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.

New Webserver, Who Dis?

December 22, 2025 by Adam in Adam's Projects

A couple months ago I bought one of those little fist-sized computers to replace my big Dell computer as my web server.  I stuck it inside my 3d printed retro computer case that I used as a prop for my roleplaying games, but the plan was always to switch everything over one day.

This morning is that day, jumping through all the technical hoops to copy things over, get it all configured, re-enable SSL, and all the other annoying steps.  I even had copilot rewrite my ancient Classic ASP pages with all their security flaws into a more modern language.  It took a lot of handholding, but eventually I got it all up and running again.

It should theoretically be faster, with a solid state drive and faster CPU.  I still have a few more steps remaining, but I wanted to actually get this on the Internet and post a story to prove to myself that it shows up.

Traveller

December 19, 2025 by Adam in Adam's Projects

There was a deal on the classic Traveller roleplaying game books.  I have most of the physical copies from my childhood - originals from the 70s and 80s.  It's really the one RPG I played regularly as a kid, and I loved making worlds and ships and adventures.  Sometimes I think not much has changed.

I continue to play with all the AI generation tools and have recently been vibe coding out a system that should help me referee one of the big adventure modules.  The players fly a merchant ship around, moving cargo and going from system to system having adventures.  There's a bit of tedium and players often need to break out a spreadsheet to deal with cargo and maintenance and salaries.  Fortunately computers are very good at this sort of thing, and I've been coding up something to help with that part.

I was also tinkering with some of the picture to 3d model AI tools.  It's not perfect, but better than my modeling skills.  I did some additional manual tinkering and am pretty happy with the end results.

We'll see if this turns into something more real, but I'm having a great time putting it all together.

Delta Green Coasters

October 15, 2025 by Adam in Adam's Projects

I have this weird need to make odd little things for my players.  This time it was the Delta Green crowd - I ended up making a bunch of coasters for them to use, take home, or do whatever.  I like the idea of souvenirs to remember our games, but I also like practical things.  This seemed like a good compromise.

Retro PC

August 03, 2025 by Adam in Adam's Projects

Weeks ago I started 3d printing the pieces to a new retro computer.  It was one of the bigger prints I've done, requiring multiple pieces glued, sanded, primed, and painted.  It seemingly took forever to get the case ready.  Then there were the components - an old Raspberry Pi, a touch screen I got for my birthday, and some assorted plugs and switches to make it all come together.  The last part was flashing a memory card and putting on Linux, then turning the thing on.

Though there are some seams and the plastic warped a little in the heat when drying paint, but it all turned out in the end.  I flipped the switch and in a few seconds it booted into Linux and I opened up Firefox to display a web page I'd made for one of my Delta Green campaigns.   My plan is to occasionally break it out as a prop.  Plus it works fine as a little desktop computer in a pinch.

Mothership Warden Assistant

June 23, 2025 by Adam in Adam's Projects

When I do rpgs, even one-shots, I try hard to put together a special experience for my players.  I got the Mothership rpg for Father's Day, which is kinda like Aliens in terms of space horror games.  I had this vision of making a display for players that had their headshots with an EKG-like pulse that showed their current health and stress levels.  The idea is that I'd have my display hidden in secret and I can click on pictures and update player stats to have it appear on the player screen.

After a week of vibe coding with copilot, generating images, and tweaking endless parameters, I'm mostly happy with the end results.  I've got it uploaded to Github publicly, but haven't really spread the word yet.

https://adamgmiller.github.io/mothership-warden-assistant/

DM Screen with Monitor

May 28, 2024 by Adam in Adam's Projects

I keep tweaking my D&D setup.  I started with a laptop for myself, attached to a tv laid flat for maps, and another monitor to display monster pictures or whatever.  I got rid of the second monitor recently, just displaying pictures over the maps themselves, but I didn't like how it was upside down for half the players and how it covered up the maps.  I saw someone turn a cheap monitor into a DM screen and knew I had to have one.

I'm not completely finished with it, but it's at least workable.  The design had lots of flat pieces to cut out and glue together, which ended up being somewhat annoying.  Still, I'm mostly happy with the end result and am already scheming various updates to make it even better.

Power Level Over 9000!

November 22, 2023 by Adam in Adam's Projects

The Hunter Communication people just left after installing 2.5 Gb fiber Internet to the house.  So far I have only one computer hooked up and it's technically only getting 1 Gb through the port on the router, but it seems plenty fast so far.  I need to upgrade some network infrastructure and move things over, then I'll make sure everything is stable before ditching Xfinitity, which is slower, more expensive, and the data caps are annoying.