I started a created a company in 1995 to do web stuff for a very niche market – I guess now it would be called SaaS. It never really completed or became a money-maker, but it’s out there and I still work on it.

First I had problems with IP theft – I had lots of original photos that people took. Then datasets and articles I had written were copied, so I focused on trying to stop that. Then I found myself spending too much time trying to deal with SEO, then x, then y… It was always a game of wackamole, trying to figure out how to keep ahead.

Throw in the ebb and flow of life’s challenges and it always seems like time, money, health, or some combination thereof seemed to come up at just the wrong time (is there ever a good time?)

I’m still plugging away. It’s thirty years later and I’ve retired from my 9-5, so hopefully I can make some real progress.

It was my reddit account, where I had twelve years’ worth to commentary, predictions, poetry, etc in the comments.

But they permabanned me and deleted everything I ever wrote.

If we’re talking something I actually have worked on in the past year, a crummy book I’ve been writing on Wattpad. Have 5-6 “Legacy” chapters out, but they’re gonna eventually be rewritten if I ever get to them within my lifetime. They’re only there to exist, pretty much. Not an interesting book by any stretch of the imagination.

Just a group of kids in the mid 90s spending their summer doing normal things like how in one unpublished chapter you follow the main character as he goes to what he considers a boring wedding and has to deal with the embarrassment of at one point having to dance with his cousin, who thinks he’s kinda cute.

Been working on it since maybe fall 2017 or sometime in 2018. Otherwise, I cannot think of any projects of mine that have been going on any longer than that that I actually have actively worked on this year and am willing to share (there’s some fanfiction series, but I ain’t willing to go into that, despite it not being too cringe).

I’ve been working on a raspberry pi based music notes box for shows on and off for about 5 years. I can count through and change songs with my foot, so I have an easier time keeping track of where I am in the song for live shows (I’m the bassist). I did all the programming and hardware stuff.

I’ve been working on a game reminiscent of Streets of Rage and Paper Mario. A beat-me-up RPG in Unity but I haven’t worked on It in a while due to work and burnout.

http://nymph.io/

This project technically started in 2009, as part of another project called Dandelion (which then was renamed to Pines), then around 2014 I pulled it out into its own project, Nymph. I worked on it on and off, until 2021, when I rewrote it for Node.js as Nymph.js.

It now runs my email service, https://port87.com/

Here’s the oldest code I can find on GitHub from July 7, 2009:

https://github.com/sciactive/pines-components/blob/144ce877e1ec9af7fa34c8eb8b11aeb7ae0efb5e/com_entity/common.php

And here’s the first version as its own project from Sep 8, 2014:

https://github.com/sciactive/nymph/tree/fdf5f770da7e5acc6938debbaeb8c09cfd080e15/src

I’ve been composing an orchestra piece for slightly over two years now. I’m kind of learning how to do that as I go along, having only really written songs for up to three instruments beforehand.

I’ve been building a media collection for over a decade and a half at this point. I have a bit of the original stuff, mainly music, from back then but I lost most of my collection a couple of times to drive crashes before I understood what backups were.

I created a self hostable plattform for managing and fulfilling wishes but haven’t been able to give it the maintenance it needs. I occasionally work on it but wish I had more time/money to work on it more: https://wishthis.online/

When I was in high school (like 2001 or so) I started doing electronics stuff, hobby projects, console mods, etc. simple stuff at first like installing mod chips and building rgb mods for older rf consoles but then building pic and embedded stuff which was somewhat impressive in the pre arduino days (even though it was functionally the same thing, just slightly more difficult because there wasn’t a dev board or ide)

That led to learning enough to fix stuff, which I did through college to earn some cash. I kept doing it, and kept doing it.

At one point I was actually earning quite a bit of money. The early smartphone days were great. Lasted a decent clip too. Each iphone generation I would buy a 50 pack of screens and batteries from chinese wholesalers that sold very good quality ones. Would easily burn through those. I didn’t really like doing this but it was lucrative. I simply charged less then anyone else in town and still made a decent amount per hour because it was ultimately stupid easy to do and all the repair shops (including apple) grossly overcharged. I would do it for $50 and the parts were like $17. Took me like 12 minutes. I was just doing it after work and making an extra 15k a year at the peak just off phones

Then the oled phones came out and all of a sudden parts were like $200, so that sucked, so that dropped drastically

Then the iphone xs came out and if you changed the parts the phone would give a nag screen saying “these parts may not be authentic” and disable features, even if I pulled the parts from another iphone. This also caused another drop although eventually I found programmers from china that could defeat it (for $$$ but at that point it was about the principle)

Then Samsung started doing it too (though they later walked it back, but then unwalked it back maybe? I don’t pay it much mind these days. For that matter apple also finally allows you to program new parts as of ios 18 but they have to be genuine apple parts that aren’t locked and buying them from apple is $$$$$. Plus last I checked they won’t even sell you parts unless you give them the device imei/serial so you can’t buy in bulk, get discounts, and doing what I did is completely impractical)

Then I gave up on that. I still do some of what I always did: buy broken stuff, fix it, sell it online. This is more fun to do because it’s interesting, like solving a puzzle, but less lucrative because it’s far more time consuming. I also no longer have to directly deal with customers which is nice (aside from the occasional person on ebay who wants a refund without returning the item because I didn’t make it clear the item was refurbished even though it was listed as refurbished, the description says it’s refurbished with a description of how it was refurbished, and an image saying “refurbished item” as the primary picture on the auction).

I also sometimes do hdmi and usb c replacements on consoles and phones because they don’t serialize those (yet, probably)

And every once in a while I still pursue an actual hobby project. My current one is making a proper portable Dreamcast but instead of doing it based on a raspberry pi or whatever I’m using the leaked schematics to rebuild the board with only the necessities in a much smaller footprint and trying to integrate some modern niceties (replace the disk drive with either sd card or cf, modern efficient power supply, built in VMU, etc). But it would sacrifice an actual Dreamcast and reuse the cpu, gpu, ram, Yamaha sound chip, etc so it wouldn’t emulate anything and be 100% accurate. About 80% to a prototype but progress is slow (been doing it for years) because I do have an actual job that takes up much of my time. Also I lost some enthusiasm because someone in china beat me to it years ago; you can buy it on AliExpress for like $500 if you really want one (but theirs is ugly and doesn’t have a lot of the feature set I plan. It does exist though, so it beats mine quite handily)

My kids. It’s been more than 26 years.

Mostly just bugfixes and maintenance now.

There’s a story or stories that’s been going on for the fourth year in my mind. The plot(s) is massive and well-thought-out but everything is riddled with holes in the middle, to the extent where I could not attempt to write it down without it being as disorganized as my thoughts (and, to be honest, clutter in my mind is easier to handle than clutter on the drawing board). Such is the life of a writer/artist, though I recently reduced the load immensely by inventing new mediums.

For decades I’ve been dreaming of my own PHP framework because the existing stuff seems to be too clunky, with too much repetitions and not close enough to best practises. By now I have something that theoretically works but I haven’t had enough time to flesh it out.

By now I’m disabled and don’t have the brain capacity to keep working on it.

I’ve been working on my 3D printed Mini Macro Pad for a couple years now, slowly making improvements over time.

My YouTube channel. Been at it for 10 years, haven’t even broken through the 100,000 subscribers ceiling yet. But it’s fun, so I keep doing it.