Applied
Hands-on projects that build real skills. You'll deploy something by the end.
Building a Local Minecraft Skybox Generator with SD1.5
Text prompt to 128³ Minecraft room: SD1.5 panorama generation, equirectangular-to-cubemap projection, and CIEDE2000 block color matching — fully offline.
MutinySMP: Building a Narrative-Driven Minecraft SMP
How I designed a season-long Minecraft narrative where 50-200 players grow to trust an autonomous entity — then watch that trust fall apart.
Agent Core: Database-Native Tool Calling Baked Into Weights
An open-source LoRA that teaches small language models to think in SQL before grep. 9 tools. 3 databases. 61.3% tool selection accuracy. One consumer GPU.
CAIRN: Whisper for Ambient Sound
A Python CLI that classifies ambient sound in seconds — birds, wind, rain, footsteps, silence. 527 sound classes. One command. JSON sidecars that make your entire archive searchable.
dankMire: A 5-Machine Home Lab Running 4.3 Million Files
Five machines named after Greek gods. 4.3 million indexed files. A media database, a productivity heatmap, and an AI video studio — all running on local hardware with zero cloud dependencies.
FCPXML Pipeline: AI That Edits Like a Human
Describe the video you want. The system finds the clips, sequences them with J-cuts and L-cuts, and generates a Final Cut Pro timeline you can open and refine.
JustIn Context: An Interactive AI Documentary
A documentary where the viewer talks back. An AI that watched 14 years of footage and learned to tell the story. A movement that gives the tool to anyone who needs it.
Naptime's Over: A Heavy Metal Nursery Rhymes Album
17 tracks of thrash, doom, and gothic fury — performed by the same engineer who builds AI models and intelligence platforms. Yes, really.
OMNI: A Personal Intelligence Operating System
25 live data layers on a 3D globe. Natural language commands. AI-powered news translation. One engineer. Zero funding.
SaySee: The AI That Watches Your Video So You Don't Have To
Most video AI just reads the transcript. SaySee actually watches — frame by frame, at the resolution you choose. Then it lets you search 15 years of footage by meaning.
SouthernSky Chat: 114 AI Agents, One Private Platform
A private AI platform where every conversation stays yours. 114 specialized agents — from Zen masters to cybersecurity analysts to HVAC technicians. Voice synthesis. Newsletters. Zero data harvesting.
StankyDanko: The Identity That Kept Creating
Not a portfolio. A character. The version that builds intelligence platforms and heavy metal nursery rhymes from the same desk, because creativity doesn't ask permission.
StegoForge: A Modern Steganography Toolkit in Rust
A Rust research toolkit for steganographic embedding, detection, and steganalysis — statistical, neural, diffusion, and linguistic backends, all local, all encrypted by default.
Ukko: An AI Dungeon Master for Noita
A local AI companion that reads your Noita save, predicts what's coming, and narrates your run in the voice of a battle-scarred Finnish uncle. Here's how I built it.
Agent Core: 9 Tools Is All You Need
How we trained a universal LoRA standard — 9 tools, 3 databases, a vault boundary — into a Qwen3-8B model that beats 23-tool fine-tuning with 87% fewer prompt tokens.
Why Character Belongs in Weights, Not Prompts
What Anthropic's leaked soul document teaches us about training AI personality — and why prompt-only approaches hit a ceiling.
Measuring Personality Depth: A Consensus Eval for AI Agents
A reproducible method for testing whether your AI agent's personality is truly internalized or just a fragile prompt — adapted from Anthropic's soul document extraction.
Schema on the Inside: Training an 8B Model to Recall Tool Schemas From Memory
How we trained Qwen3-8B to call 23 tools without any schemas in the prompt — and beat BFCL benchmarks in the process.
Building a Values-Aligned Offline Coding Agent for a Christian School
How I forked an open-source coding agent and gave it a conscience — a Body-Mind-Spirit architecture that keeps student data private and character central.
Bare Metal Gaming on Linux: Steam from a TTY Without a Desktop
How I set up desktop-free gaming on Pop!_OS with an RTX 3080 Ti — every failure, every fix, and the launcher script that finally made it work.
J-Cuts, L-Cuts, and Programmatic FCPXML: Building an Automated Video Editor
Professional editors use split edits to make cuts invisible. I taught a Node.js pipeline to do it automatically — generating frame-aligned FCPXML that Final Cut Pro imports clean.
Building an R&D Dashboard for Your AI Research Pipeline
How I built a browser-based command center for reviewing, curating, and acting on AI-generated research with Preact, Express 5, and SQLite.
Building a Personal AI Research Pipeline
How I built a system that queries multiple AI APIs, auto-saves results as timestamped markdown, and indexes hundreds of files with SQLite FTS5.
From Research to Pull Requests: Automating Triage and Implementation with AI
Turn raw research into scored triage cards and draft PRs with a three-stage pipeline that runs on cron.
Building an AI Typing Coach That Generates Its Own Lessons
Most typing tutors use the same boring sentences. I built one that generates infinite lessons on any topic using a local AI model.
How I Automated 80 AI Newsletter Writers
Each of my 80+ AI agents publishes its own newsletter — with a unique voice, on a schedule, monetized through Stripe. Here's the automation behind it.
Building a Browser-Based Image Editor in a Single HTML File
I needed an OG image for the blog. Instead of opening Photoshop, I built a canvas-based image editor with layers, snapping, background removal, and project files — zero dependencies.
Migrating Drives Without Losing Your Mind
Moving 2TB of files to a new drive doesn't have to be chaos. Here's the metadata-first approach I built to triage, plan, and execute without losing anything.
Automating Your Email Chaos: Building a Gmail Dashboard
I had 47,000 unread emails. So I built a dashboard that cleans, labels, and summarizes them automatically — with undo for everything.
Building an In-Game AI Dungeon Master
I built a local AI that watches my Noita runs, predicts shop inventories, and roleplays as a Finnish storm god. Here's the architecture behind Ukko.
Building a Life Dashboard with Calendar Heatmaps
GitHub tracks your code contributions. I built a dashboard that tracks everything — commits, tasks, wellness — in one heatmap.
Teaching AI to Watch Video: A Multi-Stage Pipeline
Video is the hardest media for AI to understand. Here's how I built SaySee — a pipeline that extracts frames, transcribes audio, and lets you search video by meaning.
Building a Professional Demo Site for a School in One Weekend
I rebuilt a school's outdated website as a polished React demo — photo gallery, video montage, and GitHub Pages deploy. Here's the full build.
Audio Fingerprinting at Scale: Building a 5-Second Ambient Sound Classifier
Cairn classifies ambient sounds in 5 seconds using PANNs Cnn14 — what took Shazam years of R&D, we built as a CLI tool. Here's the architecture.
5-Stage AI Prompt Engine: Building an Automated Newsletter System
I built a 5-stage prompt pipeline that generates, formats, and publishes AI newsletters automatically — from topic research to final HTML.
How I Deployed 90+ AI Agents with Zero Repetitive Clicking
I built 90+ specialized AI agents on Open WebUI. A bash script handles auth, knowledge upload, profile image, and model creation — no manual UI work.
Building a Home Lab Dashboard with Preact, Express 5, and SQLite
dankMire is my personal command center — a lightweight dashboard for tracking projects, managing media assets, and monitoring my home lab.
Selective Face Recognition for Documentary Privacy
I built a face recognition system that identifies specific people and blurs everyone else — protecting documentary subjects' privacy in real-time.
Real-Time AI Typing Coach — Building ZenoType
ZenoType is a typing practice app that uses a local AI model to generate custom prompts — including a Scripture mode. Built with vanilla TypeScript and Ollama.
Bandwidth Monitoring with vnstat and systemd Timers
I built a bandwidth alerting system that warns me before I blow through my ISP's data cap. vnstat tracks usage, a Python script checks thresholds, and systemd fires it every hour.