Personal Projects

This Website

A secure self-hosted server running a suite of online applications to support personal and development needs. This project involves configuring and maintaining a private server environment that hosts multiple open-source tools, such as Mantis Bug Tracker (tracking my open loops), Syncthing (file synchronization), Grafana (data visualization dashboards), and more. Each service is integrated into the server with careful access controls and resource allocation, providing a one-stop solution for various workflows without relying on third-party cloud services.

Philosophy

The guiding philosophy of this project is balancing security, maintainability, and usability. In practice, that means hardening the server and applications (using firewalls, SSL encryption, and regular updates) while keeping the setup maintainable (via automation scripts or containerization to simplify updates and backups) and still user-friendly for daily use. This website demonstrates that with thoughtful configuration, one can retain full ownership of data and services without sacrificing convenience. It’s an exercise in digital autonomy – proving that personal infrastructure can be secure and robust while remaining accessible and easy to use for the long term.

Autonomize

Autonomize is an AI-driven personal productivity assistant designed to lighten the burden of managing daily information and tasks. It integrates with Microsoft Outlook to act as a smart overlay that organizes communications and commitments. Some of its key features include:

• Email Summarization – It scans incoming emails and generates concise summaries, so you can grasp lengthy threads at a glance. Important details or questions are highlighted for quick reference.
• Action Tracking – The assistant identifies action items or promises (e.g. “I will send the report by Friday”) within emails and logs them into a to-do list or calendar, ensuring follow-ups are not forgotten.
• Knowledge Management – It builds a personal knowledge base by extracting key information (like contacts, project details, or recurring themes) from communications. Over time, you can query this for context (for example, “What did Alice say about the budget last week?”).
• Next-Best Action Recommendations – Using AI, Autonomize can suggest what you should tackle next. For instance, after a meeting it might suggest drafting a summary email, or if you have an upcoming deadline it reminds you to focus on that task first. These recommendations prioritize tasks to maximize productivity.

I have the beta of this hooked up to my Mantis Bug Tracker install.

Philosophy

Autonomize’s philosophy is about automating cognitive load to free up mental energy for more important decision-making. In our modern work and personal life, we are inundated with information and small tasks (emails, reminders, notes). By leveraging AI to handle the heavy lifting – summarizing information, organizing tasks, and nudging you about priorities – the aim is to reduce the strain on your working memory and attention. This way, you can devote time to high-value activities like creative problem-solving, strategic planning, and deep work, while the assistant takes care of the busywork. In essence, Autonomize seeks to be a kind of “second brain”, offloading routine mental tasks so you can focus on what truly matters.

Fermi Aperture

(File:Milky Way Galaxy.jpg - Wikimedia Commons) An artist’s conception of the Milky Way galaxy, reflecting the cosmic scale and mystery behind the Fermi Paradox.

Fermi Aperture is a strategy game that explores the famous Fermi Paradox through engaging incremental gameplay. In this game, you oversee the rise and progress of a civilization in a vast galaxy. The gameplay starts in an “idle” or incremental manner – you make decisions and investments that gradually grow your civilization, from primitive society to a spacefaring empire. The ultimate goal is to ensure your civilization’s survival long enough to launch a seed ship to the stars, a milestone representing the attempt to spread life across the galaxy.

Along the way, the game presents procedurally generated events and challenges, each inspired by real-world hypotheses for the Fermi Paradox. For example, your civilization might face a global catastrophe (echoing the idea of a “Great Filter” event that few civilizations overcome), discover signals of alien life that never materialize into contact (the loneliness of the cosmos), encounter resource scarcity that forces hard choices, or develop advanced technology that comes with new risks. These events are not scripted but generated based on a mix of known paradox solutions and random variation, making each play-through unique. The incremental nature of gameplay means even when the game is idle, your civilization may be accumulating knowledge or resources – but neglecting emerging threats could lead to extinction, ending the game.

Philosophy

The philosophy behind Fermi Aperture is to encourage deep thinking about existential risks and humanity’s place in the universe. By turning the abstract questions of the Fermi Paradox – “Why don’t we see evidence of other civilizations?” – into game mechanics, players are prompted to consider how fragile civilization can be. The game’s challenges map to real theories: perhaps intelligent life destroys itself (nuclear war, environmental collapse), or maybe it’s constrained by resource limits or conscious isolation. As a player, every choice to invest in defense, science, or exploration is a reflection of strategies that might let a civilization endure. Space exploration becomes not just a game objective but a thematic statement: reaching the stars may be imperative for survival. Similarly, managing resources and risks in the game mirrors our real-world need for sustainable progress. In essence, Fermi Aperture uses entertainment to spark contemplation about big-picture questions – what hurdles must humanity overcome to avoid extinction and join the galactic community, if it exists? The hope is that after playing, one comes away with a richer appreciation of the delicate balance required for a civilization (ours especially) to thrive in a potentially hostile universe.

Perpetual City

(Download Infinite, Infinity, City. Royalty-Free Vector Graphic - Pixabay) An illustration symbolizing an “infinite city” – a cityscape arranged in a looping pattern, evoking the endlessly expanding urban environment of Perpetual City.

Perpetual City is an open-world game set in a boundless, infinitely expanding procedural city. The city’s layout and architecture are generated algorithmically, so the world literally has no edge – neighborhoods morph and new districts emerge the further you venture, ensuring that exploration can continue forever. The atmosphere and design draw heavy inspiration from the web serial Worm (with its sprawling urban environments and evolving challenges) and the surreal video game Control (with its reality-bending, shifting architecture). As a player, you navigate this metropolis as it grows and changes around you, confronting both physical obstacles and mysterious phenomena that defy normal logic.

A core mechanic of Perpetual City is frequent character death and respawn – dying is expected and even necessary at times. Each time your character dies in the city’s dangerous streets or labyrinthine buildings, you respawn back at a specific safe location. Importantly, you retain knowledge (and possibly certain progression or skills) across these deaths. This means the gameplay loop involves trial and error: you might charge into a strange building and fall into a trap, but on your next life you remember that hazard and avoid it, venturing further than before. The city itself isn’t static either; while major landmarks persist, details and side-streets may reconfigure, almost as if the city has a life of its own. This creates a sense that the environment is shifting in tandem with your efforts, much like the ever-changing, anomalous Oldest House in Control.

The NPC (non-player character) interactions are meant to be emergent. Rather than following simple scripted routines, city inhabitants react to the evolving state of the world and to your past actions. For example, if in one life you help a local faction, in your next life those NPCs might recognize you or the legacy of your actions, even if the world has reset in some ways. Storylines thus emerge organically: you might inadvertently start a gang war by assisting one group, leading to certain areas becoming more dangerous, or you might gain a following of supporters who remember your heroic deeds across cycles. There isn’t a single linear narrative; instead, the story is the cumulative result of how you adapt and how the city responds over many cycles.

The influences of Worm and Control highlight two aspects: Worm brings in themes of coping with escalating threats and moral complexity in an urban setting, while Control contributes the idea of a reality that cannot be taken for granted (rooms change, rules break down). Blending these, Perpetual City’s philosophy is that adaptation is survival. Just as a person might adapt to new jobs, cities, or life challenges repeatedly in real life, here you adapt to literally new cityscapes and scenarios with each cycle. The game celebrates the persistence of knowledge – even when everything external resets, what you’ve learned remains, which ultimately is a very human truth. In an endlessly shifting world, our capacity to remember, learn, and care from one day to the next is what defines our identity.

Perpetual City is designed as an intentionally unending project—its infinite procedural nature means it can never truly be "finished." This makes it an ideal hobby, as there's always something new to explore, refine, or expand upon. The continual evolution of gameplay systems, narratives, and environmental dynamics ensures it remains engaging over the long term without the pressure or limitation of needing a definitive endpoint.

Superdiff

Superdiff is intended to be an automated document comparison tool aimed at making it easier to review changes in lengthy documents. Unlike a standard “diff” tool that might highlight every little alteration, Superdiff is smart about what it considers a meaningful change. When you run two versions of a document through Superdiff, it will highlight differences in content (additions, deletions, modifications of sentences and paragraphs) while ignoring structural or trivial changes. For example, if the document’s Table of Contents or page numbering has updated (common in edited Word documents or PDFs), those would normally cause a lot of false differences – Superdiff knows to skip those. It focuses on the substance: have any clauses changed? Were any figures updated? Did any wording get tweaked?

The output from Superdiff is a clean report or annotated document where true content edits are called out in color, and unchanged sections or renumbered sections are left alone. This saves the reviewer from wading through noise. In addition, Superdiff provides a “change density” analysis, basically estimating what fraction of the document changed and even suggesting an estimated review time. For instance, a document with only a few sentences changed might be marked as “5% change, ~5 minutes review suggested,” whereas one with entire sections rewritten might show “30% change, significant review needed.” This feature helps prioritize efforts when you have many document versions – you can quickly gauge which ones require deep reading.

Philosophy

Superdiff is about efficiency and clarity in document version control, particularly relevant because much of our professional workload involves meticulous document review. In collaborative settings, large documents undergo numerous revisions, making it challenging and time-consuming to pinpoint critical edits. Superdiff is built on the belief that technology should eliminate drudgery. By intelligently filtering out non-essential changes—such as formatting, pagination, or updated tables of contents—it closely mirrors how a skilled reviewer naturally distinguishes between superficial edits and substantive content alterations.

Furthermore, by estimating review time and quantifying change magnitude, Superdiff addresses a practical reality: not all document edits carry equal weight. A single-word revision in a technical specification or contract may be crucial, while pages of layout adjustments might be inconsequential. Superdiff’s approach is to highlight meaningful signals and minimize distracting noise, enabling reviewers to dedicate their attention precisely where it’s most needed. Ultimately, this philosophy centers on amplifying human attention by automating routine tasks, allowing reviewers to focus fully on interpreting and acting upon critical changes.

Auto Censor Kids’ Books for Comedy

This project involves an algorithm that takes innocent children’s stories and applies “unnecessary censorship” for comedic effect. Essentially, the program will algorithmically choose certain words or phrases in the text and replace them with black bars or symbols – mimicking the style of censoring explicit content – even though the original text was completely wholesome. By doing so, it generates absurd and often hilarious results: the story suddenly seems to suggest something scandalous or outrageous, even though nothing inappropriate was ever there!

For example, it might take a classic line like “The princess sang happily in the forest.” and censor a benign word to produce “The princess ███ happily in the forest.” The reader’s mind can fill in the blank with something far from the original word “sang”. This contrast between the story’s true, gentle nature and the false, raunchy or shocking implication created by the censorship is where the humor arises. It’s akin to the comedic sketch “This Week in Unnecessary Censorship” from Jimmy Kimmel, or the general unnecessary censorship meme, where even something like a Sesame Street scene becomes wildly funny when random words are bleeped out.

The algorithm is designed to choose words that won’t completely destroy the story’s comprehensibility but will create double meanings. Often, verbs or nouns that in another context could be suggestive are prime targets. The result is essentially a Mad Libs of innuendo – the story reads normally until you hit a censored block, at which point your imagination (inevitably guessing something way off the mark) does the rest of the work to make you laugh.

Super-Todo

(Download Clipboard, To-Do List, Dates. Royalty-Free Vector Graphic - Pixabay) A universal to-do list concept – from simple personal checklists to coordinated project plans. Super-Todo aims to scale task management from the individual level up to enterprises.

Super-Todo is an ambitious take on task management: it’s a federated, scalable to-do list system that can seamlessly serve a single user or an entire organization. At its core, Super-Todo provides the familiar tools of tracking tasks, deadlines, and projects, but its design allows many separate instances to communicate and synchronize. For an individual, it might be a simple app on their phone or server where they list personal goals (like “exercise thrice a week” or “finish reading Book X”). For a team or company, it could be deployed on an internal server to manage complex projects, assign tasks to various members, and aggregate progress. What makes it federated is that each user or group could run their own Super-Todo server, yet these servers can talk to each other securely.

Imagine you have your personal Super-Todo, and your workplace has its Super-Todo – because they both implement the federation protocol, you could choose to “join” a work project from your personal interface. Your tasks assigned at work would then appear alongside your personal tasks (perhaps tagged or separated, but in one view), and if you complete a work task on your app, it updates on the work’s Super-Todo server for your colleagues to see. Likewise, if you’re collaborating with an external partner company, your two Super-Todo systems could share a project space. This is similar to how email or decentralized social networks work – different servers/users, but a common language allowing inter-operation.

Super-Todo also supports multi-scale planning. This means it’s not just a flat list of todos. You can have high-level objectives that break down into sub-tasks and sub-projects. For example, a top-level goal might be “Improve Personal Health” which contains tasks like “Daily Exercise”, “Meal Plan for the Week”, etc. In a corporate setting, a high-level initiative like “Launch New Product” can break into “Design Phase”, “Marketing Campaign”, “Manufacturing”, each of which further breaks into individual tasks and milestones. The system is designed to handle thousands of tasks across dozens of users with ease, but it won’t overwhelm a solo user with unnecessary complexity – features scale as needed. If you’re just using it alone, you might never need the delegation or federation features, but they’re there when you grow.

Philosophy

Super-Todo’s philosophy is to provide a universal framework for tracking desired outcomes across all areas of life, without fragmentation. Many people struggle with juggling multiple task systems – perhaps using a notebook for personal tasks, a project management tool at work, and an app for a hobby or volunteering effort. This fragmentation can lead to things slipping through the cracks or just mental overhead to switch contexts. By federating task management, Super-Todo suggests that one size can fit all if done right. You maintain autonomy (different groups can have their own setups and privacy), but you also have unity (ability to see and manage everything you’re responsible for in one place).

It is built on the idea that consistency and integration boost productivity. When every task, big or small, is part of one interconnected system, you can apply the same methods to plan your week whether it’s for personal goals or team deliverables. The federated aspect also philosophically aligns with the modern move towards decentralization – no single company or server “owns” all your tasks. You could host your own Super-Todo server and still collaborate with others, which puts control in the hands of users. This approach values privacy and autonomy while still enabling collaboration.

In summary, Super-Todo is meant to be the last to-do list you’ll ever need, adaptable to a simple grocery list or a multinational project portfolio. The philosophy is that by unifying task management and making it scalable, we remove the friction of having different silos for different parts of our lives. All your plans and todos feed into the same system, helping you stay on top of everything that matters to you. Life and work can be organized in one place, and you decide how broadly to share or delegate each item. This empowers individuals to take control of their productivity on their own terms, and organizations to coordinate without forcing everyone into one rigid platform.