Myself, and god is it a mess of a project

My homelab is probably the longest running, but it runs things that I depend on, so I can’t say it’s much of a side project.

Probably Tesseract since I absolutely figured my interest would have fizzled out long ago.

I don’t have side projects because it’s hard enough to simply get up for work 5 days a week.

I just made a major step on one. I’ve been collecting small electronics of all sorts over the last 15 years or so, a lot of them pretty obscure. I just got a computer I wanted to use to build an inventory of everything and start a YouTube channel to highlight each item in the collection.

I’ve been trying to make a lego golf playing automaton for about three years, and I keep running into issues with the system that brings balls up from inside of the model to the surface, and keep having to completely redesign the mechanism. I’m now starting on my fourth redesign.

For decades I’ve been dreaming of my own PHP framework because the existing stuff seems to be too clunky, with too much repetitions and not close enough to best practises. By now I have something that theoretically works but I haven’t had enough time to flesh it out.

By now I’m disabled and don’t have the brain capacity to keep working on it.

Fiction writing. I started when I was very young, it’s by far my most long-runbing hobby.

FeedTheMonkey https://github.com/jeena/FeedTheMonkey

A very simple river of news style RSS reader desktop frontend for TinyTinyRSS

The .gitignore file there has been created 10 years ago and I am still using it, but only seldom update it, but still.

I created a self hostable plattform for managing and fulfilling wishes but haven’t been able to give it the maintenance it needs. I occasionally work on it but wish I had more time/money to work on it more: https://wishthis.online/

http://nymph.io/

This project technically started in 2009, as part of another project called Dandelion (which then was renamed to Pines), then around 2014 I pulled it out into its own project, Nymph. I worked on it on and off, until 2021, when I rewrote it for Node.js as Nymph.js.

It now runs my email service, https://port87.com/

Here’s the oldest code I can find on GitHub from July 7, 2009:

https://github.com/sciactive/pines-components/blob/144ce877e1ec9af7fa34c8eb8b11aeb7ae0efb5e/com_entity/common.php

And here’s the first version as its own project from Sep 8, 2014:

https://github.com/sciactive/nymph/tree/fdf5f770da7e5acc6938debbaeb8c09cfd080e15/src

Does relearning how to read sheet music and basic chord shapes on the guitar every other year count? One day I’ll figure it out.

I’ve been composing an orchestra piece for slightly over two years now. I’m kind of learning how to do that as I go along, having only really written songs for up to three instruments beforehand.

I’ve been working on a raspberry pi based music notes box for shows on and off for about 5 years. I can count through and change songs with my foot, so I have an easier time keeping track of where I am in the song for live shows (I’m the bassist). I did all the programming and hardware stuff.

I started a created a company in 1995 to do web stuff for a very niche market – I guess now it would be called SaaS. It never really completed or became a money-maker, but it’s out there and I still work on it.

First I had problems with IP theft – I had lots of original photos that people took. Then datasets and articles I had written were copied, so I focused on trying to stop that. Then I found myself spending too much time trying to deal with SEO, then x, then y… It was always a game of wackamole, trying to figure out how to keep ahead.

Throw in the ebb and flow of life’s challenges and it always seems like time, money, health, or some combination thereof seemed to come up at just the wrong time (is there ever a good time?)

I’m still plugging away. It’s thirty years later and I’ve retired from my 9-5, so hopefully I can make some real progress.

There’s a story or stories that’s been going on for the fourth year in my mind. The plot(s) is massive and well-thought-out but everything is riddled with holes in the middle, to the extent where I could not attempt to write it down without it being as disorganized as my thoughts (and, to be honest, clutter in my mind is easier to handle than clutter on the drawing board). Such is the life of a writer/artist, though I recently reduced the load immensely by inventing new mediums.