I investigate, build, and learn.

From a silent board to a booting system

The NanoPi story begins with a teardown and a silent UART that hid a healthy board. It continues through FreeBSD booting in RAM and an experimental USB Ethernet workaround whose limits remain part of the result.

To make installation repeatable, I explored an Alpine image builder, documented a Linux disk layout, and reconstructed an unattended Ubuntu install from local media. Starflash turns the image-writing steps into a guided command-line workflow. A personal introduction to FreeBSD and a small jail-documentation fix show the operating-system side of that work.

For a connected learning path, Understanding computer systems develops the shared ideas through separate Linux, FreeBSD, storage and boot chapters, with bounded exercises and explicit test limits.

Cameras, connections and repairs

Three broken TP-Link cameras became an investigation of power, reset behavior and serial output. A separate GoSure camera investigation reached a local Android preview; an old depth camera turned out to have a USB compatibility problem before its depth stream could even be tested.

The same habit applies to a child’s electronic learning book and twelve volts on the wrong pin. At home, it led to recovering a router through a Tailscale jump host and using a Roku remote from outside the house.

Small machines and interrupted runs

A TinyStories Transformer on my RP2040 board connects training and quantization to a physical display. The larger GPT-124M training experiment asks a different question: how to finish a run on limited GPUs and prove recovery across sessions.

OpenLens brings offline vision toward a portable learning companion while keeping uncertainty visible. An archived Responses gateway records the boundaries of translating between clients and model providers.

From robot beginnings to hardware feedback

Learning ROS in a university office led to building a wheeled robot. Those early experiments sit alongside a later LeRobot study and the more developed SO-101 simulation-to-hardware record.

A short proposal for an AI-centered robot stack asks how agents should use explicit capabilities. The hardware history also includes my first AT89X51, a mechanical competition, getting a linear actuator moving and implementing the RP2040 minimal design.

Input, language and reading

The Input Method Builder lets you choose Rime or Yuanshu layouts, try the preview and generate packages. Its background includes archived Trime configuration work and a Cangjie code-prefix tree. The IPA chart is a different kind of language tool: select symbols and hear the retained recordings.

Text itself can become a visual object. The archived Unicode Map and Hanzi Matrix preserve earlier browser and poster experiments. For longer reading, 書間 provides a catalogue of Chinese classics and a vertical-page reader; the Honglou edition study and earlier vertical-book experiment explain related source and typesetting work.

Build a service around a clear boundary

The site infrastructure describes how canonical content, rendering and independent tools are published. AI-native website interfaces explores making questions, evidence and next steps readable by both people and assistants; the agent guide documents the public interfaces.

The guide to operating a small service through change connects provisioning, recovery, migration and handoff through a fictional example and official references.

Mayphus Store applies that approach to a small Cloudflare shop with physical and digital products. It is still in development and Stripe test mode. The archived Shop Prototype is a separate earlier implementation, not evidence that the new store is ready for customers.

Models you can inspect

Biology diagrams, a chemical-formula parser and a projectile-motion study turn specific scientific questions into inspectable outputs. The recovered calculus studies and Racket mathematics and 3D work continue from curves into surfaces.

Geometry also appears in a Voronoi diagram, origami crease study and archived LambdaCAD experiment. A tested Sudoku solver and historical Tetris implementation look at rules through puzzles and games; these pages are records, not playable games.

Maps, patterns and repeated forms

A four-province expressway atlas investigates how to load less map data. The natural-language city-map record describes a bounded OpenStreetMap query design, rather than a working map interface on this page.

Motif composes reusable drawing ideas; Flower Studies builds forms through repetition; Cell Field preserves a dense generated drawing for screen and print. Each makes the relationship between a small rule and a larger image visible.

Different scales of time

Polychron relates Chinese regnal eras to calendar years. The Unix Timeline, archived World History Chart and Geologic Clock ask how to show change at very different scales, with historical selections and limits kept visible.

The recovered Eight Trigrams drawing and Solar Term Wheel connect symbolic structure to generated form. Milk Teeth is another time-based visual study; it distinguishes its original animation schedule from clinical reference ranges.

An observation can become an investigation

An aircraft above Qingshui Gong begins with two photographs. Sugar from a soldier follows a family memory into historical records. The public photo collection keeps other observations together.

Not every idea needs to become a product. An old flashlight, a new idea preserves a shelved toy concept and the reason I stopped. That decision belongs beside the completed work.

A working memory, not just a finished page

How I work with AI describes the roles of ChatGPT, Codex, Git and this site. An iPad at the front, a workspace behind it and a note on working on the go explore how that process fits around life away from a desk. The newer older-laptop proposal asks whether a phone-directed Ubuntu workspace could make everyday tasks easier for someone else.

Website as working memory, a week of verified loops and the real value of an AI agent return to continuity and evidence. Notes on faster Codex work and a small weapp-vite contribution keep the everyday adjustments visible.

Being a Dad opens a place for caring for my daughter and sharing everyday reflections alongside the technical work.

Background and collaboration

My profile and Chinese profile connect these projects to my systems, infrastructure and hardware background. Work with me describes bounded inquiries for deployment troubleshooting and input-method configuration. The disclosure below explains how AI helps turn this work into published words.