I thought we could have a thread related to any side projects, hobbies or things you're learning for fun, anything not related to how we earn our daily bread really. What are you all working on?

Lately I've been brainstorming computer code in my head. I've been considering using Markov chains, together with a theory of how desires, motivations and tactics to achieve desires interact to create an AI that responds more interestingly to its environment. I have no idea how any end product will work or if it could be computationally feasible for a video game. But that's the fun of it!

Also I've taken up a bit of hiking. It's a great means to think about mathematics, philosophy or whatever I find interesting. Podcasts work well, too. I just got caughy up with and Up and Vanished, a podcast about a missing woman who's murderer was arrested just three weeks ago.

I've got a few side coding projects in the works including a forum system with some unique features I haven't seen anywhere else. Unfortunately, since I code all day for a living, I usually don't feel like doing it more after work so the progress is slow

I'm getting ready to put my tomato starts into three kinds of garden bed, a sheet mulch bed on turf, an above ground hugelkultur bed, and a below ground one. I also have about 30 pounds of oyster mushroom substrate colonizing and almost ready to fruit. Experimenting with a peroxide and pasteurized sawdust pellet method.

I am a professional time thief.

The end result is not going to be anything with even a passing resemblance to quality. Switching to aiming mode let's you see through the walls, enemies can't move anywhere, the guns aren't particularly different from each other and the shotgun shoots inside itself, the gameplay is more or less limited to walking or running around, the "plot" is represented through message prompts, it can be played through in a couple of minutes...

... and I can't release it, because other people would just steal the assets and the UE.com Marketplace developers wouldn't see a penny. And even I, the man with absolutely no standards, wouldn't dare to get it published on Steam even for a price of 0.33/piece because the FGR combination of pro-quality assets has no worth or quality within (due to the aforementioned reason and others) - even though the only reason I'd even try to get it published that way is to provide the UE.com Marketplace content creators more leverage to sue anyone using the stolen assets without having paid for them. Or sue me for using their assets in the first place!

And worst of all, not being able to release it means that I won't be getting a feature in Lowtax's Gaming Garbage. Oy.

I wrote a PHP Template engine that takes a different approach to others, instead of putting placeholders in the template wherever content should appear you can add content using a CSS inspired syntax e.g . Github page: https://github.com/Level-2/TransphpormI'm also working on a HTPC project but it's not ready to be released yet. I have an electron application that runs on the HTPC and can play TV streams (via tvheadend), movies and music, all controlled remotely via a phone/tablet

I'm still trying to find a chance to try that out in a project. But children are sucking up my time.



Uhm, that actually sounds like what I and many other people have running with Kodi.
You could consider that my side project, but it is actually more or less finished and in general use. In the rare cases we actually do watch normal TV my children want to watch this novelty called commercials.

What sort of features are we talking about? Maybe I'm a dolt, I can't imagine how the basic forum structure could be improved for the end-user greatly

What kind of property are you living on? I used to have a tomato garden, but the tomatoes never turned out super well. I don't think they like SoCal heat.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but I've started watching the interview because Knuth is a pretty interesting guy.



You're making your own game on the Unreal Engine?

Pretty much.

I'm doing these in my parents yard in Utah. Soil is awful but thats why im doing the soil building beds. I'll also experiment with lessening the water as soon as they start fruiting.

I'm doing MS thesis work in hopes that I can finish the work and write it all int he next month and a half.

Following that, this summer I have an idea for distributing Doom replays that I've always wanted to work on, and I know ****-all about web dev so it should be interesting

I recently moved to Florida, so I'm learning to dive, to swim better, to fish, & to operate a boat. I've always had a healthy fear of the water so this has been a challenge. I miss Paris but opportunity calls. I'm working part-time hours here, so I've been reading (non-fiction by day, fiction by night) & writing a bit (journaling mostly but also letters to my daughter & brainstorming about essays for a potential blog), & have more time to do things with my daughter (teaching her to ride a bicycle, to swim, & to speak English more fluently). I've been doing calisthenics for about a year now & am in decent shape for the first time since I was a teenager, but intend to begin adding weights, bicycling & running to the equation very soon. I've picked up meditation, which I've found helpful, & am hoping to make it to a retreat once that's a possibility. Moving back to the states has its ups & downs but the weather here seems to make the downs more tolerable. Well, that, & learning to play the guitar.

What style of meditation?

I quit my job to go travelling for a year. 7 months in and it's been pretty awesome, seeing and doing things I've long wanted to: climbed mountains through all sorts of amazing habitats, gone SCUBA diving for the first time, seen some incredible critters in the Amazon basin, played with keas on top of mountains, swam with a shark on the GBR, saw Machu Picchu, been to giant geyser fields at high altitude with the steam freezing in the air, been to bizarre volcanic landscapes in northern Chile, visited a jungle-encroached indigenous city ruin on a Colombian mountain by the Caribbean sea, learnt to surf badly, watched a Northern Giant Petrel murder the **** out of a penguin, seen an Okarito Kiwi, experienced a Weka try to steal my shoelaces while I wore them, clambered through caves covered in so many glow-worms they resemble constellations, got my arse kicked by some Maori dudes at a highland games in NZ and learnt enough Spanish from scratch to get by reasonably well.

In my normal life back home I spend my spare time poking around the countryside, recording wildlife and just generally enjoying the outdoors. I'm both a reasonably competent all-round naturalist while also specialising in a few groups of insects (coleoptera and hemiptera). The neat thing about it is it's a hobby that never turns off; everything from the high sparrowhawk flying over on the morning commute to the unusual non-native pavement weed are of interest. It also allows you to kinda "read" the land outside of urban environs - I can see certain species assemblages and give reasonable predictions about soil type, drainage, expected commensurate species and sometimes environmental history depending on the context. Given the relative lack of people able to identify insects in the less charismatic groups, especially in Scotland, a lot of what I record (and then submit to the relevant national recording centres) are new dots on the map and go towards understanding species distribution/conservation status. It's fun, outdoorsy, self-led citizen science. In the future I'd like to help with the ongoing projects to make the insect ID material more accessible to the beginner and encourage more recording particularly in Scotland, hopefully by setting up a website with half-decent photos and ID tips for as many of the regionally relevant species as possible (but I'm lazy so who knows).

yeah but there's a few things I don't like about kodi, the TV support is kinda crappy and the interface is inconsistent due to its nature of plugins by different authors. I've got a neater UI with the ability to play the TV stream (or a recording, video file, or music, or very WIP a genesis/snes emulator) on either the display attached to the TV or via the browser on the phone/tablet or both (though there are obvious sync issues I'm not sure I can fix).

I've experimented with guided, transcendental, & mindfulness, in that order. The latter has been the most helpful for me. I think that my focus & patience have improved. I'm now able to spend large portions of my day living in the present, without being scatter-brained. I can read books without having to re-read chapters after waking from a daydream. I've lightened up, I laugh more, & I'm less angry. I don't attribute all of these things solely to meditation, but I think it has certainly helped.

That's a similar order I have experimented with. Tried guided types in some martial arts classes (a Tibetan style I guess) and some program for people in the military. I certainly think that mindfulness practices are the form that have the most positive impact on my general subjective experience though. The mantra type of meditation ala TM gives me weird spooky experiences like feelings of movement or noises until I get to a state that actually resembles the daydream reading trance you mentioned, but with no real activity. This is exciting (which usually kills it) but it also has a lot of creepy feelings attached to it, whereas mindfulness based meditation in the forms i have encountered it seems to tend towards building habits of thought to stay in the present moment of the physical world instead of trying to get into the weird false bottom compartment of my self, which is also important to me but can result in the opposite of the improvements you mentioned.

But that is why the TM guideline is to do 20 minutes twice a day. There are lots of exposes of the cult atmosphere in their instructor training facility, and people definitely (edit:I shouldn't say definitely, allegedly) have mental breakdowns (usually temporary as they have plenty of members) from meditating for like 8 hours a day there. I think that is just from getting overtrained on weirdness and not explicitly from the cult, if that makes sense. You could end up in the same boat with less support just chanting 'georgelucasstevenspeilberg' in your head 8 hours a day.

I use Plex, which has been pretty fantastic as of late. My TV has Android built in so it can run the Plex client. They also have an HTPC build that is a custom linux distro for it. Interface is pretty good, is very similar to KODI but with a more consistent UI. Also supports automatic transcoding and syncing to mobile devices as needed, and has a player for pretty much every piece of hardware out there (consoles, PC/MAC/Linux, phones, tablets, TVs, etc). In general, just imagine KODI with a huge coat of polish, good live transcoding, and apps everywhere.

I timestamped it where he says something to the effect that he did his best work when he was supposed to be doing something else.

I called myself a "proffesional time thief", but the old-fashioned term for this is "procrastinator". I just try to make it productive procrastination, which I like to think ends up making me more manic / creative.

I once read in a book that if "necessity was the mother of invention, then laziness surely was the father".

Sounds fun, what's the idea behind it?



It's lucky that you have space to do this, city-living people don't get such a privilege. Are you growing anything else but tomatoes?

Ah, what did you live in Paris for? I've only had the luck to visit Paris once; yet I can understand the desire to live there, it is beautiful. What sort of writing are you considering for your blog?



What's your thesis on? I recently resubmitted a paper after reviewer comments, but I haven't done anything at a MS level. Though I don't think MS theses are common in mathematics, at least if you're on a PhD track.

Yeah, I'm growing some chives, dill, and some random other herbs that tend to do well with tomatoes and keep its pests away. I might put some peppers in as well. I am mostly doing this to see how the bed making techniques I am doing break down over time, since at the end of this year I will be moving to an even more rural area and should have space there too. It's also for an agriculture program in school so I should get access to greenhouses and have to be involved on some other land.

I blog and make pickles.

The thesis is just a stepping stone for my program, I have a feeling it's because engineers were showing up and not able to do grad level research. My physics group mates don't have the same MS requirement.

My thesis itself is going to be about a new approach for doing multi-qubit operations in the specific type of QC my group does. Current techniques are either very slow (which ruins your ability to do meaningful computations) or require controls at too fine a level and lead to excessive noise/just aren't physically realizable (yet). There's a quantum dynamics problem that needs to be solved for one version of idea, and a more QC-type "approximating a 4x4 unitary matrix" problem as well with some structure to the operations we have access to, depending on what part I want to attack. It's likely writing is going to bleed into the summer, since *adviser and grad school bull**** *

To see how far I can get in UE4 by mostly relying on my mid-2000s outdated Unreal Engine 1.5 editing skills.

(Not far, it turns out.)

My wife managed one of her uncle's businesses in Paris. He decided to sell his businesses there & move to Florida to "retire" (he's an avid fisherman & wants to live where he vacations). Her aunt offered her an opportunity to move here & plan & manage a new business that they're developing (they're opening in a few weeks).

Paris was great (especially for my daughter & wife) but I was growing tired of it, & was ready to return to the states, even if that state is Florida. I do miss Paris though--we all do. Primarily the people. Paris is the only big city I've lived in but there were so many intelligent & interesting people & the social scene was so much better than anything I've experienced in the US. Also, having to watch my daughter go through the public school system here after having what we had there is heartbreaking.

If I start blogging, it'll likely be eclectic & unfocused in the beginning, because I'd like to write about a wide variety of topics. However, I've been journaling for a bit now & writing letters to my daughter & some of those would probably work quite well. I'm sure that whatever I do, it'll certainly be a niche audience, lol.

My main project for the past couple of years has been my finances which has necessarily meant that I haven't had room for many other projects I have interest in. While not a major project of any sort, yesterday I switched out old computers in the basement and mounted some network components on the wall. I may tidy up the wires later but this is by no means a permanent solution. Easter eggs in the picture include a The Trump Letters on the left, other letters asking for money on the right that I might actually consider, and The Undertaker on the monitor. I'm an off and on WWE "fan" of sorts and since Undertaker has presumably had his last match I've been going back and watching his Wrestlemania matches, none I've seen except the past few years. Interesting to see how the character has been portrayed over the years.

I've been working on 3D printing D&D minis and writing my own campaigns. Unfortunately, research projects have consumed my time. I've also been wanting to work on a video or two.

What printer do you use?

I have a PowerSpec Ultra and a Wanhao Duplicator 7

The PowerSpec is a pretty decent system; your standard extruded plastic FDM setup with dual extruder heads. Technically speaking, its a copy of the much more expensive Flashforge Dreamer (which is also what Dremmel's 3D printer is based off of), but with a different casing.

The Duplicator 7 is one I got just last week, and I'm already loving it. It's a UV resin SLA style design. While it has a smaller build area, it can do smaller and more detailed objects with little to no problem.

I bought a POS 1981 Yamaha XS400 for $300 about two years ago. It has been gathering dust since then. A month ago I was bored and had some unexpected cash come my way, so I tore down the bike to the frame, cut off some stuff, welded on some different stuff, cleaned the carbs, replaced all the wiring, took off the starter (kick only), relocated the battery and electrics, and just generally overhauled it. Just replaced the rear suspension last week, now I will modify the exhaust to fit the new stance and frame modifications. After that it's just some fresh paint on the tank and fenders, then to put a pretty little bow on it and give it to my brother for his 17th birthday in mid-May.

This is the third bike I've rebuilt; the first was a wrecked 2008 Triumph Speedmaster I rebuilt with/for my dad, the second is a 1979 Honda XR500 that came in three plastic milk cartons and a cardboard box that I converted to be street legal so I can ride it to the dunes, then on the dunes.

That's really cool. I've been delaying working on my truck which is sitting in my garage in a severe state of disassembly. Next week is my last of three weeks off from school so we'll see if I get anything accomplished. One way or another something will get done with it sometime soon. My age old '79 Trans Am project will get to move up in the queue sometime soon as well. We are travelling overseas in June but shortly after I want to consult with those here about a PC build. Today though I completed a little garden project. I was totally disinterested in working on a garden this year but a couple weeks ago my wife and I, mostly her, got it weeded and today I built a simple barrier that will hopefully help keep the husky out of there when she gets bored.

That husky looks like it is already planning to **** up the garden. It's staring at it, plotting.

lol, yeah, she's a fun one. Her and the pom were our daughter's but she was moving into an apartment. The little black pup is new to the house. The white one was posted here as a pup but the picture was on a defunct server so I'll have to repost it later.

Oh, and I'll tell you, the grapes from those vines taste just like candy. Last year was the first year we had any. I expect quite a bit more this year.

I gave everything up. I only do work now a days.

You try making some wine?