Hobbies

I had been thinking about a word game idea throughout 2017 and 2018. In April of 2019, I had the idea of adding a virtual travel theme and thought this might be turned into something worth pursuing. I started developing the game in my spare time, and eventually released it as a web app. I was able to get a few thousand players, but only a few of them turned into paying customers. After some time, I decided on a pivot and made a slightly different game, this time as a mobile app. This game idea started as a hobby, but as it evolved I began to spend on marketing and hiring contractors, so morphed into an actual job.

Here are a few screenshots of the original game: Plates Across America^®.

Main Puzzle Word Page

Route Section Start Page

Vehicle Customize Page

Achievements and Badges Page

I began working in a (metal) machine shop when I was about 12 years old. An erector set was one of my favorite toys. I took some wood shop classes in junior high school. Without any real decision or planning for this to be a hobby, I now do a lot of woodworking. Creating something from nothing is an exciting process that is common to both woodworking and software.

Here are a few select images of things I have made.

Mahogany Bench

Pendant Lamps

End Tables

Deck and Furniture

Wood Ceiling

Cabinet

I didn't begin to learn to play the guitar until I was 38 years old. I bought a guitar for my daughter as a Christmas present, but she never really took to it and I did not want it to go to waste. I am still not that good, but enjoy trying. I have a quantity of guitars that is disproportionate to my abilities.

Original, Cheap Guitar

Epiphone Les Paul

Epiphone Casino

I grew up in New York in a house full of New York Yankee fans. I never really had a choice about my baseball alliances. However, I really just like the game and will watch most any team and any level. When I was younger, I had a thing for the Oakland A's and a bit of fondness for them lingers. The dirty secret I avoid telling other Yankee fans is that I do not actively hate the Red Sox.

I ran a fantasy baseball league before it was mainstream, before the Internet and back in the day when it was called "Rotisserie Baseball". That started in 1989 and endured for 14, story-filled years.

It is common and seems cliche to list "travel" as a hobby. However, it is something I like to do and takes up my free time, so I guess it qualifies as a hobby. My main travel criteria is that I never like to go to the same place twice. Here's a map from TripAdvisor of the places I've visited.

I list this one last, but it is the hobby I have spent the most time on. The ability to have an idea and create something useful from nothing is exciting and what initially attracted me to writing software. The feeling has never gotten old. There's many, many projects I have done in the past and about a dozen on my list to do some day. Here's a small sample.

Home Information Center

I have a few beefs with most home automation and IoT systems. They focus too much on the hardware and novel features instead of focusing on "information integration" and useful features. The idea is to make my life simpler, but all they do is add more complications. Then there is the idea that MY information must leave my house and be dependent on a third-party vendor's proprietary systems. That is really wrong. Finally it's too fragmented a space. The "Home Information Center" is my answer to these problems. It has been running in my house for many years and I have learned the useful subset that matters to me. It's all browser based, server-side rendered so is available on all devices including some dedicated wall mounted tablets.

Sparky the Roomba Robot

I wanted to build RoboCop to guard my apartment while I was at work. Ambitious? Yes. I decided to start small with a Roomba vacuum (for mobility) and a cheap Linux router (for a brain). Add in a camera and some servos and you are on your way to "The Future of Security". This was a lot of fun to work on, though never really went anywhere. His name was "Sparky". He had a few successful, fully autonomous runs of following things around, but the battery and weight limits were very constricting. Here's a few more images:

• Full View
• Brain
• Brain Schematic

The Quote Machine

For the last 20 years I have maintained a file on my computer called "quotes". Every time I run across one I like, it goes in the file. I also have thousands of scenic pictures I've taken over the years. One day I was looking at someone's office wall with one of those (silly) inspirational posters and thought about why someone would have to pick just one quote or one image. I know how to generate thousands of posters and they could change every day, or every hour, whatever you like. "The Quote Machine" was created to fulfill that promise. I had not touched this for over ten years, and almost forgot about it, but the website was still working. I did eventually stop paying for the domain name.

Guitar Trainer Pedals

This was a neat project that combined software, music, electronics and woodworking. I almost got this written up in MAKE magazine. The problem it solves is synchronizing the viewing of music tablatures in text files and the playing of MP3 files on your computer. This is how I would learn to play songs on the guitar and would want to go through a playlist of sorts. Using a keyboard while holding a guitar is awkward and potentially dangerous to both. The solution was a piece of software to coordinate the music playing and text viewing that was operated by foot pedals. The 3 pedals are effectively the three mouse buttons. It was written in Python/Tk and it would control the XMMS MP3 player with loading text files into an Emacs buffer. Here's a few more images:

• Top View of Pedals
• Side View of Pedals
• Screenshot of Software Controller