I’m working on writing a soundtrack to a video game! It’s not finished yet but I’m extremely proud of the music so far. I also wrote this song recently just for fun. :) Made for the Gameboy using Carillon Editor.

https://youtu.be/vPVU6f2KhEA

Volunteered at an international school in the IT dept. and at the time I noticed that the students had to type out a long address in order to connect to their personal drives. This was only necessary when using MacOS.

The head person who brought me on never had time to simplify the process. He said it was like that when he got there. So, I decided to look into it and try to simplify things. Prior to this I never had any experience with macs at all. It took me a while to learn the basics of how to write a script for Mac and how to navigate the OS.

After a bunch of research and videos, I was finally able to write something where all you had to do was click on an icon and you were automatically connected to your drives. This was roughly 10 years ago and about 5 years ago I learned that they were still using what I wrote!

I’ve made an app for Lemmy and I’m quite proud of how it turned out :)

In a more artistic way, few photos that are worthy to be on my wall, but I still can’t find time to print them. Always envy fancy photographers who make photobooks with their stuff

I wrote an automatic teambalancer for Titanfall 2 Northstar, that solved a lot of proplems that match balancing was having before I made it.

Now it’s the go-to for making sure teams are even on a server. It takes into account a lot of things that might screw up balance, and is even able to actively compensate if players suddenly leave/join.

I’m really proud of this little piece of code.

For work I frequently need to look up information for patents. The specific data I need is spread around in multiple US Patent & Trademark Office databases. I created tool with Django/Python so I just have to copy/paste the patent numbers into a box and hit submit. It then returns exactly what I need in the exact format I need. It leaves me with more free time to play Cookie Clicker.

I composed a choral piece away from a piano at a coffee shop years ago. What I’m most proud of is that the voice leading works really well, and yet the chords are quite interesting. It also helps that I’m a professional musician, but I get a little thrill when I get to conduct or perform that piece.

Years ago, I used to write the monthly newsletter for a nonprofit I was part of. Most of this was just news aggregate kind of stuff, but I did get to have my little editorial section and write about whatever relevant content I wanted.

Thanks to a couple of people willing to boost my signal, I get to say my writing has been read on every continent (big thanks to a college friend of mine doing a summer geology thing in Antarctica).

Ach, I build a lot of things. It’s been a busy couple of years. I sort of had a lot of free time during Covid. It’s a little embarrassing, I’m not specifically proud of anything, but here goes in the hopes you find some of it amusing.

I made a music box out of cut, etched, and painted brass inside a wooden box. It has a bit of custom clockwork, and I designed a sort of magnetic-friction drive so that the dancing figures on top are hot-swappable risk of damage to the mechanism. It plays traditional Vietnamese music (MP3), and the porcelain dancers have costumes from the different ethnic groups.

I’ve also designed and manufactured a sort of night-light for children that activates by turning it upside-down for a few seconds. The electronics are rated for 100 years, and a CR2032 coin cell can power it for 6 months of normal use. I got power consumption low enough that it does not need an off switch. I hate e-waste and thought maybe electronics could last long enough to be heirlooms, if we made different design choices. I also had autism in mind, where maybe it’s comforting to have things that always work according to the same rules, never break, and will last from childhood into adult life (although maybe it is just comforting to me, when things work this way).

I also wrote an algorithm that plays (4,6) Mastermind that beat the record in the primary literature by 0.5% with a slight modification to the MaxParts strategy. So I might or might not have the world record on that one – I never got around to publishing it except as a school assignment. Which oddly enough I received a rather poor grade on, which I thought was really funny.

Oh also I made a quantum hardware random number generator that lets you conveniently make various other electronics into a Schrödinger’s Cat paradox. It takes one signal input, then presents one of two outputs to control the other electronics. This was part of an elaborate practical joke – the nature of the device makes it impossible to accurately simulate, so it presents an unusual problem for whatever poor grad student gets tasked with running a simulated Universe.

I also made a device for recording tiny variations in the 50Hz (60Hz in North America) signal in main power lines. The original idea was to correlate the microsecond timing variations to space weather and use the power lines as a sort of radio telescope for space weather. It didn’t work. I was able to track what was going on in the power plants though, like when they are turning on and off turbines.

Finally (and most recently), I wrote a Lemmy bot! If you message @kong_ming on my instance, an early prototype of my quantum random number generator will generate an I-Ching reading for you (the Book of Changes, sort of an ancient choose-your-own-misadventure fortune-telling book). It’s literally a thing sitting on my desk in Vietnam held together mostly by my irrepressible optimism, so sometimes it takes a minute to get to your request or ah, takes a break from functioning correctly.

I guess there were a few robots and whatnot too. Those were pretty standard rover builds though. Not sure what I’ll do next. There’s a particle detector I’ve been meaning to get to. Also someone on Lemmy suggested a way to progress in my experiments making a CPU clocked by chicken bone (bone is piezoelectric) for Halloween.

I’ve made a few mods for games over the years that always make me feel a little happy when I remember they exist. Usually its the ones that I made for my own personal tastes that turned out to be things other people really liked, too.

I’ve made video games for the last decade but the one I’m most proud of is called the away team. A 120k word interactive novel that explores what humanity is and if there is anything worth saving in it. If so, what. All told through the eyes of an AI tasked with saving the last of humanity by finding a new planet in the galaxy for them to colonize.

It has a demo and native Linux builds. https://www.awayteam.space

I come from an extremely religious background. I made a rather cathartic and weird “music video.” It’s not exactly pleasant to watch, but that was kind of the point. As a bedroom musician/producer, I don’t get a ton of feedback, much less strong feedback, but this one has gotten some unexpectedly strong responses when sharing with close friends (like one guy getting pissed and leaving the room–never had that).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_KpkQWtfSU&feature=youtu.be

I do the photography for a small computer museum. I published this collection of black & white shots - mostly macro, leaning towards the abstract.

https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Machines-Dave-Fischer/dp/B09X557N52

For me, maybe this even if I made one of the characters a little too big. And an Artfight attack I thought came out alright for more recent stuff.

Years ago as a stupid fresh college grad, I worked for the US Forest Service as a summer intern. I co-authored a study that showed that bighorn sheep were NOT limited by availability of lambing habitat.

This was a political hot button issue that pitted hunters against cattlemen. Cattlemen claimed that the sheep were not getting brucellosis from their cows and that the sheep populations were indeed limited by lambing habitat.

I was very surprised when, 15 years later, I visited the same ranger station to say hello and that same study was still being used as evidence in hearings to undercut the claims of the cattlemen that they didn’t need to vaccinate their cows to protect the sheep. That felt really good.