Hello there! It’s been a while and I’ve basically been non-stop since early 2023.

Fiction Writing

Book

In 2023 I focused on finishing my first novel/novella, a story I had started ten years ago, and restarted a few times since. I wanted to have a published book written by my 30th birthday, which was earlier this year (2024), so I pushed myself to get it done. The book is slightly shorter than I would have liked (my initial plans were 30 chapters and it ended up with 26), but it’s still finished and published on Amazon. I have plans to make a few minor edits to make it stronger, but haven’t been able to find the time because of my next fiction project.

Movie

I pulled a John Hughes and wrote an entire movie screenplay in two days. It’s just a first draft and there are several ways I can improve it to make better, but there may be a stage play or indie movie in the next year or so. Please stay tuned.

I also wrote another episode of my WIP TV show called “Help Desk”, a show similar to IT Crowd, but with some of my own experiences thrown in.

Tech

SIMple

Three years ago, I was asked by my partner to see what kind of Inventory Managers there were in order to help keep track of stock at the non-profit animal shelter she works at. Any free or open source inventory manager was either not a good fit (Snipe-IT), too complicated (Inventree), or for bigger places like warehouses instead of just a simple store room.

I’d used a product called “Optiflex” at a previous job, which was fairly simple to use on the front-end and would have been a great fit for this use-case, but was paid software when it was supported by the company. While I couldn’t use Optiflex itself, there might have been an option to create a “clone”, so ealrier this year, after finishing the book, I took one more look around at the other inventory software out there to see if anything had changed before trying to tackle the problem myself.

The first thing I came up with was a simple, old-school text-based system, which worked, but required a lot of data validation and would hae been just about as complicated as the other systems I was looking at–maybe moreso–for the workers at the shelter. Knowing I would likely need some sort of GUI, I started looking into PyQt, or potentially even using Godot. These seemed to prove fruitless, as I was unable to either connect the front-end with the back-end (PyQt), or create dynamic lists of the items (Godot).

Just before October I took one final scroll through Github to see if there was some existing project I could use, big or small, and edit with what knowledge I have. By a stroke of luck, I came across this inventory management system written in Flask, which is a Python backend. Because I know Python decently well, have a little SQL knowledge, and have experience with the basic webdev core, I felt really good about using this as a base for SIMple, the Simple Inventory Manager.

Thanks to the head start provided by Gavin on his IMS, I was able to edit his code and write a bunch more to make SIMple exactly how I envision it within a period of two weeks. There are still some improvements to be made, but a lot of the major underlying code has been written and the base application is ready for prime-time. I’m hoping to set up a demo here once version 0.2.0 is complete, so stay tuned for that.

Servers

The ZFS pool that holds my video backups in my media server PC had unrecoverable errors earlier this year and so Kodi and Jellyfin stopped working for a while. None of the data seemed to have issues as far as I could tell, so I copied most of the videos to a smaller, XFS formatted drive until I could investigate and fix the issue for good. I think the primary issue was that the original ZFS pool was not in a mirror setup, so if one bit was bad, it couldn’t error correct. I remade the pool, this time in a mirror with another disk, and everything is back up and running.

Another Honey-Do list item was internal security cameras for my partner’s “kitten room”, a room where we house foster kitten families. I bought her a couple of Amcrest PoE cameras for Christmas, and I learned how to integrate them with Home Assistant for easy viewing. Then, while she was out of town for a weekend, I did a major project in the kitten room, and decided to put up the cameras while I was in there. Setting them up wasn’t too hard, but it does require the unofficial Dahua plugin.

Vacation

We went to Tokyo in late August. This was my third time to Japan, but my second time to Tokyo. We stayed in Ryogoku, on the east side of the city, and each day was something different. It was a really amazing experience and I really didn’t want to come back to the States. If you’re interested, here’s a breakdown of the week.

Monday - Day 1

We stayed in Ryogoku, looking around the city. I mostly just wanted to see the area around our hotel so that if we got lost, I could lead us back with no GPS (in case our phones ran out of battery). While we did get “lost”, we found a really cool park called the Oyokogawa Water Park, which is basically a 1 block wide, 10 blocks long in the middle of the city. It lead us to the Tokyo Skytree, where we window shopped for a while and got our first crepe.

After we walked around a while we returned to our hotel (using GPS) and took a nap before going out to Saizeriya for a nice Italian dinner (yes, I know). What was really neat about Saizeriya was that they had QR codes on the tables so you can order your food completely from your phone. When you’re ready for dessert, you press a button on your phone. When you’re done, press the button on your phone, and take your phone to the register to scan the barcode it gives you. It was such a cool experience, it would be interesting to see if the concept could work here in the States.

Tuesday

The plan for Tuesday was to figure out the rail system and visit Shinjuku, Shibuya, and possibly go to the Tokyo Dome for a Baseball game. Because this would use the train, I wanted to get a Passmo or Suica card for us so that we didn’t have to go to a ticket machine every time we wanted to go somewhere. Every ticket machine I went to said new Passmo and Suica cards were unavailable, and I didn’t bring mine from 10 years ago (like a dork).

I found out later that this was because of the IC chip shortage from 2020, but I basically purchased us tickets to Shinjuku from our station and we got to the platform. I had forgotten about rush hour, so we ended up waiting on the platform for about 30 minutes, wainting for the trains to become less like sardine cans. When we finally got on a train, we were stopped for about 20-30 minutes just before the Shinjuku stop, but afterwards we strolled around Shinjuku to our heart’s content.

We got a little lost around Shinjuku, but eventually we made our way to Kabukicho, which I was somewhat familiar with thanks to the Yakuza game series, in which the main area you run around in, Kamurocho, is based off of Kabukicho. Because I thought it would be funny to go to a store I’ve been to in a game, we went to Don Quijote. That store is actually a really interesting store with decent prices, and we ended up doing most of our souvenir shopping at the several Don Quijotes in the area.

We also went to Shibuya and got to see the Hachiko statue, though the line was too long to get a good photo with it. We crossed the Shibuya Scramble Crossing and then got to see the first of our 3D billboards, the Panda. We did a lot more window shopping before heading back to our hotel and getting some really good sleep.

Wednesday

We went to Tokyo Disneyland. It was fun.

Thursday

We went to Yokohama, visited the Yokohama Don Quijote, and then went down to the Yokohama Chinatown, the largest Chinatown in the world (outside of China).

Friday

Akihabara all day. Lots of small shops, lots of nerd shops, lots of walking around another Don Quijote.

Saturday

Checkout was at 10a, our flight was at 6p, so we stored our baggage in the Shinjuku Station lockers and traveled to several areas. Got to see the 3D cat billboard at Shinjuku station, and then the 3D dog at Shibuya station. Also found a “party street” that ended up just being a commercial street with lots of cool little shops.

Conclusion

It’s been a busy two years since I last checked in, most of it happening on my laptop. I’m excited to see how SIMple evolves in the future, what will happen to the script I wrote (and will likely polish up in November), and finally what 2025 will bring.