Things I Found Interesting in September 2026

I added comments to my static blog. At the bottom of the post is a "Comment by email" mailto link that has the post slug included in the address. Anyone that send email to that slug+email will get sent to an inbox that the email publish script can pull down and add to the page.

The next step is to using something like Jev, through openrouter, to filter messages for spam or any other content I don't care for, but since I currently only have about 0 people reading this blog, I think I'm pretty safe for now. (I actually don't know how many people click on my blog, I don't use any analytics or tracking; you're welcome.) I just want a reason to play with Jev.

Hatching is just painting with lines... right?

I'm working on hatching, and came up with a simple tool that can reduce an image to the major areas for shading. Upload an image, and then adjust how many shades of grey you want to see. One thing I'm noticing that makes for a better shading, is having a reference that isn't mostly dark. Having contrast in your image helps prevent muddy hatching.

• define and follow planes (no random directions)
• high contrast (avoid muddiness)

launch the tool

Spoilers ahead.

In the story Driver by Sameem Siddiqui, a man's brain is scanned and the image is used to drive a taxi cabs for a company for as long as the company stays in business. The scan was modified so the driver doesn't know what is going on, he just thinks it is a normal day driving people around.

The cartoon The Amazing Digital Circus is about an AI that finds brain scans of patients and then brings them to life in a virtual world to keep him company.

I was thinking about those stories today because google has scanned the entire brain of a fruit fly, and now people are making that brain play minecraft , trade stocks, and play doom.

The internet tricked me into buying one of these Cheap Yellow Display Boards and instead of doing the smart thing and figuring out why I needed one before I bought it, I was left scratching my head after it showed up. It's kind of like the people that buy all those Raspberry Pi devices and have no idea what to do with them once they get them.

So I did what any person would do with tech they don't know what to do with, you either install Linux on it, make a stock ticker, or make a weather app; I made a weather app:

Some of the ideas that still might get implemented:

• a cnc cut wood frame to set the device in
• a belt buckle
• a switch that turns remote SSH access on/off
• a virtual metronome
• a talking robot face thing.

oh, and maybe a stock ticker. I wonder if I can merge a stock ticker and a weather app together into one glorious widget.

For some reason I can never get Blenders' mesh->knife project to work correctly so I'm writing this to help me remember.

• in object mode select the shape to be cut on.
• select to edit mode
• ctrl left click on the object you want to do the cutting.
• align your camera, this is how the projection figures out how to cut.
• select mesh->knife project and and it should have cut your surface. (if the surface is a plane make sure to subdivide it so you have triangles to work with.)

I wanted to do this so I could project an SVG (top shape) on a shape (bottom cube) and start cutting it out:

Simple image collage creator. Drag in some images and create a gallery image. Launch the app here

Just like a big city, my desk has room for vertical growth, but not horizontal growth, so I'm building up. I wanted a small table to go over a pile of scrap paper, but I didn't want to buy something from Amazon; instead I grabbed a sheet of the scrap paper, that was patiently waiting for it's new home, and started sketching out some design options. One of the options that seemed fun, was to build a tinker toy like shelf from 3dprinted parts. I fired up freecad and started modeling different parts that dowels could fit into.

Why do I need a stack of paper on my desk? Because it's sad every time an idea dies, or you don't scratch down some problem because there is no paper nearby. I know you, reader, would never talk yourself out of doing something just because it involves getting up and looking for some paper, but not me. This also solves the eternal struggle of: what sketchbook do I use, which is the best, how do I organize it, how do I keep like projects together. All that tomfoolery goes away when you just draw on loose paper and keep the pages you find useful. Having piles of paper also solves the "this isn't good enough to add to my sketchbook" problem; it doesn't matter anymore, it's all just loose paper, throw away the junk, keep the good stuff; don't worry about anything else.

Loose paper gives you the freedom to draw the worst things you can, and then improve on them instead of being to scared to put something "bad" in a bound collection of paper. The only reason this tinker toy desk shelf exists is because I was putting down messy ideas on a piece of paper until this idea popped up.

I guess I'm not the first person to figure this loose paper idea out link

The joys of rock tumbling ; I added some sea glass in also (not in intial picture) it got ground down pretty good, along with some of the rocks that were pretty much completely ground down to nothing.