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       Happy Easter
       April 05th, 2026
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       Happy Easter, gopher!
       
       I've been on a pretty good run with personal projects and hobbies
       lately. Let me do a little round up!
       
       https://films.tomasino.org
       
       This is my personal film rankings site. I had this idea a while
       back to create a system to track my films and create a master list
       of how I rate them. By using Glicko-2, the chess ELO scoring
       system, I can set films up in little tournaments where they're
       paired up 1v1 and I pick which one I prefer. Then the tourney
       scoring rules shift them around with their new chess scores and my
       list gets more accurate over time. I've got this thing set up
       pulling my watched films list from Trakt.tv, and that's connected
       to my Plex. So it's pretty good at catching most of the films
       I watch automatically. My tourney builder has lots of config
       options, but the defaults are set up to priortize scoring films
       I haven't rated much, or lately, so they get pulled into the
       rankings quickly. Also, when I input a new film it gets a baseline
       ELO based on critic rating, so I'm not scoring everything from 0,
       but drifting it off the norm per my own preferences. I'm really
       proud of this one.
       
       https://www.hellshexagon.com
       
       Hell's Hexagon is another film related site. This is a type of
       six-degrees game where you connect film actors to one another
       through shared films with other actors. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon
       being the original impetus here. This hexagon approach is
       a variant I came up with back in college with friends where you
       need to connect three actors through 3 specific movies in a big
       ring. You can't re-use actors or films and you're trying to get
       the fewest possible steps to complete the hexagon. It's
       six-degrees on hard mode. Try it out! You are allowed to use sites
       like IMDb. That's fine. Treat it as open-book. Play with friends.
       It's more fun that way. Oh, and I set it up to get harder as the
       days of the week approach Sundays, just like crossword puzzles.
       
       https://coach.tomasino.org
       
       My Writing Coach app is one of the most robust open-source
       projects I've put together lately. It's free to sign up, but
       you'll want to bring your own API key to one of the major LLM
       providers. The tool will help you through directed practice on
       focused skills to grow in skill at your particular style of
       writing. I built it for myself to level up my own fiction writing,
       but it's good at business writing, marketing, grant proposals,
       etc. You can have multiple goals if you want, but each has their
       own pathway to growth. The AI/LLM use is minimal: forming prompts
       into clear english, and formatting the deterministic feedback on
       your writing into cogent forms and markup on your writing. The LLM
       doesn't do the grading itself. You can also clone the repo and run
       your own. If you want, you can provide the LLM config for all
       users instead of enabling the per-user API keys. That might be
       nice for a small community.
       
       https://github.com/jamestomasino/beep
       
       Back in the early 2000s there was a project from Nullsoft called
       'beep' that made computery noises when you did stuff on your
       computer. The more memory or cpu usage, the more beeps. This is my
       attempt to recreate that effect. It's written in Ada, because
       that's cool. It works really well on linux. I have a homebrew
       version I'm working on for MacOS, but it's not working well yet.
       I don't have a mac, so I've been coding it in the dark and asking
       friends to try it. I think I may have hit the end of that pathway,
       so I'll consider that functionality on hold until I can get a Mac
       or someone contributes to the project. Anyway, this is a toy app
       and it doesn't do anything other than create fun vibes. Try it
       out! I've not tried it on any BSDs yet. Someone let me know if it
       works.
       
       https://github.com/jamestomasino/vic-cipher
       
       Back in 2008-ish I wrote an encoder/decoder for the VIC Cipher in
       Flash. The guy who wrote the date component i used in the encoder
       reached out recently and asked if i'd ported it into any modern
       tools. I hadn't, so I did. Here it is as an npm package. It'll
       work with deno also. It's the coolest cipher in my opinion, and
       worth playing with. Since it's hand solveable with the right
       instructions, it could make for an awesome thing to include in
       your ttrpg, especially if you use a spy setting. Enjoy.
       
       There's also been some work on https://thehierophant.world and its
       related projects. I'll have to write more on that subject soon.
       Until then, enjoy the fun stuff!