Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Its actually a picture but if I share it then I no longer truly own it, so no.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I build, customize, and paint Gunpla. I finished this one a couple days ago.

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 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.

My kid, but I admit I didn't do most of the work.

Still, they're pretty great.

French fries and mac N cheese. Cause both times it's a recipe I came up with on my own.

With Mac N cheese, the problem was lack of availability of good cheeses where I live. So I made a change to the recipie. Put 2 parts milk, one part cheese slice, and some flavouring oil. I create the flavour oil by heating garlic and onion on very slow heat for like half an hour. The oil gets the confiet garlic flavour, even though garlic crisps up because gas stove is still too hot for the task, and then add the milk and cheese. And damn it turned out great. Just put a little sugar so it emulates cream a little more.

Then fries, I'm trying to make crispy fries that don't require pulling in and out of freezer, or even double frying. My last batch was sloppy, but I was 85℅ successful. I must experiment a little more to see if it's even possible to make them 100℅ as perfectly crispy as you get in restaurants, but I'll try, and if successful, will share the recipe.

I'm a cs graduate, I wish someday there are real projects that I've worked on that I would be proud of, but for now it's just these small achievements😅.

Edit: NOT one part flavouring oil. I use a lot less. I don't measure it out, but when I'm using 2 part's cheese, I usually go for a table spoon or two.

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 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.

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!