Ask Lemmy

Years ago I was asked to make a website to educate the public and promote a campaign to bring back a formerly-declared-extinct species.

There were scientists, zoologists, researchers and volunteers in the field who did the REAL work. I had the easy part.

But when the website was launched, I received 'thank you' emails from all over the world. Reading all of those letters was one of the most rewarding feelings.

And the best part . . . Though it's still a threatened species (I'm told recovery potential is strong), today there are more than 500 of these animals living in the wild.

Last year I built this cupboard and hutch, along with a matching buffet.

Back in the 90s, we bought an 87 year old house that had been neglected for decades, but the neglect was what we liked. That meant that nobody had "upgraded" or modernized it.

We spent the next 7 years renovating it, fixing every wall, repairing plumbing, installing a cast-iron woodburning stove, etc.

When we were done, we had turned the ugliest house on the street into a museum piece, and sold it for far more than any house on the street had ever sold for.

I made this halloween costume out of scrap from a hospital demo I've been doing and I'm pretty happy about it.

When I was on paternity leave with my first, I used the boring nap times to make a children's book. I have a first draft done with a second now underway which is effectively a full redo... But I got the first draft printed and it's cute. It makes me happy when my kid now grabs it off the shelf and I remind him I made it for him.

My partner asked why I didn't just sleep when he slept...I'm just really bad at taking naps. Tried getting the first draft published and there weren't any bites so I let it sit for over a year before revisiting for the new draft. Maybe someday. Maybe never. The act of making it is fun, regardless.

It's no longer online in order to minimize data exposure, but during some major wildfires a decade ago, a small city was evacuated with my city being the nearest safe place to be (~4 hours away), so I built a site within a couple of hours to let people with spare rooms offer space to evacuees. For nearly a week I became the place to find vetted information about resources for everything an evacuee needed to know. It took the province and Red Cross 4-5 days to get their systems up and running so I was an important stop gap. I've since devised a system for evacuee information that I can deploy in less than an hour (it's always running, but I confirm data for each deployment to make sure links and phone numbers are still valid).

It gpt too hot too early in the season to complete it, but this greenhouse will be completed soon!

My name is on a plaque (along with dozens of others) attached to the Nancy Grace Roman telescope that just launched. I don’t think I’ll ever top that. I also had a hand in building the primary mirrors for JWST, seeing images come back from it has been incredibly rewarding! Working in aerospace definitely has its awesome moments, despite being “just a job” most of the time.

A free mobile game "Wandering Alchemist" I've released on both Android and iOS. Free as in offline, no ads, no in-app purchases (Besides a fully optional "support the developer"). It's a GPS walking game where you gather ingredients, brew potions, sell them to merchants and decorate your neighborhood.

On some days it's awesome, on other days I ask myself why I do this to myself. But overall it's fun :)

I'm currently working on a big update that reworks all the visuals, a lot of them are still from early on and look really shoddy. For example before and after:

Google Play Store

Apple App Store

I made a printable pattern that allows you to origami fold two d6 dice from a sheet of letter paper. It means I can give my acute psych patients board games if they ask and even if they're sick enough to insert them into their orifices there's very minimal harm possible.

spoiler

I have other games that also utilize pieces made very similar to the pieces used by this chess set and have even made checkers to accompany that set.

Something out of myself. Raised poor, lived in a renovated chicken coop for a while. Almost homeless a few times. My wife and I now have two nice paid off cars, a nice home, good jobs, our kids are all doing well and we spoil the shit out of our granddaughter.

We just had this delivered to her! Something I always wanted as a kid and wanted to be able to afford for our kids but couldn't.

I took a wire weaving class yesterday and made this:

I also managed to finish these in time for my mom's birthday:

I make music. It’s not amazing music but it’s mine and doing it brings me great joy. I have a recording studio in my house, and use much of my down time for writing and recording music. I’ve slowly been teaching myself audio engineering and production, try to drop a song or two each year, and am working on a full-length album.

Unfortunately I can’t really share that here without doxxing myself. I do still maintain a Reddit account solely for the purposes of promotion and networking with other amateur recording artists, only because the music making communities on Lemmy are not very active.

It was ridiculously expensive, I could have built an RTX 5090 gaming system for the money... in 2025. But what is the fun in that? (Almost) anyone ready to shill out that money can do that. I enjoy projects where I can design and build something to my own specifications, something that ends up being more or less unique, yet functional.

So I built a 7.5 L small form factor PC based on a Strix Halo with the best iGPU on the market (with RTX 4060 levels of performance), completely fanless, operating at 100W TDP sustained for CPU and GPU combined. This was rather nerve wrecking given the investment and how it could have easily ended up as paper weight or with my custom cooling solution just being not up for the job, as the first prototype is also the final thing. But it worked and that's why I am pretty proud at it, even if it means something only to me.

https://smallformfactor.net/forum/threads/monochrome-2-my-custom-fanless-7-5-l-strix-halo-system-completed.20177/

I make video games on occasion. My portfolio is mostly jams and unfinished prototypes, and while I am working on something special, at this rate it will be a million years before it's ready for release.

I catch my wife playing this one sometimes and it makes my heart happy

Sometimes I paint minis. These were a couple of characters I played where I made a custom figure

Kurt is technically a kitbash. I took a figure that was originally a bard holding a harp, cut out the harp and gave him some books. He was a gifted kid turned wizard-college-dropout, really pulling from life experience there.

For Robin I made a couple of additions with clay. I'm really bad at that, but it makes me happy

I sculpted this tiki mask using blender and then milled it out of aluminium using a 3 axis mill.

You can make your own, if you have a 3D printer or a milling machine: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4636877

Something I’m still proud of was a diorama I made in 5th grade for Halloween. It was called the “Peanut House of Horror” and featured dried peanuts with little googly eyes being disassembled in every conceivable way on cardboard torture devices — think a stretcher rack pulling one in half, a “pit and the pendulum” device slicing into one, etc. with peanut shells all over the floor. My parents supported the creativity and humor. Other parents, not so much. But to paraphrase John Waters, you need to possess good taste to appreciate poor taste.

I was at work, but I got a patent on an antenna that is used to jam cell signals so that explosives experts could stay safe disarming IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was more compact than previous antennas that stuck up really high, making the guy with the radio a target for snipers. Or they would fold them up to get through doorways making them less efficient. I have no idea what happened to them but I came up with the concept, designed them, simulated them, built them, tested them and even shipped five of them myself. One of the best programs I had working for the man. I sincerely hope I might have contributed to saving a life.

I made a t-shirt from pieces of other t-shirts. It's messy as fuck but I wear it with pride. I want to make more and improve.

Once made a game on my calculator. Not uploaded from my computer, literally typed it in and developed it on the calculator. Had to do some optimization and everything to get it to run reasonably since this wasn't a very advanced system. It was a pretty simple game about flying a spaceship through an asteroid field, with collectables that blew up all the asteroids onscreen, and your score was how far you flew. It was just nice to actually finish a project for once, and on such limited hardware, and have it actually be fun to play!

Speed the read write speeds of every server and workstation at work by introducing on the fly compression. I hypothised it would work because we had a surprising amount of idle cpu and even where we didn't a lot of the clock cycles were waiting for IO. Had to design some benchmarks, run on test systems, do a blue field deployment on a few prod servers, etc, but it was really rewarding to go from idea to implementation. It's was actually noticble to users for start up time too! It lead to a more aggressive compression on some backups that ended up delaying the need for hardware purchases too.

https://newdawnowl.itch.io/microtonal-grid

I made a pure code, microtonal step sequencer that makes it really easy to try out what microtonal music is like.

I'm also very proud of how quickly and easily I implemented the conway's game of life into it, only took me about an hour or so.

I'm not proud of how long it took me to get rid of the "clicky" bug.

Keyboards (home and work)

Macro-pad (for me and the Mrs)

Hitbox controllers (for playing Street Fighter 6)

My last two PCs

Turned a broken laptop into an emulation console

A bunch of "Ikea hack" furniture pieces around the house that I don't have pictures of currently.

Well, if we're tootling anyway. Am rather fond of my latest.

Its owner will be taking delivery later this week. Hopefully they're fond of it, too.

Many moons ago I had the good fortune to get a contract job creating an online tournament system for a game company. When I asked if there was a requirements document or a spec they said, "The only spec is: we need a tournament system." It was totally my kind of project - I had carte blanche to do it however I wanted. What I came up with was way beyond expectations. I got a letter of commendation from a small game company in Utah that produced games for them. We field-tested it in a couple actual game tournaments and it worked great. Sadly, for unrelated business reasons my system ended up never being used, but it's still the project I'm most proud of because I pulled it off almost singlehandedly.

I don't have anything specific to show. But I am an aspiring author who took an old English Creative Writing assignment and turned it into a 16 book epic decades later. I should be ready for publication by the end of this year.

My son is my biggest one.

Second, I completely redesigned the UI for one of the most popular image editing apps (it had been on Windows for years and my design was v1.0 for Mac). My design was nominated for an Apple design award that year, and Don Norman called my UI ‘innovative’ (I still have that email).

I built a maze game in Godot. It uses depth first search to make a maze then you have a little wizard dude that runs through it. Each time you complete theaze the next one get bigger.

I make music and I'm occasionally pretty happy with some of my guitar playing.

I spent most of this year building https://github.com/zedd00/PantryButler a pantry and recipe organizing app.

I'm about 95% on a firmware update and Linux gui interface for my cloudnine keyboard so I can move the fucking led back light change button away from the ctrl key.

i made a windows app that dims my screen. but specifically for use on hdtvs, cuz I've neved had space for an office setup and have used every dimmer out there and they all lrave me unsatisfied one way or another.

i know theres 1000 dimmers out there, but i really put a lot of work into making mine useful, small, and intuitive. there's event automation, hotkeys, and a convenient ui.

no one seems to really care about it online, but after literally 10+ years of suffering I'm incredibly proud of it

I made a charging station/toolbox/catch tray thing out of cardboard to set on my nightstand and put all my pocket stuff in. Going to test that out for awhile and redo it in wood once I've confirmed I'm happy with it.

I made a punk rock album a while ago, it's mostly good. I've taken a few of the songs to my new band, they're definitely better with more people!

https://jimmyhalliday.bandcamp.com/ if anyone wants to give it a listen. It's free!