2026 Apr 5 - Life is too busy!

I missed last week, but I'm still making stuff

Published: 4/5/2026 | Updated: 4/5/2026

Tags: update, consulting, automation, music

Last week I started a new consulting gig, and my weekend was taken up with dancing and music. I got to see the Isidore Quartet perform the best performance of Haydn I’ve ever heard, as well as a fantastic quartet Billy Childs wrote for them, and Dvorak, one of my all time favorite composers.

Consulting

I ran into my neighbor a few weeks ago and we got talking about business. She manages trade spend nationally for a food brand, and she has been struggling to keep the data analysis clean and reliable as the number of stores and distributers grows. Everything is currently done in Excel, which is workable, but difficult to scale, especially as all the data has to be manually entered and transferred between spreadsheet templates. I offered to help out, and we are now working on a web app for tracking and projecting trade spend for food brands.

The way that fees are structured in the chain from brand, to distributors, to stores, especially when promotions and sales are involved, is very complex. It’s also very important to calculate those costs and profits are accuratly and reliably, as brands rely on these numbers to make expensive business decisions.

It’s still in the early stages, but if everything goes well I will share more details in a future blog post. If it goes REALLY well, it might even be worth launching commercially.

Karakeep fanfiction auto-downloader

I finally finished my Karakeep fanfiction auto-downloader script. All I have to do to archive the stories I read is to bookmark them in Karakeep, and the script will download the story and automatically tag the bookmark with the story’s metadata. The stories are then directly available in my Kavita library, so I can read them from anywhere.

Check out the dedicated blog post for all the nitty gritty details!

Custom Minecraft macro

Another automation project I’ve been working on is a custom macro program to automate forging in the TerraFirmaCraft mod. My friend and I have been working our way through TerraFirmaGreg (TFC with Create and GregTech, iykyk), and we’ve reached the stage where we need to grind a metric shit ton of metal parts by hand to make low voltage machines. We’re both frustrated with existing macro programs, and I really want to be able to trigger macros from my phone, so I built a macro program that automatically calibrates the offsets for UI elements, and then runs scripts that describe the forging process for any item we want to forge.

Once we work out the forging pattern once, we can just save the macro and run it as many times as we want, even processing entire inventories at a time.

I still need to add key presses (for example, to drop an item), and a few other small things, but it already works. You can check out the code on GitHub. I will also do a write up of the project for my portfolio on my site, so check that out someday. Blog posts take a long time to write.

Conclusion

Hopefully I won’t miss another week, but life does get in the way sometimes. I have a lot of half written blog posts right now, especially my portfolio pieces, so there’s more coming!