I have too many things going on, and now I’m paralyzed by choice.

I found a really exciting thing at a surplus shop a couple months ago - a weird, totally unmarked circuit board with some surprises that I won’t spoil. High voltage is involved. There was a delay when I blew up a transistor and had to order replacement parts. It was relatively easy to reverse-engineer, but I’m still diagnosing a bizarre problem with it. I’m probably about halfway done with the blog post, and it’s going to be a juicy one.

I bought a damaged ThinkPad T61 on CraigsList about a month ago. It has sat in a cardboard box in about a million pieces while the replacement parts have been shipping from China. Those parts finally arrived this weekend. I have taken this thing all the way apart, and I want to make a post where I show the whole re-assembly process with detailed photos.

I want to get back into my film photography hobby - I have some wonderful vintage gear that’s been sitting on a shelf for over a year now, simply because I’ve been too busy to use it. I’m currently selling some of the lesser-used pieces of my collection, and consolidating that money into a couple of higher-end items I’ve been eyeing for some time. Handling messages from eBay, Craigslist, and various Discord servers is a bigger time sink than I expected.

It would be a bit of a left turn for this blog, but I’d love to write about analog photography from time to time. Maybe some equipment teardown posts, deep-dives on various vintage camera bodies and lenses, and/or a deep dive into at-home film development.

Eventually I want to get back to developing an open-source IoT hardware/firmware architecture that doesn’t suck. I think I could really make a difference in a field that suffers from terminal enshittification. However, I already write enough firmware at work, and I’ve been enjoying doing some non-code things.

In the midst of all of this, the Great Lakes’ April showers (and sleet, and freezing cold) have suddenly disappeared, and I’m not keen on spending our best weather of the year sitting inside, fiddling with computers and stuff. I’m finally getting back out to the basketball court, and my friends have invited me to their weekly rock-climbing nights. So that’s happening too.

Oh yeah, did I mention that I’m getting married in August?

I’m juggling too many things right now, and all these projects are getting in the way of each other. I have decided it’s up to you. If you feel strongly about one of the projects I mentioned above, shoot a message to this email address. Tell me your thoughts.

I don’t collect analytics of any sort, so I can’t be sure that anyone reads this blog at all (though my AWS bill would indicate that someone reads it). If it’s crickets for the next few days, I’ll just pick something at random.