workshop log · always in progress
A lathe of the mind.
Ideas go on the spindle and get turned until they hold a shape. A personal corner of the web for after-hours projects: teaching agents to play an old platformer, running a small cluster at home, automating the house, and taking apart hardware that probably should have stayed together.
- reinforcement learning
- home cluster
- self-hosting
- home automation
- retro hardware
- FPGA
01 / projects
What's on the bench
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Platformer RL
Agents that learn a classic side-scroller from pixels and memory, one level at a time.
Open the training hub -
Home cluster
A handful of single-board computers plus bigger machines, scheduled as one pool.
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Home automation
Lights, sensors and routines that run locally and keep working when the internet doesn't.
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Storage & self-hosting
A big reservoir disk for run data, one stubborn drive under repair, and services I host myself.
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Retro & FPGA
Flash carts and FPGA boards for 8-bit consoles: reading how the old hardware actually works.
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Small power
Paper sketches for a small DIY generator. Mostly math and caution so far.
02 / training
Teaching a machine to jump
The longest-running project here is a reinforcement-learning setup where agents learn a classic platformer from scratch. Watching one go from walking straight into the first enemy to clearing whole levels never gets old.
Training runs on whatever hardware is around: a GPU workstation does the heavy lifting, while a small Mac, a laptop and a Linux box take smaller jobs. A queue hands out work, and a little dashboard shows live runs, recordings and progress.
- observations pixels & game memory
- hosts 4 trainers + a scheduler
- best moment the first clean level clear
03 / cluster
A small cloud in the house
Part utility and part excuse to learn, the home cluster ties single-board computers and bigger machines together over a private mesh, with a job scheduler on top and a health console that shows what's up and what isn't.
The rule is boring and strict: everything is local-first, every service has an undo, and nothing reboots without a human saying so.
04 / tinkering
Hardware that talks back
Off the keyboard: an FPGA flash cart for an 8-bit console, a drive recovery that is teaching me patience, home-automation gadgets, and a notebook of small-engine power ideas that will stay on paper until the math is convincing.
05 / now
Now
- training Agents that read enemy positions as well as pixels.
- cluster Moving shared services onto dedicated small nodes.
- storage Making finished runs land on one reservoir, checksummed.
- web This page, plain and fast.
06 / notes
Design notes
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Feedback on a dashboard redesign
Page-by-page notes on turning an engineer's research dashboard into a website people can actually use.
07 / colophon
About this site
Hand-written HTML and one CSS file. No JavaScript, no trackers, no cookies, no web fonts, no build step. It's served as static files from a small machine at home, with certificates from Let's Encrypt.