Farm House

March 20, 2026 by Adam in Adam's Projects

The house at the farm is coming along.  I'm stepping in to fill the oldest kids' shoes as he steps away to do other things.  I'm trying to line up painters and today mom, Emma and I drove out to the farm to clean up the site and haul away trash.  The schedule is moving along at a rapid pace and the siding and roof are coming along, with electrical after that.  In a few weeks the drywall should be up and the interior should be ready for painting.  We might actually get this place ready for renters by the start of summer.

Steamboat Simulator

March 17, 2026 by Adam in Adam's Projects

Dad came over for dinner last night and we ended up talking about AI and some of his dream hobby projects.  He wanted to make a steam powered model boat since the world speed record is tiny and he thinks he can (hopefully figuratively) blow it out of the water.  I told copilot to research steam powered model boats, fed it various specifications dad rattled off, and let it build a thing while we ate dinner.

The end result is a simulation of an Arduino controlled steam powered radio controlled boat.  I simulates the physics of the system, the remote controls, the Ardunio code that controls the engine, and links to the research that went into it.  It's some of the most impressive work it's cranked out with minimal work.  Just click the autopilot button and see what happens.  The engine cutaway tab on the sim page shows the animated engine move.  It's shockingly good.

My AI Girlfriend's Head Came Off

March 09, 2026 by Adam in Adam's Projects

I went a little crazy with AI over the weekend.  I've been rethinking the way I do my job and hobbies as all the LLMs roll out to change our lives.  I've been using them for awhile, but I went pretty hard this weekend, spinning up a bunch of weird little demos to play around with ideas.

It started with a simple thing I'd already been doing - read a Call of Cthulhu PDF and turn the mission into a nice web page with notes, then create image prompts I can use to make player images.  It worked beautifully and saved a bunch of time.

Next was making a system to take images and turn them into 3d models.  I started with an AI generated spaceship image.  It tried to turn it into a CAD drawing, then iterated a few times until it looked more like the picture.  The results were okay, but I wanted to tweak it more, so I created a system where I could click on a part, type in how I wanted to change it, and it would do its best.  Pretty soon my spaceship was looking less monstrous and more like a real spaceship.  

I wanted to play more with my old Kinect, so I told copilot to use a javascript talking head library to display a talking head that I could speak with and have it detect where I was in the room and look at me while it was speaking.  The first weird thing was that copilot picked a young woman avatar - probably the default in the demo - and I realized I'd accidentally made an AI girlfriend.  Sadly every time it tried to talk the head would stop displaying, leading me to laugh hysterically.  We finally worked out the bugs, including gesture detection.  Then it would say weird things like "Nice T-Pose, are you asserting dominance?".  I decided to shelf it as it was all a little too weird.

The last project was more practical - walking a novice through the steps of building a tiny house.  It was okay, but rough around the edges.  I'm experimenting with some better communication between copilot and a web page - we'll see if it pans out.