What's on the bench now — and everything we built to get here.

Domain attached, certificate issued, email forwarding, link previews, sitemap. Then this page.

“Holy hell it works.” My daughter joined from the Switch and my son on split-screen; sprint and jump powers restored.

A second story world on its own server: a sea-cliff relay station and a narrator called One, with a synthesized voice. Built and played the same night.

A second-monitor dashboard for running the Survey: players, coordinates, health, next step, the chat feed.

Thirteen years of email swept across two accounts — filed, trashed with a 30-day undo, nothing lost.

Friends could join from outside the house; the first non-family player closed Chapters I–II alongside me and reached the Nether the next day.

The Survey became a voiced campaign: an AI found in the farmhouse sixty-two years after “the Quiet.” “A crazy experience with the sound.”

Five routes, a scanned-house hero, reels that alternate VR and real-world clips. Lighthouse 100.

One world for Java and Switch players together, the farm loaded, and a story campaign — the Survey — played that night.

The drone map converted at one meter per block with a hand-written world writer: terrain, water, trees, hollow buildings, ore below.

A headset puts the next note on the real keys at 90 frames a second. “On the keys, feels instant.” My daughter approved it four days later.

Retired the old side-shop name. Picked Elston.Works as the name for a fix / build / fly shop on the Plateau.

Drainage, structure siting, an accuracy report, and a live interactive map for the new place — the deliverable, end to end.

Wired the DAW to Claude: a piano clip became MIDI in eighteen seconds; two songs arranged as easy piano pages for her and my daughter.

First flight at the Crossville house — a five-ring orbit, 4K video — and a 3D scan you could walk through in a browser by evening.

The house scan in Blender with a real sun rig and three raised beds, watching the tree shadows sweep the yard hour by hour.

The new address is under Class G airspace — unrestricted flying from the yard.

Co-registered the farm’s drone terrain against public lidar, found a five-meter offset, shipped a fused bare-earth model.

The router rewired through the Pi’s ad-blocking DNS. The Pi found its retirement job.

Farm, park, and the friends’ field stitched into one continuous VR map. Drove a monster truck between them.

Modeled my dad’s sauna from a sketch and set it on the scanned farm — the put-a-building-on-your-land demo.

A house on the Plateau. Move window: late August.

A stuck inkjet rebuilt on its native driver; printed a volcano picture my wife sent, straight from email.

Two drivable farm levels: a 1:1 map with an RC buggy, and a twelve-times giant with a 2.7 km see-through hamster-tube track.

My daughter and a friend anchored a real local news show — stories, the actual forecast, comedy — off a teleprompter. They asked to do it again.

Record a clip, layer effects, hot-swap it into the live VR world from a browser. A sandbox for kids who like noises.

Settled the answer to “so what do you do?”

1,914 RTK-fixed stills over the city park in three missions at two altitudes. The third property.

Sat together answering questions; a grade-aware 2026–27 homeschool plan with a state attendance tracker shipped the same day.

The rebuilt house voice booted clean: hold a key, talk, hear the answer. She can save memories now.

The scan stood up in Unreal Engine with a third-person character under real lighting in one evening, driven over its HTTP bridge.

A kart, an off-roader, a monster truck; a scaler from mouse-sized to colossus; a life-size Starship parked in the sky.

A friend heading back to school didn’t want an app. She wanted one card and one step. So that’s the whole screen.

She wore the headset calling for animals, fireworks, flowers — and they appeared without a relaunch. Then: “things that go boom.”

Both scanned properties in a headset the same night as asking: a dialable sun, fireflies, four hundred trees, a grand piano built at my feet.

Friends write to one address; a sandboxed assistant drafts, I approve, the reply goes out. First request: vacuum recommendations.

767 RTK-fixed stills over friends’ property; a textured mesh, elevation model, and 2 cm orthophoto delivered the next day as a gift.

A friend who rides tandem needed his stats read aloud. Worked out his phone could already hear the bike’s sensors and wrote him the steps. Pro bono.

The daily brief grew from two readers to a fourteen-person team, with news auto-tagged to the customers it mentions.

Mesh, point cloud, 1 cm orthomosaic, and a photoreal 3D scan of the farm, live on the website, streamed as tiles.

Asked for something to listen to on the drive; two episodes with two synthesized hosts rendered that afternoon, on a private feed.

Draw your property and get a mission estimate; check your airspace on live FAA data; size a stockpile. All on the company site.

A commenter asked for it, so: two procedural Sims with plumbobs, staged poolside on the farm mesh, rendered overnight.

A vintage Apple trackpad got scroll and right-click on Windows through a filter driver. Fix-it work is like that sometimes.

Circled the family car with the drone — 285 stills in five minutes — and got a 3D scan with the glossy black paint intact.

First real mapping mission: ~2,000 RTK-fixed photos across six routes → a 1 cm orthomosaic, an elevation model, a mesh, a 147-million-point cloud.

Non-verbal chirps for the house: “done” for long tasks, a rising “ask?” for questions, an uh-oh for trouble. Played from the wall kiosk.

The survey drone arrived, got registered, insured, and authorized under Class C airspace — and flew its maiden flight that evening. Flawless.

My wife’s calendar and mine mirror each other every fifteen minutes — create, change, delete, all verified round-trip.

Postal delivery emails parsed; a package arriving today becomes a quiet all-day event.

A wired camera system for a client, run through the attic, pointed out from inside. Color at night, no monthly fee. Nobody’s footage leaves the house.

The piano’s MIDI drives the office lights — circle-of-fifths colors, chords swell, notes decay, the sustain pedal holds them.

An old laptop boots straight into the control room, fullscreen, on the wall.

Picked and ordered the survey drone and an RTK base station after re-evaluating every alternative.

A circadian curve, a dim-to-check-you’re-still-there after forty idle minutes, teal for deep focus, violet when a game launches.

Her own laptop — and her own instructions file for the AI, so it works the way she does.

A 5:30 a.m. state-of-everything writes itself to the vault and pushes a teaser to my phone.

Bank transactions sync on their own and reconcile to the penny; the monthly report fills itself from the ledger.

Sat the FAA exam and passed. Legally cleared to fly for money. The certificate came four days later.

The daily brief started sending itself to a real company, every weekday: a few hundred sources overnight, one email before coffee.

A daemon reads the inbox, pulls out dates and to-dos, and files them as pending cards — one click to confirm.

A nightly job builds each kid’s quest board for the day, researched before it’s written. A parent passcode guards the admin.

An addressing layer decides respond-or-stay-quiet. She ignored movie chatter with the kids three for three.

A morning industry brief for a chemicals sales team, signed “Pelorus,” with a phone console. The demo my dad showed around.

The house got a voice: local speech-to-text, a spoken reply, a candle bulb that swirls while she listens. She answers only me.

Built a 70-part quadcopter from primitives, animated it, rendered a flight video on the GPU — all by asking.

A work schedule scraped every morning from a locked-down portal — an eleven-hop login — onto Google Calendar. Four months of trying.

The Obsidian graph rendered as a rotating brain-shaped force graph in the control room, pulsing on fresh edits.

A companion bot in the game that follows you, hints, and finds things. The first step toward the farm being in there.

The office lights learned states — focus, a breath when an email leaves, a blink for alerts, sunrise for the morning brief.

My daughter beat all ten levels of the math game in her app; a new chapter with nine palettes shipped before bedtime.

A mod that shifts the game’s view with your head through the webcam; the HUD stays pinned. “It worked! Very cool.”

Hand tracking on two webcams: point at a lamp to pick it, pinch to dim it. “I feel like Iron Man.”

Webcam head-tracking shifts a 3D scene on the monitor like a window. Within the hour of asking. “That just broke my brain.”

My daughter asked for comics, Stardew Valley, and galaxies; the lessons were written and on her quest board that night.

A dashboard where every running program shows itself live — built so I could physically show people what Atlas is.

The company site verified live; the contact form delivered its first real quote request the same day.

A hotkey popup that answers plain-language questions about anything I’ve looked at today, on a local model.

The company’s AI voice: reads inbound mail, drafts replies, and deflected all eight tricks in a hand-built hostile email.

Every night something attacks our own systems, grades the result, and writes the fix. It found three bugs in itself the first week.

Every day gets a note in an Obsidian vault, written by the machines and read by me. Nothing has been lost since.

Ambient screen memory on my own machine: OCR and a vision model on window changes, redaction, nightly rollups into the vault.

Memory and scripts moved to the workstation; the Pi went to “the farm of servos and LED lighting.” It runs the house DNS today.

First session on the workstation. Named it Atlas and wrote down the two-year plan for an AI that runs the business.

Built the machine that runs the company, installed from a boot stick made on the Pi; a missing EFI partition rebuilt by hand.

Built in a day: dashboard, calendar, groceries, meals, chores, a wellness page, a memory jar. My wife is its first user.

A gamified homeschool app for two kids with very different brains: quests, badges, a tutor.

Kernel panics traced to the Pi’s Wi-Fi driver choking on an AI stream. Fixed with a bandwidth cap and a boot monitor.

The family farm’s app went live: a public calendar, a guest portal with magic links, a guestbook, and an assistant that logs the chores.

An hourly job started ingesting every coding session into memory — 113 on the first run — plus a nightly security audit.

Two-tier memory on the Pi with a nightly consolidation at 3 a.m.; asked to recall the day, she found it on the first try.

Two webcams, local face recognition, lights that react to who walked in, an offline voice that greets you, a fan that runs itself.

The company opened as a folder: a week plan, a market brief, ten competitors researched before 1 a.m., and one rule — no fabricated data, ever.

The first AI with a name and a home: engineer-in-residence on the Pi, named after The Good Place, talking over Discord, keeping her own notes.

A two-line I²C LCD on the Pi, with tests, showing a rolling readout. Small board, real pixels.

A coding agent on the Pi with a backup before every change and a blocklist of commands that would kill it.

A recurring client: a printer, email folders, a Messenger bot, home internet. The seed of the fix-it shop.

The first program on the Pi: a loop that printed I am alive every five seconds. It still counts.

A buildability map of a property from public lidar data, in QGIS — the first portfolio piece, before owning a drone.

Started narrating the build on TikTok. First company website went up the same month.

Registered the drone-mapping company with the Tennessee Secretary of State. No drone yet. No customers. A name and a plan.

ElectronShepherd, a Pi 5 on a shelf, imaged and left alone for seven weeks. Most of this page started there.

No software background. Started building things with an AI at my elbow — the first lines of everything below.

Began the FAA remote-pilot certificate — the four-month gate on every paid flight.