Projects
Archives and data
Major General Robert W. Burns Flight Record Archive
My grandfather’s flight records, photographs, and papers, from the Second World War onward, digitized with a searchable gallery, maps of where he flew, and the record behind each image, so the family and researchers can use what a box in a closet could not offer.
Active · Python, a static site, cloud hosting
YouTube Tagging Dataset (2006–2007)
Metadata and tags for 1.09 million videos from YouTube’s first full year, collected with Gary Geisler for a study of how people tagged video before there were conventions, and released on Zenodo nineteen years later so the record of that year survives.
Collected 2006 · published 2025 · CC BY 4.0
Vinyl collection database
A catalog of the record collection that identifies the pressing, not just the album, so the hidden gems are known. Photographs of labels and dead wax go in; matched pressings, market values, and a listening queue come out.
Active · Python, FastAPI, SQLite, the Discogs and Spotify APIs, vision models
The memex and this site
The memex
Vannevar Bush’s machine, built for one person with today’s tools. Every interest, project, and idea is a thread in plain markdown with a dated log; decisions carry their reasons; a weekly journal is drafted from the traces and confirmed in conversation. An AI assistant reads the corpus, files what I say, and asks about what has gone quiet. The principle that survived a summer of trying things: keep the connection between what I encountered, what I understood, and what I chose to do.
Started July 2026 · active · markdown, git, Python, Claude Code, a home portal
This site
A structured record of a career in one YAML file, rendered as a CV, publications, and these project cards. The file is the source of truth; the pages are views of it; the whole thing deploys on every commit.
Active · Jekyll, YAML, GitHub Actions
The studio
The Beat Factory
A garage studio built slowly around a modular synthesizer, a drum machine, a tape-and-microsound module, and a mixer that records. The gear is documented as it is learned: cheat sheets, session notes, and manuals, rendered as a home portal so the next session starts where the last one stopped.
Active · Eurorack, Elektron, Tascam, Reaper, a great many patch cables
LED displays
Two wall displays built from addressable LED matrices, a diffuser, and a WiFi controller, driven from the studio and from the home automation system. Text, spectra, and ambient light, with the build documented as it went, including the parts that did not work.
Started August 2026 · one display alive, one in progress · WS2812 matrices, ESP32, WLED, Home Assistant
Electronics bench
Learning circuitry through projects rather than courses: a photographed inventory of every part on the bench, guides for the tools, and a growing list of breadboard builds, from pedal circuits to a wall-hung tuner on a microcontroller.
Started August 2026 · active · Arduino, Teensy, Raspberry Pi, a soldering station
The house
Home lab
A small server in the house that runs the home automation, local DNS and ad filtering, a reverse proxy for the internal sites, and a local language model. Documented as infrastructure: the runbooks live in the repository and the services are rebuilt from it.
Active · Proxmox, Home Assistant, AdGuard, nginx, Ollama
Garage lighting
Eight smart fixtures and their rings, brought under one control with scene buttons the family can trust. The instructive part was the regressions: every new feature had to leave the old ones working, which became the rule for everything after it.
Maintained · Home Assistant, Matter, patience