Maker

I wanted to watch a movie on my Fat Shark Scout goggles. They have an SD card slot and can play their own recordings, so I figured this would be a quick ffmpeg command. Several hours, red X thumbnails, green video, and one headset crash later, my AI assistant and I finally had a working file. The useful clue came from comparing a recording made by the goggles with the same recording repackaged by ffmpeg. The video hadn’t changed, but playback stopped after a frame or two. Eventually, we got a complete 103-minute movie playing, with audio, as one file. Apparently I needed to learn about MOV chunk tables to watch a movie on my face. ...

My 3D printer is named McPrintyFace. I feel like that establishes the level of seriousness with which this project began. I wanted to see how much of the printing workflow I could hand to an AI assistant. Find the model, choose a version, open Bambu Studio, configure the print, and send it to the printer. Computer use gives the assistant access to the actual desktop application, so this could go beyond giving me a list of settings to enter myself. ...

I have a microphone listening for birds on my balcony. It’s connected to an Intel NUC running BirdNET-Go, which processes the audio and keeps track of what it thinks it heard. This is a fairly predictable project for me. Take something outside, attach a computer to it, and eventually start researching microphones that cost more than the thing I originally plugged in. The starting hardware was pretty modest: the NUC and a USB lavalier microphone. Enough to get audio into the system and start detecting birds. I used an AI assistant to help work through the configuration, inspect the machine, and figure out which parts were worth improving. That last question turned out to have several answers, depending on how far down the rabbit hole I wanted to go. ...

I’ve been working through my childhood in therapy lately and asking myself what drives me to fix things: problems, computers, code, people, etc. And with enough work I’ve pinpointed it to a single interaction that I’ll recount here. I don’t recall how old I was, exactly, but we’ll place the time period around Windows 95. It was a typical evening in the Gennari house. I would say probably sometime after dinner and before bed. And I recall the phone ringing and my mom handing the phone off to my dad. To date myself, these were the times when phones were attached to walls. If you were lucky, the cord to the handset was long enough you could walk around the corner. I was sitting at the dinner table, probably finishing homework when my motioned to me. ...