plugin in the previous post, we are now ready to change it to make it play sounds when the boolean value it monitors goes from false to true.

Well, it’s off-season for the FIRST Robotics competition, which is always a good time to try new things.

On a previous post, I discussed creating a simulator for a simple flywheel in the FIRST Robotics WPILib framework in Java.

Well, the off-season of FIRST Robotics is upon us.

I recently had to pipe some audio from my browser to a file.

Recently, I had an Ubuntu laptop I use regularly develop a weird quirk: sometimes when I plugged it into USB-C, neither the monitor nor power would connect.

One of the things I’ve missed, having moved my blog off of Blogger, is the metrics.

In an earlier post, I added self-hosted static comments via shortcodes in Hugo.

Having chosen to self-host my Hugo comments as part of the static page content, there are a couple of ways to do it.

After putting a bit of thought into it, I’ve decided to start the process of switching my personal blog to self-hosting on Hugo instead of hosting through Blogger.

Privacy Policy last updated: 2025-08-02 Change history 2025-08-02: Updated Comments policy to reflect new comment engine Overview General Principles Site Access Comments Additional Concerns General Principles Balancing personal privacy with operational ne…