Things I Did Not Blog About

Here's a bunch of things I did that, for any number of reasons, I didn't bother writing about.

My Brother's Keeper #

I used a photo of my twin to generate a 3D model of him and then I attempted to insert that 3D Model into two different games, made a video of a giant waffle version of him in space with the theme to 2001 A Space Odyssey playing in the background, rotated his spine out of his body to create a weird monster version of him, and created a snapchat lens that lets you rotate, resize, and place the 3D model of my twin anywhere you want.

Mechanical Keyboards #

Assembled a hot swappable keyboard with Lord of the Rings keycaps

Soldered and Assembled the Scotto34

3D Prints/Hardware #

I assembled the Input Labs Alpakka, an open source gyro focused gamepad, which was surprisingly comfortable to hold considering it was entirely made of 3d printed parts.

I 3D Printed and assembled the OctoLamp

I 3D Printed and Assembled the Lord of the Rings Lamp, and slightly modified the light ring to let me use the LED Strip I already had along with WLED.

I 3D Printed a shell for a picamera and raspberry pi to build the Gif Camera with the intention of using the BeReal (unofficial) API to upload images to BeReal directly from the camera, but there were issues with the post endpoint so that aspect was never completed. But I adjusted it to use Mastodon and other minor changes so it worked with the newer PiCamera in my fork

I 3D Printed Wormhole Chess mainly to experiment with putting magnets into 3D Prints

I built a pwnagotchi and 3d printed a case for it

I built a battery powered homeasistant dashboard with an E-Ink screen and a 3D printed shell

I 3D printed The Moon Lamp. It did not go well, there is a lot of hot glue, and I don't think I can ever remove the bulb without breaking it.

Software #

I used github actions to slowly simulate a chess game while displaying the current chess piece formation using LaTeX which you can see in this Github Repo - Basically there was a github action on a cron schedule to run a python script that would load in the current moves in a chess game, pick the next action, generate a .tex file with the new chessboard, convert that to a PDF and then convert the PDF to a screenshot of the board which would display in the README.

I created a Decky Loader plugin for the Steam Deck that lets you upload a screenshot straight from the Gamepad UI to any mastodon-compatible API, it can also auto-upload screenshots immediately after taking them. It's still somewhat glitchy and I was running into issues with Pixelfed's API (which I believe have been fixed recently) which required users to create a APP manually from their pixelfed settings. Repo: TomCasavant/DeckMastodonPoster

While experimenting with the mastodon API, I created a very simple Wikipedia-Mastodon Bot which posts a 'Today in History' post every day at 6PM EST to @daily_wikipedia@tomkahe.com. Repo: TomCasavant/wikibot

Experimenting with a library called PySceneDetect I built a bot that would attempt to extract clips from a tv show and post them to mastodon (it's hit or miss) @community@tomkahe.com. TomCasavant/mastodon-plex-scenes

A few years ago I was connecting random things together in Homeassistant and ended up with an automation that takes the current song I'm listening to and posts it to this mastodon account: @tomsmusic@mastodon.social

After getting somewhat annoyed that following a lemmy/kbin community from mastodon meant I had to see every single comment on every single post boosted into my timeline, a built a sort-of fix for it with a proxy account that follows the lemmy communities and only boosts the top-level posts. TomCasavant/mastodon-groupy and example bot is located @groups@tomkahe.com

I forked Postmarks - a federated bookmarking platform that can be hosted on glitch.com so I could make some opinionated changes to how it worked for me such as keeping the hashtags hidden from the post, adding in profile fields, embedding spotify/youtube iframes, and automatically archiving links on the Internet Archive. Repo: TomCasavant/tom-postmarks

I modified a chrome extension to place images of my twin in all your youtube thumbnails - this only sort of counts because all I did was swap out some photos and learn how to build Firefox/Chrome packages. TomCasavant/Rogerify-Youtube

I used an unofficial Animal Crossing API to have my character automatically say (in a chat bubble) what song I'm listening to

Running #

I ran a 5k while carrying a 5lb pumpkin

In September of 2022 I read an article about a person who decided to walk 20,000 steps a day for a week and they said it was something they'd never do again because of how difficult it was. So in October of 2022 I walked/ran 30,000 steps (it felt unfair to only do 20,000 since I was already doing 15,000 a day) every day for a month and it was an exhausting experience that I will never do again. I ended the month with 1,000,090.

I was feeling pretty great at the end of the month so I decided to run 2 miles every hour over the course of 24 hours (I ended up attaching a 25th hour so I could even it out at 50 miles). That was October 29th-30th, 2022. October 29th remains my record for steps in a day at 73,066.

I am not a fan of seeing numbers go down so for the entirety of 2023 I walked/ran at least 20,000 steps every single day, ending the year with 7,473,873 total steps (a total distance of 3492.9 miles). It started off well but by July I started getting extemely exhausted every day and runs were replaced with walks resulting in significantly less distance ran than I normally do in a year.