In this post, I’ll outline this multi-zone clock project, and how I was able to rescue it from unused purgatory (*sort of, see end). In a planned followup, I’ll outline my more general thoughts on what it’s like to work with AI for programming hardware projects. So, you know, subscribe not to miss it.

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The (Defunct) Project

Some years ago, I had the idea to make a clock with several faces on it, allowing me to keep track of what time it was for friends and business associates around the world. It’s not a new idea — you’ve probably seen some version of this on a movie or TV show, depicting a command center of some sort with clocks set to different regions — but mine would be an all-in-one temporal monitoring solution that I never had to worry about.

What I came up with used an ESP32 chip to connect to the local WiFi network and then auto-magically set the time via NTP (Network Time Protocol). It then displayed the time using a series of addressable LEDs (SK6812) on a printed circuit board (PCB), arranged to imitate four old-school 7-segment displays — like what you might remember from the Back to the Future era (maybe in that actual movie, I’m not sure).

After quite a bit of experimentation, I was able to diffuse the LEDs through the top of another PCB, along with a 3D-printed light separator grid thing to keep the photons in their respective areas.

The problem (It sort of worked)

Long story short, the hardware could nominally display three times. I took it to a Maker Faire, and people thought it was neat. At least one person said he’d buy something like it.

However, it was far from perfect, most notably, it couldn’t automatically handle time changes. And the LED matrix below the digits was largely an afterthought. It just showed random lights that looked pretty but didn’t mean anything. Perhaps I’d get back to this project eventually… but a year or two later and it was still turned off after missing its designated time change.

Just ask Claude… to program firmware?

Today (or maybe a month ago, things are changing so fast) vibe coding has/had something of a bad name. And if code it made for the pure informational space (e.g. generate a webpage, modify a database) was questionable, how could it handle/understand how my physical circuit board interacts with a multitude of LEDs arranged in a rather complicated pattern?

Add to that the more complicated challenge of interacting with a WiFi network, and one would have to assume that it couldn’t effectively code hardware in the real world without a lot of virtual handholding.

Nonetheless, in our conversation, John assured me that it could indeed do this sort of thing, and that when he asked it to help him with a robot project that he hadn’t touched in some time, it fixed a persistent motion problem for him. I was skeptical, but the clock was an excellent test case, and I went ahead and asked Claude to help me out.

It did indeed solve my time change problem, and much more (again, see my note at the end). Here’s a short clip of it in action👇

Claude fixed the critical time change issue. It also helped me add the below features and more:

• 9x3 Matrix display (lower-left) shows hours left in the day in each zone in colors corresponding to the time of day in an 8x3 (24 hour format). Includes an animation where when the hours change, the no-longer-needed pixel/hour appears to shoot to the right, then up and off the screen.

• Optional “Breathing” separators between the hours and minutes on each face. (Though this seems to induce some intermittent bugginess)

• OTA (over-the-air) update functionality: while before I had to physically connect to this device to program it, I can now update the code via WiFi.

• Update script: I had Claude make a script with various update options that I can run in my MacOS terminal. I just specify characteristics from a list of options (change brightness, separator breathing, etc).

Of course, even with THE POWER OF AI, there were a few features that I ultimately decided to leave off. Plus a few bugs:

• Fourth clock face: I had a fourth board in a not-quite-working state, but when I fixed it and added it on, things were somewhat buggy. Also, I’m not comfortable with the amount of power four faces draw together (at 85 LEDs/face).
  
  From a usability standpoint, three faces seems like a nice straightforward configuration. As of now, faces for the US West Coast on the left, US East Coast (my location) in the middle, and China (all of it) on the right seems like just the right number.

• I wanted to generate a local web page where I could modify settings via a browser window. Unfortunately, browsers tend to be quite finicky about accessing sites without https://. Through no real fault of Claude, I eventually concluded this was more trouble than it was worth.

• The LEDs flicker, and sometimes the time gets a few minutes off. Today, as I was writing this, I had to unplug it and plug it back in. Frustratingly, this is all rather intermittent, and I wonder if it’s a hardware problem.

The ultimate programming knowledge/intelligence tool?

Note that I was initially using Claude’s free Sonnet 4.6 model via the web interface. There is a better model and ways to use it, but that seemed good enough to at least try things out.

I plan to go over some additional thoughts in a followup post, but the obvious question becomes: Is AI good for everything? Is knowledge work dead? Is the era of thinking over? Are we even going to be able to think critically in the future? Should I just turn my work and this newsletter over to AI?

To answer that last question, no, I don’t plan to use AI to write this publication, for reasons elaborated upon in the footnotes2

Bottom line: it helped me here

In this case, for someone who is only OK at writing firmware, being able to just ask something (i.e. Claude) to take care of a task is an awesome capability. My clock is now showing me three time zones after a bit of (i.e. significant) back-and-forth, while it was basically a decorative doo-dad on my wall a few weeks ago.

To wrap this post up, AI allowed me to improve on something in a manner that is way beyond my current programming abilities. If you’re stuck on a project and want an easy button, Claude may just be that appliance. That said, there are some BIG caveats to this paradigm that I’ll outline in an upcoming post. Subscribe👇 to get it sent straight to your inbox!

Pre-publication update 4/28/2026

I originally wrote this post a few weeks ago and things looked good-ish (I saved it to publish later as I tend to do). Between writing and publication, it seems the clock still has some intermittent errors as noted above, most notably that I can’t be sure it’s displaying the correct time, which is obviously a big deal.

It also seems like Claude wants to let me pick its programming brain less and less for free. So, for now, it’s disconnected/off. Thought I should go ahead and put that out there, even if the the clock is much cooler in some ways.

Not a great endorsement. Anyway, stay tuned for my full followup! -JC

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Another post for your edification:

Addendum/Footnotes:

Not entirely coincidentally, I got a new air conditioner. Like the old air conditioner, it drips quite a bit of water out of a pipe on the side of our house, formed as heat and moisture is extracted from the air.1 While this water normally goes to waste, it doesn’t have to. Thirsty plants would be grateful for this house-comfort byproduct.

Thus was born my unconventional — and free — irrigation setup. Below I outline four AC-irrigation options, from extremely simple, to a bit more complicated, to… someone else’s idea that involves an electrical condensate pump.

This is PART 1 of a 2-part series about free irrigation water. Subscribe to get PART TWO/DEUX/DOS in your inbox👇

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And/or subscribe if you’re generally into offbeat engineering, real-world builds, practical tech thinking, or just want to support my work.

(0) The simple AC watering solution

Typically, condensed AC water is simply released onto the ground, creating a significant damp spot. In fact, with the cloth pots first seen here2, you could theoretically just place them in the line’s mini-drain field. Or you could position the outlet over the plants for drip irrigation as seen above.

The down sides here are that: A) You’re eventually going to swamp your plant, and B) you have to take the plants to the water, not the other way around.

(1) The (over?) engineered solution

Of course I can’t leave this sort of thing alone. I threaded a quick-disconnect fitting to a 3/4 inch PVC elbow and attached it as shown above, allowing flexible tubing to direct water to nearby plants. Specific details/parts are found here 👉3 if you want to learn more/try this yourself.

Initially, the elbow sometimes fills up and spills, rather than draining directly down the tube. I suspect this has something to do with getting air bubbles out of the tubing, but this behavior eventually seems to stop.

Note that it’s supposedly bad if you accidentally have a setup like what’s shown above, so make sure things drain properly. The extra holes in the 3D-printed fixture below are meant to alleviate such a double-air-lock situation, though it’s just about impossible to see inside.

(2) 3D-printed watering solution

As an alternative, I designed this little fixture to slide onto 3/4-inch tubing and pass water along via a 1/4 inch NPT airline adapter.

It’s designed so that water can build up more here than in an elbow, theoretically providing a bit more pressure to push water into the tubing. It includes a lip feature for water to drip off of, concealing vent holes that help mitigate any potential backup if the normal tubing path isn’t flowing well.

(3) Condensate Pump Solution [Not Mine]

As I considered publishing this, I started to wonder if this was a new concept, or if I was reinventing the proverbial wheel and did a quick search around the Internet. My 3D-printed doodad does appear to be new, but I’m not the first person to design his own AC condenser water irrigation setup.

Instructables user askjerry posted his auto-garden over 15 years ago, which uses a pump that allows condensate to build up, which is then pumped onto his plants. While this adds some complication, it gives you lots more options for water distribution versus my gravity-fed method.

He conservatively estimates that his air conditioner puts off in the ballpark of 350 gallons of water each year. That’s a lot of water, and there’s a very good chance mine — and perhaps yours — puts out even more!

Potential drawbacks and risks

First off, like ~all NUC [Novel Use Case] posts, this is a new idea that hasn’t been tested to any significant extent. There may be a reason/s why other people don’t do it this way.

One obvious problem is that AC drain lines often get clogged with biological gunk and/or filter material. You and/or an AC technician may decide to pour chemicals (e.g. vinegar) down the drain line to cleanse such elements. While I suspect biological gunk wouldn’t generally be a problem for plants, vinegar et al might be problematic after application. Also, don’t form a second water lock as illustrated earlier.

It also might be best to avoid watering edible plants. Though given askjerry’s experience, and the state of industrial farming/pesticides, I suspect it is fairly safe.

Clogging is a good argument for the elbow design, as it gives good visibility + an alternative exit path for contaminants + it’s easy to remove for cleaning, perhaps using my 3D-printable vacuum adapter).

Combat drought and dying plants with FREE WATER

Interestingly, the day that I set this up I received an EMERGENCY LEVEL 7 DROUGHT ALERT from the county water czar telling me that, among other things, you were only supposed to run your fountain for four hours a day, and that you shouldn’t wash your car unless it is your watering day. Being on top of things, I preemptively allowed my fountain to dry out months ago.4

My car does need a bath though. Maybe I’ll save up my AC condensate and argue the point to the water judge. -JC

You’ve just read part 1. In part 2 I’ll discuss:

• ANOTHER free water option

• How to water multiple areas

• My preliminary growing results.

Part 3 should get even wilder. If you can believe that.

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Addendum/Footnotes:

>UPDATES AT END OF ARTICLE — TINDIE IS BACK!<

April 15, 8:08 AM, online sales platform Tindie was down. I emailed support there to let them know that their site — where I make a small, but meaningful, portion of my income — was down. And it remains down as of this writing on April 17th, 9:32 AM.

What’s frustrating here is that I really like this platform, and have been involved in it in one way or another for around a decade. I even wrote for their blog for several years before learning PCB design and having things to sell, and have sold hundreds of items there at this point.

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Tindie outage or not, I don’t want to leave this platform, but if they are simply non-functional then I at least have to find an alternative. Website performance was a bit of an issue even before this, and the community aspect of people selling, designing, and collaborating to make cool stuff seems to have dampened in the last few years.

To their credit, Tindie paid out my balance soon before this debacle, purportedly because it had reached a certain threshold. The timing is a bit strange though, and I have to wonder if it was in anticipation of whatever is going on now. If so, the did the right thing, but adding a warning to sellers would have been even better.

I was told by support that the site would be back as they were updating things, but that was a few days ago. I sincerely hope they come back better than ever.

Acquisitions and changes

Circa 2015 Tindie was acquired by Supplyframe — which appeared to be good for the platform. Then Supplyframe was acquired by Siemens in 2021. While I can’t say for sure whether this is the inflection point which eventually led to their current problems, it seems that somewhere along the line things stagnated.

Own your platform — or at least have a backup

The general lesson here is that if there is something critical to your business or personal life, don’t wait until things shut down/break to consider alternative solutions. In this case at least, I did a few things correctly:

What I did well:

• I recently put my current best-selling product on another electronics seller site called Lectronz. They have a fairly easy export-from-Tindie setup, but I assume it doesn’t work when Tindie is non-functional.

• The address jcdevices.com was pointed to my Tindie store, which I share in various places. This was easy enough to point to my Lectronz store, so that at least takes someone to an active page.

• While in this case Tindie did it automatically, I made regular withdraws from my account there. Don’t keep too much $$$ in various accounts if you can avoid it.

What I could have improved:

• I don’t have nearly the seller reputation on Lectronz (or any reputation really) as I do/did on Tindie. I probably should have started there some time ago, but you have to start somewhere.

• Sell on my own site and avoid some fees. I.e. own the platform.

• Preemptively exported other products.

Will Tindie be back? [I hope so]

As noted earlier, I hope Tindie will be back1 from this outage and better than ever. Perhaps it will again become the electronics platform that we have came to know and love.

Whatever happens, I hope to keep selling electronics one way or another, and if that means building up my reputation on another platform, that could be beneficial in the end. If you need something from me — i.e. JC Devices — that’s not currently listed, shoot me an email: hi@jeremyscook.com - I am happy to manually take payment and fulfill orders!

Updates:

April 15, 2026 (8:08 AM ET): Tindie is down

April 17th, 2026: Just as I was about to hit publish, Tindie support sent out an update via email. I don’t think anything here is privileged, and it appears to be fairly generic, so here’s an excerpt:

We know how important Tindie is to your work and we sincerely apologize for any disruption this downtime might be causing. Please know that this is maintenance that will benefit our sellers and buyers alike, and we're working incredibly hard to get Tindie back online as quickly as possible.

Think of this as a significant "spring cleaning" and a bit of a glow-up for Tindie! We're laying the groundwork for some really exciting improvements and enhancements that we believe will make your experience even better, more efficient, and more enjoyable in the long run.

So that is encouraging, and probably needed. However, it would have been MUCH better to get such an email a few days ago before anything happened. Fingers crossed that Tindie will emerge as an awesome platform again.

April 18th, 2026 (9:10 AM ET): Still down, same message.

April 19th, 2026 (12:50 PM ET): Still down, same message.

April 20th, 2026 (12:24 PM ET): Saw this message/thread from a day or two ago:

April 20th, 2026 (12:26 PM ET): Still down, same message 5+ days now 🙁

April 20th, 2026 (2:21 PM ET): Saw below from earlier today. Apparently most of the work is complete and they’ll test it and put it live 🤞

April 21st, 2026 (8:02 AM ET): Still down, same message

April 22nd, 2026 (8:33 AM ET): Still down, same message

April 22nd, 2026 (4:21 PM ET): Received another email from Tindie support

We sincerely apologize for the ongoing downtime. Tindie is currently undergoing a more complex-than-expected technical migration. The migration is now largely complete, and the team is working through final testing to bring the site back online in a stable way as soon as possible.
Thank you for your patience and support.

April 23rd, 2026 (7:47 AM ET): Still down, same message

April 23rd, 2026 (8:21 PM ET): Still down, but a semi-official update. Tindie has been sold:

# Announcement

After much back and forth with the community and the team internally, we can reveal a bit more of what’s happening. Tindie transitioned to new ownership on April 14. Due to circumstances beyond the control of the new owners, the site was immediately put into maintenance mode.

Since then, the process of transitioning the site to new infrastructure and upgrading the aging codebase has been ongoing. The intention was, as I originally thought, to do this seamlessly with no downtime. However, once the site was put into maintenance mode and the transition happened. it was decided to take the time to work on the site and get things up to modern standards.

The new owners are genuinely excited about Tindie and what the platform can be. After a year or so on cruise control, we’re finally going to make substantial investments in the platform and community -- something which in my humble opinion is long overdue.

# Timeframe

Again, I still don’t have an exact timeframe for the completion of this work. I know that is what the community wants to know more than anything, and it’s very frustrating that I can’t satisfy your answers about that.

I know that the new tech team is working hard with the Supplyframe team to complete all the transition steps and ensure things are done properly.

# Who Am I?

I figured many of you already know me, but my name is Alexander Rowsell. I’m the editor of the Tindie Blog and the social media manager. I’ve been with Tindie for a few years, and I’ll be around for the foreseeable future. I do embedded development work, but I also really enjoy writing about what the community is up to. It’s always a blast to go through the newest listings on Tindie to see what people are creating!

I’ll be honest with you, I was worried about Tindie over the last few months. I could see that the site needed attention from a professional dev team and was worried the site would break totally before that happened. Well, there has been downtime, but the upside is that the site will be refreshed and ready for the long term. Short-term pain for long-term stability -- that’s where we’re at.

I wanted to write a longer statement, and seeing as how the Tindie Blog itself is down I figured this was the next best thing. To verify this statement is actually from me, I’ve signed it with my GPG key - B5CFBEB4EE9FE813. You can verify this signature by getting the raw text of this post, and verifying the signature using GPG.

April 24th, 2026 (8:02 AM ET): Still down, same message. A whole week 🙁

April 24th, 2026 (9:35 PM ET): Tindie is back! Yay!

April 25th, 2026 (3:11 PM ET): Tindie still up. Quite a bit of discussion on Reddit.

April 28th, 2026 (8:06 AM ET): Tindie still up, and I got an order which I fulfilled with no issue. HOWEVER, when I went to disburse funds it said that was currently unavailable. I hope they figure this out soon.

April 28th, 2026 (8:25 AM ET): Tindie put an official statement about being up on Twitter/their blog.

April 29th, 2026 (8:16 AM ET): Tindie still up. Disbursements still unavailable. Tindie sent out an email about new ownership and the transition. It says, in part:

Dear Tindie Community,

My name is Gongyu Su, and I am writing on behalf of the new Tindie ownership team.

First, we sincerely apologize for the recent downtime and the disruption it caused. We understand that many buyers and community members were left without clear information during the transition, and that this created frustration and concern.

Tindie is now owned by EETree LLC, a Washington State company. Our team took over Tindie because we believe it remains an important platform for makers, hardware creators, engineers, and independent sellers around the world.

So that’s a bit more information. Hopefully things will keep improving.

Thoughts? Insight into the situation? Please let me know in the comments.

If you’re wondering what to do while Tindie is down, you could [still] always read👇

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Addendum/Footnotes:

I usually don’t cover news per se, but I’ve seen very little about this. I may update this page over time, but wanted to get it out ASAP. Please forgive any typos, or better yet, let me know via email/comments/etc.

1

So I hope:

In all of these cases, I was/am able to bring a high degree of technical competence to the table via my engineering education and experience. However, in the age of generative AI, Internet writing as a profession has changed significantly.

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As it just so happens, AI can summarize other people’s work really well. AND it can write an SEO-optimized article that is an amalgamation of primary sources much faster — and less expensively — than I can. So why use a technical expert/writer, or even a generalist writer, when AI can do the job sufficiently well?

There are still good reasons to use a real, human technical writer. But not necessarily the same reasons as five years ago.

BE the SOURCE of truth for AI

Consider a recent chat of mine with Claude, where I was trying to get information on a temperature logging sensor. The source of its information looked very familiar:

Yes, some percentage of the facts that Claude spouted back to me were actually written by ME a few years prior. And upon further inquisition of Claude, I decided that the BMP180 temperature/pressure sensors that I HAD ALREADY ordered on Amazon was inferior to an MCP9808 device that it informed me about.

I immediately got a refund on my original selection, and added the new (more expensive) device to my cart. This sort of purchasing behavior influence seems like something that could, perhaps even should, be monetized.

However, neither Claude, nor my publisher, or even myself, got credit for this sale in the traditional page view/cookie sense.2 But it DEFINITELY led to a change in my buying habits. Getting some fee and/or commission advertising and ultimately driving sales is arguably the way the idea of the Internet has been funded through the years. The question is how do you, as a writer or marketer (technical or otherwise), get paid for it?

Authority marketing & published expertise for non-humans

In a (future?) world where AI “search” dominates people’s buying decisions, the way to market your thing X is to get AI to recognize that X is indeed a good fit for use-case Y, Z, and Q.

And how do you do that? By publishing informational, authoritative articles on respected websites. Similar to what was happening with SEO before, but now the goal can’t (just) be for people to actually see your product X on various sites, but for AI to be taught that X is, again, a good fit for Y, Z, and Q via your writing.

One problem with this is that it is (seemingly) much more difficult to directly gauge what kind of effect you’re having via metrics like impressions or click-through rates. OTOH, a company, literally called Gauge, attempts to do just this. It seems there are others, though this is a bit of a new concept to me, and I haven’t looked into such services extensively.

Marketing in this new world will have to be something of a longer-term play, cementing a product’s authority in the AI zeitgeist. In my mind, this means companies with fairly deep pockets to spend on marketing, and a bit of patience. Jeremy Cook, and his Techadjacent newsletter, are excellent resources for high-value technical writing and effective AI optimization (AIO).3

Non-sequiturious plug aside, if you’re on a bit of a shoestring budget, and your product doesn’t have a lot of competition, you can always self-assert your authority and point to your own device. As seen below, Claude does know about my rather niche Arduino Opta I2C adapter, apparently based based largely on things that I’ve written.

AIO + SEO ≥ SEO

Given what I do, I’m in a bit of unique position to AIO my own wares. And in all seriousness, if you do need someone to help give your technical thing an authority boost, I am happy to talk (hi@jeremyscook.com). Whether you need my services or not, this shift is something to consider.

I say if you have unique expertise in something — technical or not — lean into that. Also lean into your personality/personal experience. At the very least, you’re an expert on your own life.

And no, I don’t consider myself to be an expert in AIO, GEO, or even SEO. This article is based on my observations, a tiny bit of research, and small snippets of conversations with two other people much more knowledgeable in the area than I.4

-JC

Techadjacent is where I share engineering ideas, builds, and practical tech analysis. Subscribe to get the next post in your inbox — published weekly👇

[I’ve got another AI post scheduled about programing an ESP32-based device with Claude, so don’t miss that]

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Addendum/Footnotes:

1

Such projects include:

• Things I sell on Tindie

• This off-grid cellular water level monitor

• This 3D-printed guitar that was a hit at the Autodesk University 2025 trade show

The short answer is likely NO if you’re not counting your time, and DEFINITELY NO if you pay yourself Florida’s $14/hr minimum wage. Per a quick search on Amazon, Ping-Pong tables are around $400, or a bit more at sporting goods chain Dick’s. If you can find a used table — or even a broken one to repair — all bets are off. Just buy it and have fun playing.

BUT, buying means you won’t have the fun of seeing the table come to life in your garage! There is, however, an elephant 🐘 in the room that we need to address. Likely the reason we don’t see similar builds more often:

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The geometric (9x5) challenge

The official top dimensions of a Ping-Pong table are 9 x 5 ft. Plywood is generally sold in sheets of 8 x 4 ft, and good luck getting anything bigger than that home in the car. This is a problem.

The solution: Get the two sheets cut as show below-left at your local wood repository; then arrange the pieces as shown below-right.

This sort of assembly does leave you with two seams, six inches from either side of the net. However, the frequency of the ball hitting there is fairly low, and you can smooth things out with paint, filler, and glue. However, you can’t fold the table up for storage or practice. Still, I’d list these as acceptable tradeoffs.

2x4 and 3D-printed frame

The frame that supports the plywood is made out of 2x4s, arranged so that the two longer top members are 8’ lengths — no cuts, since they come that way from the store. The cross members are 4’, or half that — so one cut. Angled wood supports were added later, and adding these helped immensely with stability. The lower horizontal supports are… purely theoretical a this point.

The green pieces are 3D-printed helpers that…. help with frame assembly, and are designed in such a way that you can stable through them into the top plywood. This allowed me to assemble everything upside down without disturbing the play surface. Once flipped into place, I painted the surface green with a roller, and added lines around the edges and center. This really sets things off nicely.

While the build was nominally successful — and looks great — there were a few things that I would do differently if were to build one again.

The good… and the bad

First, what makes this awesome:

• Paint/playfield color looks great, and the spray-paint lines add a nice effect

• Net support tabs lead to some scoring ambiguity, but keep the posts out of the way - net positive IMO.

• Angular wooden supports make it much stronger.

• Building the frame/surface upside-down on the ground (shown in video) with weight on top facilitated a square assembly.

What I might do differently:

• I used OSB, instead of traditional plywood, which was the wrong choice. While I did save some money using it, plywood would have provided a more even surface that would stay together better.

• Consider using fewer 3D-printed supports, assembling only the supporting frame upside down to make that square. I could then flip it and apply the surface plywood right-side-up with glue (and weights on top).

• If I DID staple/flip again, I would get more help.

• The cover keeps off rain, but if water stays there for a while, it ends up soaking through. Need a better solution for this.

Supports for any table

During this process, I used a leftover 3 x 3’ section of OSB for a nice mini table/prototype. This allowed me to test the screw-in-place corner supports on a smaller scale.

While not everyone needs a ping pong table,1 many people would like a way to make a simple coffee table, card table, or even dinner table with inexpensive wood. This was inspired by the 2x4 Basics legs that I’ve used in the past, which are apparently no longer available on Amazon. It appears they are, however, available on 2x4basics.com.

Was this worth it?

On a purely money/time basis, the answer was certainly no. I maybe saved $100, and put in at least 20 hours of work. However, it’s fun to use, and I take some satisfaction in the fact that I made it when I see it on my porch with its custom base coloring and spray-painted lines.

If I were to reframe it as… a functional piece of art, the answer becomes “yes, definitely worth it.” Also, I get to write about it here.

Of course, one has to also consider the next best alternative. If I didn’t make this, would I otherwise spend my time watching TV? If so, that’s a vote for DIY. If you have an opportunity to do something more productive and/or enjoyable, then just buy a table. Being self-employed, my opportunities for monetary profit vary greatly on a day-to-day basis. It’s nice to have something that I can work on as I have time.

Video & Build Specifics

If you’re considering building your own and/or want to see the results, check out the video. A bill of materials is below that, and the cutting diagram for Lowe’s/Home Depot/etc was shown earlier in the article.

Bill of materials:

• (2) 4x8 sheets of OSB cut to diagram (recommend better wood if possible)

• (7) 8’ 2x4s

• 1-1/4 inch wood screws

• 2-1/2 inch wood screws

• 2x6s (optional - handle/storage)

• Paint

• 3D-printed table assembly helpers

• 3D-printed net spacers

• Net/Paddle kit [Amazon]

• Ping Pong table cover [Amazon]

Enjoy! -JC

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I didn’t see it when it was originally broadcast, but, as shown below, it starts out with a nice shout-out of my work. Then it takes on a more ominous tone:

This might seem unnecessarily harsh — from a network known for children’s and/or nonsensical/child-inappropriate content after a certain time at night — but keep in mind that this was early 2021, and the world was still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. People, and even cartoon networks, were still a little on edge.

Reactions varied from concerned, to impressed, to indifferent when I proudly shared this accomplishment. However, neither SpideyAtLaw, nor any Cartoon Network legal henchmen ever got in touch with me.

Perhaps the statue of limitations will run out soon. Or…

…would have if I hadn’t just posted a picture of Ignignokt, beautifully spray-painted on top of my office whiteboard. My contact info is at the end of this post if you’re with Cartoon Network and just haven’t gotten around to figuring out how to get in touch.

Also, 2007 Boston Mooninite Panic

While I meant no difficulties, perhaps it’s also relevant, or at least interesting, that this isn’t the first time that Ignignokt and/or Err (the other Mooninite character) were involved in legal hot water. Per Wikipedia:

On the morning of January 31, 2007, the Boston Police Department and the Boston Fire Department mistakenly identified battery-powered LED placards depicting the Mooninites, characters from the Adult Swim animated television series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), leading to a massive panic. Placed throughout Boston, Massachusetts, and the surrounding cities of Cambridge and Somerville by Peter “Zebbler” Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, these devices were part of a nationwide guerrilla marketing advertising campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters.

Yes, people thought that these LED signs were some sort of explosive devices. And yes, the title of the movie was Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters.

Given Mr. ‘Nokt’s rude gesture, and the black tube on the bottom, one can perhaps sympathize with the reaction. Per Wikipedia, Turner Broadcasting (i.e. then-owner of The Cartoon Network) and marketing organization Interference had to pay a total of $2 million dollars to compensate the Boston Police Department and the Department of Homeland Security for their efforts.

That’s a lot of money, especially considering the movie’s budget was $750,000. Film costs included paying for some rather impressive voice talent, like Tina Fey, Fred Armisen, and H. Jon Benjamin2. I actually did see it in the theater, though IIRC we mostly had the showing to ourselves.

Why this story?

#1 — It’s April fool’s day… and even though it is true that my work was featured/threatened on Adult Swim, the whole thing is a bit farcical and entertaining. I’m 99% sure they never intended to sue me. I’m only 60% sure SpideyAtLaw is an actual lawyer, and that entity’s tweets are now obscured from public view.

#2 — Sometimes it crosses my mind how cool it was that my work was seen on Adult Swim, but then I have a hard time finding it on Twitter/X. This should make it easier for me to say, “Hey there it is.”

#3 — If you’re impressed with someone who had his work… featured/threatened on cable TV, I’d encourage you to subscribe to this newsletter👇 Or subscribe even harder, share, or even leave a comment if you’re already receiving the Tech Adjacent e-rag.

Thanks for reading. We will return to your regularly scheduled Tech Adjacent programming next week. -JC

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My promised contact info: hi@jeremyscook.com, (813) 421-0852, or reply back to this email.

2025 April Fool’s post:

Possible meanings:

• At this point AI slop will be indistinguishable from human work. Admittedly, humans write a lot of slop too. Pre-2028 at least you can plausibly prove that a human made some piece of content/code/etc.

• In 2028, OpenAI plans to pay $$$ Internet creators for all of our hard work on which it trained its AI. Or stole, if you’re feeling spicy. I won’t hold my breath, but one can always hope.

• OpenAI sees this as the date when artificial general intelligence, or AGI, becomes sentient and makes all knowledge work done before this antiquated.2 I’m not sure why this would make previous work valuable. There’s lots of old stuff that I don’t want, and it’s not like humans won’t be able to write/think anymore (hopefully). Or…

• By 2028, we’ll be so coddled by AI that we’re no longer capable of making good knowledge things. And after the war between the machines and mankind it will be hard to find written textbooks and literature as the OpenTerminators actively eliminated them a la Fahrenheit 451.

• Paul Graham just made this quote up.

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Whatever, if anything, this supposed quote means, one thing is for certain: If you create content online and want people to respect you—or merely acknowledge your humanity—the time to establish yourself is now. Or 10 years ago would be even better, but per our current understanding of spacetime, that would be impossible.

The currency of humanity and work in the real world

If you have established, or manage to establish, yourself as a human expert—or even just a semi-coherent human—you have earned something valuable: people’s trust. Perhaps that’s what we should take away from this. Whether the ALLSLOP FUTURE comes in 2028 or 2030 (or even if it never comes) establishing trust from your readers/audience is important, and will likely get harder and harder.

If you establish online trust, never, ever break it. It will be hard or impossible to get back. I touch on this in my previous should use AI art in blog posts article. As great a tool as AI art can be, the tradeoff in reader trust just isn’t worth it.

Welcome to the real world

In 2025, I wrote the verbosely titled: Will AI Eliminate Art and Creativity Like Robots Automated Mundane Physical Tasks? I wish I had better news, but from my current 2026 vantage point, I don’t see this trend reversing. Perhaps creative and business activities rooted closer to/in the real world that still takes some intelligence will be the path to success in the future. I’m guessing that plumbers, surgeons, painters, and electricians will still be in demand over the next few decades, even as their tools continue to evolve.

And lest you think this ALLSLOP FUTURE is limited to those of us who type on a screen, the AI Eliminate post features a video of AI Will Smith eating spaghetti and then a hamburger. I was extremely impressed, even if the clip wasn’t quite perfect. In related news, Val Kilmer is slated to play a role in the upcoming movie: As Deep as the Grave. From beyond the grave. As an AI actor. One might argue this is creepy, or even that it’s been done before (e.g. CG Princess Leia). But on a practical level, likely it will represent a level of AI video quality that is difficult to distinguish from… THE REAL WORLD.

In a strange way, I feel like the Internet is eating itself, especially as a means of self-expression. If you put yourself on screen, no one will know if it’s you, or if the representation is even an actual human. If type, AI can do the same thing much faster.

But if you can somehow establish your humanity (ideally now), what you have to say would have more value. Perhaps we’ll see a return to paper magazines and mix tapes for authenticity. Or maybe people will accept their new AI overlords and entertainers. After all, with the right prompt and enough training/computing power, the perfect movie/piece of content is just a prompt away 😀😬😥

People definitely seem to enjoy records these days. I don’t listen to them, but maybe there is hope for humanity. Also, if you believe I’m human and aren’t yet a subscriber, please subscribe to this newsletter 👇 At least you’ll know one actual person online post 2028. -JC

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The short answer might appear to be “no” on the surface. Maybe even an emphatic explicative + no. The real answer, however, is more complicated.

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Design < Buy in Pure $$$ Terms

Consider my portfolio of 3D-printed thingies, found here on Thingiverse. If the equivalent of any of these things was available and I were to buy them, I’d expect the average price would be in the $5 ballpark. Correspondingly, I’ve spent in the ballpark of five hours on each printed design. So at Florida’s current minimum wage of $14/hour I’ve spent $70 on the design + (ballpark) $1 on filament and power.1

So $71, or 14.2 Biggie Bags, based on their now-obsolete $5 standard. Or, coincidentally, 14.2 times as much as just buying something if I minimally valued my time. Not great.

3D-Share > Not 3D-Share

I have 61 models available as of this writing. 61 models x $70 = $4270 of my time that I spent on these, a rather bad deal if the equivalent purchased price works out to $305. However, consider that my models have been downloaded 2,263 times, and if we assume that every one of those models is printed, my time cost per print drops to $1.88.

Of course, I am seriously undervaluing my time in this example, and I get no direct monetary benefit for my individual design time. However, as a whole, the 3D-printing community (including me) does get a huge amount of benefit from designs being available.

Consider that while I may use my design once, I also print quite a few things that someone else designed. I also use open source software a lot (e.g. KiCad, LibreOffice). This isn’t exactly the same thing, but it certainly counts as part of the information sharing/design economy.

You and I don’t have to contribute, but it seems like a good thing to do.

Exactly What You Want for Increased Productivity

Indirectly — and more nebulously, one might say — stuff I design for my office and workspace helps be do things better and faster, thus allowing me to make more money. Have these pursuits increased my productivity by $4270 over time? Actually, I think it might if you take everything into account. Though again, that’s grossly undervaluing my time.

Alternatively, could off-the-shelf solutions get me, say, $3000 of the way there? Maybe, but there’s also some joy involved in optimizing something to do exactly what you want. I could also argue that making such designs sharpens my engineering skills and makes me better at jobs that do directly pay.

Advertising, Direct Sales, sponsorship for actual $$$ Profit

Personal use, and possibly giving some designs away, is where 3D-printed pursuits stop for most people. However, in addition to increasing your productivity, there are ways to make this more directly profitable than by solely improving your life/what comes around goes around. A few ideas, some of which I pursue:

• Advertise Your Web Presence - If a lot of people go to site X to download your designs, if there’s a link to your other content… a newsletter, for instance, they might check it out. It’s certainly a low percentage, but this probably helps with SEO as well.

• Sell your stuff directly - I maintain a store on Tindie, where I mostly sell electronic thingies that I’ve designed. I also have these 3D-printed avocado seed floats for sale, though I’ve only had one order so far. YRMV.

• License Your Design - Hopefully I can talk about this in more depth later, but I recently licensed one of my designs for another company’s use. In theory, this is great, since you don’t have to worry about warehousing etc.

• Sponsorship on Printables et al - You can set up your Printables profile to allow people to support you, if you have obtained a level 18 status or greater and have at least 150 followers. You can also ask for an exception if you think you deserve it for some reason.
  -I supported Mikolas Zuza for a short time in order to build a Hackstercaster derivative that I was getting paid for.2
  -You can also earn “free” filament on Printables. This is nice, but hardly worth the effort required.
  -FWIW, I’m at level 20, but have only 15 followers!

Need help? Don’t want to model things yourself?

I’ve made some rather conflicting arguments here about whether or not you should make your own 3D-printed designs. At the end of the day, if you enjoy it you can probably justify the pursuit if you share designs and/or make a direct profit. If you’re not a 3D-modeling person and still want to contribute to the world of free engineering stuff, there are lots of other open-source outlets that might be more appropriate for your skills and interests (again, e.g., KiCad, LibreOffice).

IF you need something made, and either don’t have sufficient CAD skills to get it done, or if you just don’t want to bother with it, well I know a guy. That’s right, I’m the guy. And yes, we can negotiate my rate in Biggie Bagz👇 Though they’re $6 now. Or maybe $4. Also I do a lot of technical writing. Like what you see here, but generally a bit more serious in tone. Get in touch if I can help you with anything: hi@jeremyscook.com, leave a comment, or just reply back to this email if that’s how you’re reading this. -JC

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The killer application for pneumatics is that very fast and powerful linear actuators can be had in the low-two-figure range if you poke around online, or likely a bit more from well-known industrial suppliers. The big tradeoff is that you need an air compressor — something that isn’t exactly standard, but that many DIY types have, including myself. For experimentation per an upcoming class that I’m giving, I decided to spend the ~$50 required for a simple pneumatic actuator setup.1

What do you need to pneumatically actuate?

As noted, most fundamentally you need an air compressor. I had one for a few years from Harbor freight that was ~$30 IIRC, which eventually broke. It was also extremely loud. The Makita compressor that I have now cost something like ~10x as much money, but is much quieter and… still works. I guess you get what you pay for.

Once that is sorted, my relatively simple pneumatics components bill of materials (BOM) is as follows:

• 5-Way Solenoid Valve

• Air Hose Fitting

• 6mm Tubing Kit

• 20mm Bore 100mm Stroke Air Cylinder

• Flow-control valves (optional)

With these parts in-hand, I connected the air lines as (mostly) shown in the image above, then hooked the solenoid valve’s wires up to an Arduino OPTA PLC’s built-in relay. The PLC was programmed with an extremely simple “relay blink” sketch. I.e. the relay simply cycles on or off every second.

As shown in the video below, the results are quite impressive, at a rather low cost. It can push with a force of the piston’s surface area x the applied air pressure. So here it would be 3.14 x 10mm^2 x 100 PSI. Doing the math/conversions yields 48.7 pounds on the outbound stroke.2 So about 50 pounds for $50. Not bad at all!

Of course, that doesn’t include the cost of the air compressor, which was already purchased, and has been extremely useful for so many reasons. I highly recommend this type of tool, even if you start with a cheapie.

While I think making a cylinder actuate is fun in and of itself, I do have a few pneumatics project ideas.

Why/what comes next?

If nothing else, this video and/or experimentation will be a nice bit for a class I’m going to give.3 It’s also a good demo of the Arduino OPTA, and perhaps something that will drive sales of my I2C/serial/MIDI breakout.

Perhaps the most obvious other idea I have for this tech is constructing a robotic drummer. While one might correctly say that this has been done before, I’ve yet to put my own spin on it. I think I could do a good job, though it would be hard to beat Kolja Kugler’s One Love Machine Band:

Of course, there are about a million things one can do with pneumatics, it always seems like my project list needs to contract, not expand. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. Be sure to subscribe below for further updates… air-powered or not! -JC

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This summer, however, they both joined organized basketball teams and asked me to coach. While #1 might still apply, I did play for my (very small) high school, then recreationally in college and beyond. So the #2 excuse was out the window. I agreed to be an assistant coach on both their teams. I have some thoughts.1

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So what is coaching kids like?

Short answer: it’s a lot of fun. Imagine being that parent on the sideline that’s always yelling at his kid, other kids, and the referees. That guy (and usually it’s a guy) is being obnoxious and needs to calm down. But some part of you wants to be that guy, and as a coach you’re actually supposed to be that guy.

Think the ref made a bad call? Let him have it! Did Jimmy miss the rebound because he was out of position or didn’t get his hands up? Let him know! Loudly, because how else will he hear you? CAVEAT: any feedback should be offered with respect and sans personal insults both to kids and referees. At the end of the day everyone is (should be) there to learn and have fun (and/or make a little money as a ref).

It’s also incredibly rewarding. Kids that are newer to the sport can make gains in ability in a very short time in part because of your guidance. You set the tone for the team and how they play. In my role as an assistant coach, I didn’t dictate plays or overall strategy, but largely focused on individual tactics to make sure kids were in the right position for rebounds, defense, and shooting.

So while I’m still grateful to my kids’ coaches for the time they put in, I now realize that it’s not actually a sacrifice for most of them. I suspect they’re having a great time. So does someone “give up” X hours/week to coach? It depends on the next best alternative. It it’s watching TV, probably not. If there’s something more productive and/or enjoyable on the table, then possibly.

What do I focus on as a coach-engineer?

There are a few things I focus on while coaching that I think are analogous to my former and current work as an engineer. My thoughts:

• High percentage strategy (individual shots don’t matter): At this level the kids will take (and miss) a lot of shots. I try to get the kids taking the right shots, getting rebound for a second shot, and doing other things that may or may not pay off in an individual situation, but that over the long term will win games and seasons.
  
  Sure that extra rebound by the kid that shoots 20% might not produce points, but 10 of these actions over a season can be the difference between wins and losses.
  -At the same time, I suspect top-class competitors like Michael Jordan, Caitlin Clark, or LeBron James would disagree somewhat. That buzzer beater in game XYZ does mean a lot, and appears to be the focus of great players. However, the overall team strategy got their teams and them into a position to hit the game-winning shot.
  
  As an engineer (in manufacturing automation) you have to deal with emergencies in a hands-on manner (game-winners, so to speak). But the bigger issue is how you deal with systemic issues, making sure that preventive maintenance get done, spares are on-hand, and other unseen details are sorted out that help things run well most of the time and eke out a few extra percentage points of production. Sort of like that extra rebound, or perhaps even points, that Jimmy gets because of your advice.

  

• Develop weaker players: On the 11-year-old’s team, there were a few excellent players, other players that were competent, and some that were new to the sport. The exciting thing as a coach is that the n00bs can literally become twice as good as they were before in a season, eventually making a small, but real, contribution to the team. That aspect was really fun.
  
  This was perhaps slightly less evident an the 8-year-old’s team, but the general concept would apply.
  
  This is similar, but not quite the same as Pareto analysis where 80 percent of your results (or problems) come from 20 percent of your inputs. One can reverse this and see that your best 2/10 players will likely make most of your points. Unlike the n00bs, your coaching isn’t going to make them much better individually in a month or two, though you might be able to help them play better with a team.

Other Interesting Aspects of Coaching

• These electronic “whiteboards” are pretty cool

• As someone who works from home by himself the vast majority of the time, it’s cool to be in a group striving for the same goal. There’s a real sense of camaraderie, even if you’ll ultimately all go your separate ways after a month or two.

• Parents generally appreciate you. So that’s neat.

At the end of the day, both my kids teams did quite well, winning more games than they lost. Unfortunately, the older kids lost in the first round of the playoffs per a combination of them not playing well, and the other team playing well plus hitting some rather unlikely shots. While I doubt it would have changed the game’s ultimate outcome, my son had to sit out that game per a jammed finger. The younger kids made a good effort at the end, though they didn’t ultimately win the tournament either.2

Get out there!

Maybe you weren’t a high school athlete. Maybe you didn’t play your kids’ particular sport. If they’re young enough, it doesn’t really matter. With a bit of research you can be competent enough to coach a kids’ team. It will likely be a lot of fun for you, and certainly meaningful to them. -JC

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2

Some months later, my daughter’s soccer team won third place (out of four teams) in their league’s end-of-season soccer tournament. The scene looked like👇 Being a kid isn’t always fun… but sometimes it is.

The resulting guitar is shown above, with build details available on Hackster.io (which commissioned this project) and any future mods to be published on Printables. You can even (in theory) mix-and-match parts from the original and my design for something truly unique.

The question is who owns my new design? Is it me? Hackster? Original author Mikolas Zuza? Anyone? Does it even matter? Am I being overly legalistic even worrying about this? I have thoughts.

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What is the point of open-source designs?

First, I don’t think you have any moral obligation to release your designs as open source. However, I’ve benefitted greatly from open-source projects like KiCad, LibreOffice, and a wealth of other software and hardware designs — way too many to name if I even knew the name of all of them. So it seems like a good thing to “pay it forward” and advance the ecosystem.

There are several good reasons to put your design out there for free, including:

• Let others make your thing and enjoy it

  • Chances are your new device… let’s just call it a butter-opener fork won’t get enough commercial traction to make it worthwhile (though maybe you can sell in multiples). And if you design and make something for just yourself, it likely won’t be worth your time.

  • However, if you put it out there for those 100 people who would like a butter-opener fork, and who can print it themselves, you’ve made the world just a tiny bit better while enhancing your reputation… just a tiny bit.2

• Let others build on your design & even give you feedback

  • Maybe the butter-opener fork would benefit from a spoon on the handle. As an open-source design, someone (lets say Jill) can just add that in and post it as a “remix” of your design.
    -I’ve done this myself, in the form of split Harbor Freight bin (my most popular design on Printables).

  • Someone may suggest a change to your code and/or CAD model that you can directly integrate into your own design. A win for everyone.

The problem — for (overly?) honest people

So what happens if someone (Jack) takes the butter-opener fork/spoon made by Jill and tweaks it to the point where it can be a commercial success? If you put it out via a non-commercial license, Jack (apparently) can’t use the design, even if he was to give you a cut of the profits… unless he also negotiates with Jill, who perhaps can’t be contacted for whatever reason.

No one can then profit from Jack’s design, and people can’t get the improved butter-opener fork/spoon that they so need and deserve, except for those that are willing to print it themselves. Or, someone less scrupulous(?) might just make the butter-opener fork/spoon and sell it, daring you, Jill, and/or Jack to sue him.

Which you won’t, because it’s really not worth the hassle… and is it enforceable/legally binding anyway?3 In theory, if your design is artistic, it could be subject to copyright, but something that is purely functional is not. Defending your presumed rights to such a design, even in the case of large guitar companies that have real money to loose, is fraught with difficulty and expense.

What is commercial use?

At it’s most obvious, commercial use of a design is making something (often 3D-printing it) and selling it — even if the author says this is a no-no. But what does “commercial” include?

When I made my new guitar, it was for a giveaway, and the product was mostly the video and media having to do with it. Here I would lean toward the “it is commercial” stance, because I was effectively selling it to someone. But what about the many YouTube channels that take an open-source design, make it on camera, credit the author, then profit via the video? I doubt all of them have an agreement with the original author.

What about if you have a commercial shop and need somewhere to, say, store batteries?👆 You see a design online, print it out, and use it as intended. You’re making profit off of this indirectly, but aren’t selling it per se. I don’t think this is what’s meant by “commercial use,” though you could certainly make the argument that it is.

I certainly wouldn’t sue, or probably even complain, if a company were to use a few of my designs to help with their processes. Besides, how would I know? There are bigger problems in the world. The general idea of non-commercial use seems to be that you shouldn’t churn out thousands of someone’s design for direct sales, while the original author sees none of the profits (even if it may be legally permissible).

My invention - sold by others without permission (it’s OK)

Years ago, I designed this dust extractor for my CNC router, which became rather popular at the time. I was told that the printed version was for sale elsewhere — without my permission. It kind of made me cranky, but besides a possible email or two there was little I could do about it. Plus, I think I just put it out there without any sort of license originally, so my legal and/or moral rights were tenuous at best.

I wasn’t personally selling it, and it seems that others were there to fill the gap in demand. Perhaps I should have jumped on this opportunity and started turning them out and/or sold the design. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say.

Example: paracord tensioner — an array of “violations”

As a weird example of how this all gets rather convoluted, consider “my” paracord tensioner design, found here on Printables. As I put it in the description:

Modeled this version from scratch, based on the STL found here. Which is apparently based on something called a Loop Alien. Or probably a knockoff Loop Alien, which was then adapted as a 3D-printed device. Wild how things develop. This is released as public domain with CAD files. Enjoy.

In other words, my model is 4-5 iterations removed from the original idea. So it only seemed right to release my design as public domain that anyone can use, and I suspect it doesn’t matter anyway. You can also just buy knockoffs of Amazon, along with the actual paracord. Those tensioners are inexpensive, and certainly way stronger per their aluminum construction.

Does the license actually matter?

Since functional things aren’t generally subject to copyright (even if the files used to make them could be) and you (likely) don’t have a patent on the design, bringing a lawsuit for perceived licensing violations would be fraught with difficulty. One could argue that a functional thing, made from open-source materials, aren’t subject to any sort or restrictions legally speaking, unless there is a contract involved.

Mostly confirming my thoughts, Perplexity’s opinion reads, in part:

• The non‑commercial license on a 3D design file is generally legally binding as a matter of copyright licensing. The problem is that copyright does not cover everything the physical object does or is.

• If the main value of your design is functional, and you genuinely want to control commercial manufacturing of the physical objects, you need to think in terms of patents, trade secrets, or contractual arrangements, not just a NC label.

• If you mostly care about people not commercially exploiting your models or artistic prints (e.g., miniatures, logos, decorative objects), a non‑commercial Creative Commons license can be meaningful and enforceable, especially against obvious commercial re‑use of your exact files and designs.

Of course, this doesn’t mean all uses are morally right, but some entities will respect your non-commercial licensing/wishes. Some likely will not.

While there are reasons that you might want to use such a license and/or state other restrictions, you could also consider simply putting your thing out there as public domain so people can use/modify/integrate your work without worry. Or add a watermark if you really want credit.4

This is my opinion, IANAL

In summary, “owning” a functional design is not as simple as stating your license terms. And unless you’re making cutting-edge chip manufacturing machinery, whatever you made is likely pretty easy to reverse engineer with a good pair of calipers and/or inexpensive test equipment anyway.

As for the guitar, I suppose I own my new modifications in some sense, but not the guitar design as a whole. One might also argue that my mods are more functional than artistic, while Mikolas Zuza’s portion is more easily classified as art. So could he technically produce my design commercially without permission, but not the other way around? I’m not certain. At the end of the day, it’s a bit of a conundrum that wouldn’t be worth litigating. Perhaps the right attitude is: treat designs and each other with respect, but don’t get too hung up on the details.

Please take this article as food for thought. It’s mostly based on my opinions/observations. I have some some limited research for the piece, but not nearly enough to make me an expert in the field! I am not a lawyer, I’m just a guy who likes to make things.

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Addendum/Footnotes:

BUT YOU’RE STILL READING, so you’re at least curious as to how to make things semi-organized in that no-man’s land. Even if you don’t use an Apple TV for streaming as outlined here, I hope the general principles will be useful!

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Quick TL:DR/stuff used - I mounted an Apple TV to the back of my… TV & organized the wiring with zip-ties:

• Apple TV (Ethernet) - a bit cheaper at Costco

• 3D-printed Apple TV mount

• Velcro stick-on strips

• Reusable Zip-ties (yes, you can zip them off, which is awesome)

• In-wall cable management kit

• Extension cord & splitter

3D-printed mounts: ready for download!

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but if you have an idea for something, especially if it involves a popular item (e.g. Apple TV), check your favorite 3D-printing repository to see what’s available. In this case, Printables had several mounts ready to use, and I found one that I could just download and print out in PETG.

Velcro is your organization friend

What can I say about Velcro. Rumor is that it was actually harvested from an alien spacecraft circa 19472, but now it works really well for keeping terrestrial things in place. In this case, a bit of adhesive on the back of the not as fluffy bit attaches it to the TV, while the fluffier portion attaches to the mount itself with a bit more adhesive, allowing the Velcro to work its magic.

One might argue that you could just attach the Velcro directly to the Apple TV or other streaming device. But that seems like rather rubbish work, and you’re gooing up a beautiful piece of hardware. Best to avoid that if possible. As a rule, I tend to use the non-fluffy bit on the more permanent base, i.e. the TV in this instance. You might have a different opinion, but be consistent.

If you need to reposition, just pull it off and add more Velcro-tape as needed. As seen in the image above, I initially installed it a few inches higher and to the right.

Cable management [reusable zip-ties are awesome]

Circa 2020, I ran power/ethernet/micro USB behind the TV via the ECHOGEAR cable management kit listed above. While the Ethernet was largely useless for my ~2010 vintage plasma TV, I’m quite glad I left it there for my Ethernet-enabled Apple TV. Hooking it up was just a matter of splitting the power outlet with an extension, then connecting power and Ethernet to the Apple TV. HDMI then plugs directly into the TV.

This situation is convenient, but leaves a lot of wiring behind the screen that either: A, looks bad, but is hidden, or B, Actually hangs below the TV. If neither is acceptable to you, look no further than the reusable zip-ties listed above. Unlike normal one-use ‘ties, a little tab releases them, allowing them to be reapplied or adjusted as needed.3

A few tips on zip-tie wire organization:

• Lightly zip-tie to begin with, then secure when you have a good general layout for the wiring

• After locking things down, cut the zip-tie ends off at an angle, but leave an inch or so sticking out so that they can be reused if needed.

• Leave enough slack so that wires aren’t tight, and if they will move (e.g. a movable screen mount) that they won’t be tight (or be forced out) in any position.

• Loop extra cable and secure if it’s too long.

I was happy with years-ago Jeremy for leaving the Ethernet cable in place, even though it wasn’t then being used. I did pull out the Micro-USB cable that was previously powering my little Roku player. Maybe that would have been convenient in the future.

Final thoughts? What about the Apple TV?

Long story short, I like the Apple TV. If you want my more complete thoughts, dsee the post below👇👇

I don’t think Apple TVs are the most common streaming devices at this point. However, as other media players and smart TVs become/remain advertising cesspools, I could see them becoming more and more common as long as they don’t pursue that path. So don’t do that Apple. And stop reorganizing my icons while you’re at it.

I hope you enjoyed the article. As we all know, good wiring practice never goes out of style 😎🫡 -JC

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Addendum/Footnotes:

After a few choice words on my end, it eventually sent me to the store where I was put on hold until I hung up. A (pyrrhic) victory for them, as this interaction was successfully dealt with sans human labor.

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But then I called back. I submitted to the AI and asked it if they had a certain type of particle board. As with the website, it said it did not, but noted that they could order it for me. After again begging for a human, getting put on hold, talking to one person, then getting transferred to another person, I was told that no, they did not have it and could not order it. Thanks Mylow.

In a recent post about predicted words of the 2000s (as seen from our 2026 vantage point), I lamented that the term “voice-jail system” hadn’t become prominent in this future-present. As I consider it now, this might not have been a simple case of the wording itself being forgotten, but that things ACTUALLY GOT BETTER… temporarily. As the Internet fully proliferated our lives, returning a product, checking your bank account, or any number of useful tasks often transformed from a voice jail ordeal to a couple of clicks.

Sure, voice jail never really went away, but my gut feeling is that we as a society were spending less and less time in this audible purgatory. Rather than taking this opportunity to make the lower number of calls more efficient, corporations have doubled down on the concept—with the help of AI—to get their voice systems to “accomplish” more, a condition I’ll refer to as AI Jail.

AI Jail has, of course helped make voice jail systems less efficient on average2, while executives likely spin it as somehow saving costs. But consider where else AI has… affected our lives (for the worse):

• This AI Jail system in China automatically names and shames you if you jaywalk. Look for similar frivolous AI Jail automated enforcement coming to your country soon. Perhaps there will even be a version for ambitious home owners associations, automatically judging your grass and issuing fines!

  

  One could make a pretty good argument that this sort of overreach3 has already made it to the USA. Maybe it’s not as bad, but I wonder how USA AI Jail tolerance will shift in the next decade or two. At least Ring can find your lost dog… Or it could — in theory(?) — be used by hackers, government employees, or anyone with the proper access to do all kinds of Orwellian stuff.

• Fast food drive-through ordering is now AI-assisted(?) in many locations! You didn’t want 300 McBurglars? Good luck getting a human to change things around. Fortunately, it misidentified you as that other guy who also happens to have two eyes and brownish hair. He will have to venture into the realm of AI Jail to fight the charges on your behalf.4
  
  I recently went to Wendy’s and Mc-Voice-Jail inquired about what I wanted. I said two Biggie bags, which it got correct. However, when I tried to specify different drinks for each one, that blew its AI warden mind and I had to speak to a Mc-teenager (who, to his credit, did a good job).

• If you receive a long email that is grammatically correct, but maybe a little too wordy, do you read the whole thing out of respect for the time that the sender supposedly put into it? Or do you summarize it via your own AI, maybe missing a few details, but saving you precious seconds?
  
  Or maybe you run it through an AI checker routine to be sure it was written by a human, then read it… But then that takes time, so what’s the point of any of this? Here you’ve put yourself into AI Jail just based on the threat! [Further elaboration]

• While automation used to imply [getting out of] tedious manual tasks, AI can now take care of fun creative stuff that… you now don’t have time for, for some reason! In AI Jail — unlike regular jail, where you stereotypically, read, work out, and play/make up up harmonica-based blues songs — you no longer have to worry about such pursuits, or even finding songs that suit your mood by human artists. Just type in what you want to hear and the music will appear, as if by magic!
  
  AI can even help you work out, according to the commercials. So like real jail/prison, but with extra features!

  

• Verification, verification, verification! I’m not sure this can be blamed directly on AI Jail, but you may have noticed that verification often requires much more work than putting in a strong password. My particular credit union has me verify after logging in, sometimes more than one time during a session.
  
  I suspect they’re trying to catch up to the AI Jail technology employed at larger monetary repositories. At least they haven’t auto-opened any accounts for me (AFAIK).

• While we’re on this subject, who really wants more CoPilot on their computers? Do you really need CoPilot to tell you “do whatever you want, it’s temporary anyway” when attempting to skirt HOA rules during Christmas? I used Windows machines (and Linux for a while) up until ~4 years ago. For this and other reasons, I’m glad I made the switch to Apple. I hope that they don’t go all-in on the same mistake — it might be time to try Linux again.

What do all of these things have in common? AI, a technology that is supposed to save you time, make your life easier, and make business operations more efficient seems to be doing the opposite. Or, at the very least, it’s neutral-ish but annoying while taking a lot of power for processing.

In fact, who’s to say that THIS VERY EMAIL that you’re reading isn’t a product of AI Jail slop expulsion? It isn’t, but wouldn’t I say the same thing if I was an AI? How would you know? How would I even know? Maybe I need to lay off the caffeine.

But no, I don’t use AI to write this newsletter, save for some research duties and questions like “should I use lose or loose” if I were to talk about how I was going to lose my loose use of AI in a sentence. Thanks for reading! -JC5

And if you’re not reading this via email, please sign up below to get the next one in your inbox. More fun and/or educational posts are forthcoming👇

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Even better, use “AI Jail” in a sentence 👆 and when whoever is listening says “what’s that?” tell them that you heard about it on www.techadjacent.io!

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly-ish about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness. -JC

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Addendum/Footnotes:

Roughly 5 years ago my wife sent me to Costco with the vague suggestion that I should see if they had any new vacuum cleaners that we might want to buy. That afternoon I came back with several-hundred fewer dollars in our collective account and a brand new Dyson Cyclone Animal V10 cordless vacuum cleaner.

What can I say, it looked awesome, and I actually started doing the vacuuming for fun for a period of time. These vacuum cleaners work well, but they require some maintenance and/or upgrades to keep them running at peak efficiency. Even so, at some point they wear out beyond economical repair.1

Below I outline my upgrades and fixes for this device, what ultimately did it in, and what we can learn from the process [fix… but not too much]. And no, running over the non-existent cord isn’t what killed it!

Upgrade #1: 3D-printed support/tool storage

The Dyson V10 vacuum comes with a hanging charger/holder. This is ~fine but it only holds two accessories at a time. And there’s no support on the bottom, meaning there is a lot of potential torque on the base if something/someone were to run into it. My response: a 3D-printed support and accessories holder, which also uses my second-favorite assembly tool, zip-ties:

Really that’s the only “upgrade” on this list, unless you count the GoPro mount that I made at the same time for FPV filming.

On a related note, These reusable zip-ties are awesome. Highly recommended.

Maintenance #1 - battery “upgrade”

While rechargeable, the battery for these Dyson vacuums eventually dies. Fortunately(?) Dyson sells replacement battery packs for “just” $129.99. A quick search of Amazon reveals a range of aftermarket parts for around a third of that price that seem to work fine.

According to ChatGPT, Dyson’s original batteries are rated at 2.6 Amp-hours. Mostly identical aftermarket batteries advertise capacities from 3 to 7 Amp-hours, but having replaced a few I haven’t noticed much difference. My suspicion is that they are all the same and they are just putting whatever label they want on them.2

An actual upgrade would be these interchangeable Ryobi battery pack adapters. However, they have the serious drawback of disabling the standard Dyson plug-in-hanging charger. Also, it makes the unit significantly larger. Helpful for some, but it’s probably not for me.

Tip: write the date that the battery went into service on the bottom, giving you some indication when it’s time to move on to a new pack. I haven’t exhaustively tracked this, but if your battery is two years old, it’s about time to move on.

Maintenance #2 - trigger

After a few years of use, the trigger on my Dyson V10 Vacuum broke. This part is a bit difficult to access, but once you’ve taken everything apart it can be replaced by an inexpensive part from Amazon et al. What’s frustrating here is that a little bit more plastic could keep this from happing some huge percentage of the time. Either Dyson didn’t test this (unlikely) or they did and said “uhh, whatever” and/or “wow, this could drive more sales.”3

I’m generally not that cynical about product design for planned obsolescence, but… I’m a bit more cynical after seeing this bit of shoddy engineering..

Maintenance #3 - dirty filter/internals (i.e. starts/stops)

If your Dyson Vacuum starts sucking and immediately stops, most likely it means that there is a clog in the system. The exit filter may need to be washed, or there could be a piece of debris stuck internally that it can’t “digest.” You may even notice that it will start on max, but not on medium or low, quickly draining the battery.

The filter is washable in tap water, which makes this process really easy, though you’ll need to let it dry before using it again. Keeping a second or third filter on hand is a good idea, and they are often included with new batteries as a part of a combo kit.

Once you’ve examined your filter etc, you might also consider the vacuum’s motor. It too can get quite dirty, and in this latest repair iteration I stripped it down [based on this video] to the point where I could give it a good clean. This wasn’t easy, especially considering a few connections that had to be removed and put back on.

A time to repair, a time to replace 🎶

As the Beatles Ecclesiastes/Byrds famously noted, there is a season for everything, and after cleaning the motor and putting everything back together my vacuum still only worked on its Max setting. Perhaps it was a time for a new motor unit.

However, looking at the Amazon motor listings, these parts are either rather expensive, or would take a long time to arrive. Also, in the process of multiple repairs, some of the plastic screw bosses on this vacuum have broken. Finally, internal sealing rings in the dust can section had come loose.4

In other words, my vacuum cleaner was falling apart; like Humpty Dumpty, no amount of tape, glue, king’s horses, or king’s men seem to be able to restore it to its original form. It was time to surrender and procure a replacement. As shown👇 the new V10 does look pretty awesome.

So what have we learned here?

Lesson #1: If you never repair anything (yourself), be prepared to pay a lot of money for replacements. I’m not sure how many vacuum cleaners I would have gone through without a bit of maintenance, but vacuum #1 would have worn out way sooner.

Lesson #2: Keeping stuff in service longer than normal is great from a minimize-things-in-landfills perspective. I wouldn’t consider myself an avid environmentalist, but throwing a comparatively giant chunk of plastic and metal out because of a cracked trigger seems especially wasteful/irresponsible!

Lesson #2A: Related to #2, but targeted at Dyson et al. Stop making the proverbial and/or literal trigger thats going to break after X number of cycles because it lacks a few cents (at most) worth of plastic. Hopefully the new model is better.

Lesson #3: Evaluate when to repair and when to replace. You may love your car/truck/washing machine/vacuum cleaner/trampoline/etc., but at some point you’ve loved it for too long. Or, as the saying goes, “If you love some[thing], you have to let it go [to the dump].”

I’m not sure that is a good general policy, other than as an attempt give a jilted person some sort of solace.5 In the case of worn out things, maybe you’ll feel better about spending the money for a “new one,” whatever that is. Maybe you could also go without, but with a family of five + one canine, a vacuum cleaner is something of a necessity in our household.6

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness.

Any Amazon links are affiliate

Addendum/Footnotes:

1

I also recently replaced my ~15-year-old washing machine with a new LG model, also from Costco. After several repairs over the years, it was squeaking badly and leaking oil onto the floor. The new model, however, works flawlessly, and even has a clear portion on the top that allows you to look down into the load-in-progress. This is extremely cool to look at now, and may be good for troubleshooting in the future.

It was an expensive month, but it’s a great feeling to have things that work as they should. It is also good to know when to surrender to replacement, though I likely exceeded that point for the washing machine.

Fast-forward to today (with an upgrade ~8 years ago), and the Roku interface has devolved from pretty good into an ad-infested swamp. As shown below, your Roku experience might include a guy from Experian trying to step out of your TV to give you unsolicited financial advice, random icons that you didn’t ask for, and other distracting video ads that chew up untold bandwidth.

They claim that, “Roku makes every part of the TV experience better, including the ads.” Which is the sort of garbage that you write as a corporate person and don’t believe. Then you and everyone else go along with even though they don’t like/believe it either, since they want to seem like team players…

…and want to keep having a job since AI is coming for it, etc, etc. Then AI gets taught to emulate said behavior, this drivel gets propagated, and the eventual result is a Terminator-like future where guys dressed like Mr. Rodgers in a purple cardigan1 step out of the TV and literally bores you to death about your credit report.

Long story short, I not only threw my Roku LT in the garbage, but also smashed it in a vise beforehand to prevent Experian-purple-guy from becoming sentient and initiating a bordeom-apocalypse. So without further ado, here is what Roku LT looks like when it’s subjected to a Wilton vise2:

Lest Ye Go The Same Way Apple TV:

So as not to come off as a fan person3, Apple TV isn’t perfect either. It’s not cool that there are apps like Apple Fitness that you can’t delete. Also, no one wants the home screen to go to Apple TV+ (which can be changed). Normally, I would give this device a B-, but if we’re grading on a curve, I guess I have to bump it up to an A.

Most importantly, I don’t think my Apple TV is going to become sentient and send its Roku-purple-guy-analog to torture me. However, secrecy at Apple is supposedly pretty tight, so who really knows?

Alternatively, you could use a single-board computer like the Raspberry Pi for streaming and for Netflix. Something like this Beelink Mini PC (which I bought a few years ago for another purpose) might also work, giving you access to stuff available on Windows (or Linux, if you want to go that route). While I have a few available, setting up a Raspberry Pi for Netflix streaming (as outlined here) appears to be a rather complicated procedure that I didn’t want to take on.

I have more to say about my initial impressions of Apple TV, along with some neat wire management and mounting tricks, but it seemed better to break that up into a separate post 👇👇 Also, no one is literally forcing me to buy any sort of streaming device, sentient or not.4 If you are bored, you could start on the first Tech Adjacent post and read sequentially from there. I’m not counting the “Coming soon” auto-post.

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly-ish about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness. -JC

Any Amazon links are affiliate

Addendum/Footnotes:

2

A Wilton vise, if you’re interested in buying one. It was quite a bit less expensive when I purchased it in 2020. Nonetheless, if you’re from Wilton and would like to sponsor Tech Adjacent, I’m open to offers.

For that matter, if you’re from Apple or Roku your money is green to me as well. And sure, you could argue that smashing my former streaming box was gratuitous.

You’re probably familiar with the concept of a sailor stranded on a desert island who launches a bottle asking to be rescued. Given the lack of GPS, or even accurate maps, in the age of bottle-based communication, I’d put the chances of this being effective at less than winning this week’s lottery drawing.

What if, however, your bottle featured not just a note, but a light inside? This would certainly make the chances of bottle recovery much better. Right?

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Upon asking Perplexity a series of increasingly leading questions, I finally got it to admit that such a light could QUINTUPLE your odds of getting found at sea to… still astronomically bad.1 But what else do you have to do besides talking to a deflated volleyball?

A trip to Costco, a syrup bottle in search of a project

My light-in-bottle journey started not with getting stranded on an island, but the opposite of that — a trip to Costco. There I spotted a rather expensive jug of syrup. Said jug somehow ended up in our cart, leading to a bit of harassment from the rest of my family who didn’t think $20 was worth it for waffle sugar2.

And while it was good, I was only partially interested in the syrup (and how I would slather it on the 196-pack of Eggo waffles that I just purchased, some of which may still be in my freezer). It was the packaging that I wanted, a beautiful flask-like jar with a spring-loaded stopper on the end.

I wasn’t sure what I would do with it when empty, but I knew it would eventually inspire me. And by the time it was empty, I was indeed inspired… to make a light-sensitive beacon that would LIGHT UP THE NIGHT FOR A MILLENNIUM!

How it works [& a millennium, really?]

What I came up with is more or less a equivalent to the light-on-dark path garden lights that you poke into your yard. Except mine uses a supercapacitor, theoretically allowing it to function way longer than a typical rechargeable battery that I believe typical garden lights use (supercapacitors are good for somewhere on the order of 500,000 charge-discharge cycles).

So if it charges up once a day and discharges at night, 500,000/365 = 1369.8 years. Ideally, someone in Y3K will spot it shining in my futuristic former-yard and wonder what my civilization was doing with such light-up device. Maybe it will be the subject of various neuro-podcasts about ancient civilizations, positing various theories about who Jeremy Cook and Kai-Kad were.

Will it really last 1000+ years? For various reasons, probably not. Still, I think it’s a neat design, and, conveniently, I won’t be around at that point to receive any criticism on its failings.

While it costs way more in time and materials than a typical garden light, I didn’t have to pay import duties since the PCB was made in the USA via OSH Park. More importantly, I designed it to be small enough to squeeze into the neck of the bottle — 17.5 mm in width as shown👇. And, again, there’s the supercapacitor.

How it works — Technical-ish details

A simplified3 circuit diagram for the board is shown 👇, which is quite similar to my battery-powered, light-up PCB that I featured in 2025. Explaining things in terms that may or may not seem simple:

• Solar cell SC1 collects energy from the sun4

• Current flows through diode D15 and is stored in supercapacitor C2. D1 only lets electrical current go one way. So this charge is thus stuck in that section of the circuit until it can go through the emitter (1) on Q1 (a PNP transistor).

• Current can only flow through the emitter when the base (2) is at lower voltage than the emitter. So when C2 is sufficiently charged, and the solar cell (SC1) drops to a lower voltage when the sun goes down, a little bit of current is allowed to flow from the emitter to the base. Per the way transistors work, this allows even more current to flow from the emitter (1) to the collector (3).

• Current exiting the collector travels to the resistor R2 (which slows down the rate of energy usage) then through LED D3, producing actual light.

Is that simple? Hopefully it’s at least follow-able. It took me a longer time than I’d like to admit to understand transistors and this particular circuit. If you too find it confusing, I sell these handy PNP and NPN transistor coasters for your edification and/or as a gift !

A good project? Things I would change?

I do think this was a very cool project, which could act as sort of ambient art piece for decades to come. OTOH, I wish I’d kept track of what resistor R2 I used and/or implemented a smaller value so that the LED was brighter for a shorter time. As it is, it shines for several hours, but it’s not very bright.

But the circuit is literally stuck in a bottle, and I’m not sure if I want to fish it out. Perhaps I’ll experiment more with the other PCBs that I received.

Bringing things full circle, if you’re stuck on a desert island, these techniques might increase your odds of getting rescued from the equivalent of winning two lotteries in a row to just a single drawing.6 If that happens, it’s a good thing you subscribed to the Tech Adjacent newsletter and shared it with all you friends👇👇

PCB designs are available here on GitHub. -JC

Techadjacent is where I share engineering ideas, builds, and practical tech analysis. Subscribe to get the next post in your inbox — published weekly👇

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Thanks for reading! I hope you follow along on this Techadjacent journey. Fair warning: I can and do get a little off-topic in the footnotes.

Note: Some links may be affiliate

Addendum/Footnotes:

To address your preconception, straw person1, yes, my primary income comes through writing. Largely writing that draws from “a deep understanding of a variety of technical subjects” according to my profile page. I don’t get paid directly from this Tech Adjacent Substack newsletter, though I suspect it has helped open up some opportunities. I have a few other sources of income as well.

I don’t expect you to be interested in me per se. However, I hope that explaining how I make money as an independent technical content creator, and what has worked for me in 2025, will be instructive for you.

2025 Income:

First, let’s break down my income sources:

1. Contracted writing

2. Contracted video work/presentations (online class)

3. Product sales, largely through online marketplace Tindie

4. Advertisements: YouTube/Amazon

You can make your assumptions about my actual income in dollars, but here’s how it down in pie-chart form:

As you can see, technical writing (blue) is indeed where I make most of my money, followed by about half that (green) in video-ish content, and about half again for instructional classes (red). The small yellow slice is things I sell on my Tindie store, followed by almost invisible slides for YouTube ads and Amazon affiliate links.2

Income change over a decade-plus

Below is an unlabeled chart of my income since I started starting writing for real, actual money. Note that I was employed as full-time as an engineer in manufacturing automation up until 2016. Also, my wife was working, and we didn’t have kids for most of this time. So, despite a rather meager-looking writing income in 2013 to 2015, that period of time was actually pretty cushy $$-wise.

Since becoming a full time technical content creator3, 2020 represented a high point (so far) followed by a few not-as-good-but-still-not-terrible years, and a bit of a rebound in 2025.

On a more granular level, below is a chart of what I invoiced monthly in 2025. Things started out semi-slow and bumped around to a few very good months, and a few that weren’t great. Perhaps the beginning of the year represents when customers are just getting back from vacation and/or are deciding the year’s priorities, and the end is when they’re ramping down. I’m open to other interpretations.

I’m glad to see that things things are looking up on a macro level, though I would certainly be happy to get more work in the pipeline (see Final thoughts 👇). Here’s what I believe worked for me last year (and could potentially work for you):

What worked for me in $2025

• Negotiation - how negotiation works will different depending on the industry, and your business personally, but perhaps the best value you can give yourself in $$/time terms is negotiating your rate. Not only does this help advance your career, but it also helps keep you from sliding backwards due to inflation.
  
  While it can be intimidating to ask for more money, as far as I can remember I have never lost a customer when asking for a raise. Sometimes the result is a yes, sometimes a no, and sometimes we meet in the middle. If terms aren’t satisfactory, you may have to move on, but it can generally be your choice. See footnote4 for a bit of an offbeat take on this process.

• Reach out to potential customers - While I’ve certainly had customers referred to me (thanks!), most of my business has been obtained by reaching out.
  
  In more than one instance, the ultimate customer wasn’t even the entity I initially reached out to, but was a product of a referral based on contacting someone else. Get creative and work all the angles, send emails, make phone calls, contact people via social media. It can be awkward at times, but the alternative of not feeding your family or… getting what one might consider a real job is a great motivator.

• Track Your Work Hours - I typically charge by the job, but I still track my hours when working on assignments. This allows me to know if I’m billing too little for something, or if I’m making at least the hourly rate I’d like to maintain. Ultimately, you’re always selling your time.
  
  This is also helpful when you have to put in hours that you won’t get paid for, e.g. marketing/negotiation👆 That way when you hear that little voice in your head say, “You didn’t do any [paid] work today,” you can look at your logged hours and say, “Yes I did, and it’s actually a very profitable pursuit.”

• Longer-Form Articles - I’m not sure that this was a conscious choice as much as where the industry is going. At one point, the majority of my writing work involved looking at people’s projects and summarizing them for publications like Make, Hackster, Hackaday, etc. The cool thing about short-form is that it’s easy to track these bite-sized units of work/$$$. Do X articles in a day, get paid Y, make X per year. The bad thing is that it can get kind of rushed, and you have to string together a lot of them to = success.
  
  The elephant in the room here is that AI — ChatGPT et al — is also very good at summarizing projects and it’s waaaay cheaper than I am. Thus the shift to longer-form articles that require a lot more research/specific knowledge/thought, but typically pay much better per piece because of the extra effort/competence involved.

• Contracted Video Content and Classes - I did a significant amount of contracted video content this year, and did an online class series for another. Whether these particular jobs will continue into 2026 is kind of questionable, but that is often par for the course.

  

What didn’t (directly) work in $2025

• Affiliate links - Long story short: if you click on an “affiliate link” here or anywhere else, the linking site will typically receive a small cut of the purchase price at no cost to you5. I maybe made a cool three figures with my affiliate income. Enough money to take my family out to eat at a moderately priced restaurant. Score!

• YouTube Ads - Again, somewhere in the low three figures here. That’s with 133,000+ views and well over 6000 total subscribers. Definitely not worth the many hours I put in (though I didn’t track this) to make and produce non-contracted videos.
  
  -This is NOT big green VIDEO chunk of my income pie, which instead registers video that I was contracted to make and that I didn’t publish directly.

• Substack - I don’t get paid directly from Substack, with the exception of affiliate links👆, which might net me a Biggie Bag or two on a good month (see footnote #3. Of course, if you want to sponsor Tech Adjacent, do get in touch👇).
  
  -WHAT DID WORK on a non-monetary level is writing and queuing up posts for Tech Adjacent when I felt inspired or was otherwise available. It’s nice to be able to keep your newsletter going when you’re really busy for a month or two, though I generally give them a once-over before publishing.

  

• Kickstarter - as publicly stated there, people pledged $852 to make this a reality. In reality, this covered the materials of me making something cool, but little else. Now that the de minimus exemption is no longer, I’m not sure it would have even covered that.
  -They’re still available on Tindie if you’re interested in such a thing.

• BUT, but, but…👇

AS CAVEATS to all of this, I suspect that me putting out this Substack newsletter helped secure one or more jobs that maybe wouldn’t have otherwise happened. It also seems YouTube helps drive sales to my Tindie store, which itself helps burnish my reputation as someone who is knowledgable and can make stuff.

So while these things might not make sense in direct $$$ terms by themselves, perhaps they do in a holistic/marketing sense. If nothing else, it helps keep me sane (maybe) and my skills sharp(er).

Final Thoughts

Considering my results over the years, I think the key to being productive as a self-employed person boils down to:

1. Figure out where you are getting the most buck for your bang (bang being your time) and focus in on that.

2. Even if you nominally get paid for something (e.g. technical writing), you can often get a better buck/bang overall for this if you also do a good job on supporting things, e.g. marketing, negotiation… newsletters.

Have I followed this advice over the years and in 2025? I’m not perfect, but I’ve certainly improved on #1, maybe even #2. Hopefully 2026 will see the graph tick up again. Speaking of which:

If YOU need technical content (and/or gadget) creation for your blog, website, YouTube channel, show, event, or otherwise, please do reach out in the comments or via hi@jeremyscook.com. I could always use more work in my pipeline!

Thanks for reading, and I hope your 2026 is starting out great!

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly-ish about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness. -JC

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Addendum/Footnotes:

If you’re into offbeat engineering, real-world builds, and practical tech thinking, subscribe 👇

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A multi-part challenge

Designing such a system would involve several distinct parts/challenges:

• Mechanical structure to hold the solenoids in place

• Microcontroller or other device acting as the “brains”

• Modular user control linked up with the venerable 5-pin MIDI interface
  -Somewhat optional, but it did lead to the product idea

Each of these parts required a novel solution, and the MIDI/Serial/I2C adapter that I came up with for the last bit turned out to be something that others could use. I turned it into an actual product, even though it was only a small part of my overall project.

The Drum Mechanism

I designed the machine in a semi-flexible “C” configuration, at least partially inspired by the distinct look of Cray-2 supercomputers. The slots on the top are designed to allow adjustable friction arms — generally used for camera equipment — to attach and grip nicely. It’s an extremely versatile setup, theoretically accommodating a tank drum as shown above, or the Amazon-sourced steel tongue drum that I eventually went with:

The Arduino Opta PLC & SSR Expansion

Mechanics aside, how can I drive the solenoids that bang on this drum? A typical Arduino (e.g. an Uno) can’t power such devices without a lot of external circuitry. However, Arduino had recently came out with a small PLC, and a solid-state relay (SSR) expansion module that can fire the solenoids without making any noise. Even better, I got both of these units for review purposes, making my price quite attractive at $0.

Problem + MIDI deep dive = successful product!

There was just one little problem. I wanted to use an external MIDI2 controller as the device’s user interface, and there (was) no ready-made MIDI-to-Opta adapter. Also, I knew very little about MIDI.

The good news is that the ancient MIDI spec — which dates back to the early 1980s — is fairly easy to understand, and is basically a serial signal. If that sounds like gibberish, the important part is that it didn’t have an easy way to communicate with my Arduino via either serial or MIDI. I had to make an adapter myself to talk serial/MIDI. I also broke out its I2C3 communication capabilities on this adapter, as it was rather easy to add and greatly enhanced its usefulness.

The neat thing is that it appears this problem hadn’t yet been solved, and I’m not the only one that could use a way to interface externally with the Arduino via I2C and/or serial. Once I’d figured out the correct connector and pinout4, the design process was rather simple.

While others could have figured this out pretty easily, I believe I was the first, and there’s certainly an advantage to being the or among the first people to build a product. It’s a bit of a niche product, so while my customer base will be limited for the foreseeable future, any potential competitors probably have better things to do than squashing my enterprise.

A Semi-Musical Journey of Learning

You might assume that there is always an off-the-shelf solution for problems that you run into. However, when you’re dealing with newer and/or less standard hardware, that isn’t always the case. If you see an opportunity, even if it’s only adjacent to the overall project you were working on, consider jumping on it.

In this case, the Arduino Opta was the new kid on the block in the PLC world. Since I wanted to make a neat project with it, I had to come up with my own communication setup. Since its publication in August 2024, I’ve sold somewhere around 200 of these Arduino Opta I2C and Serial I2C Aux breakout adapters, netting a pretty decent profit5 for something that was simply a side-effect of another project.

As for why selling something where my profit/unit is well under $10 could potentially be worth my time, see article👇

The Videos

Yes, I make YouTube videos, which are less-moderately-successful than my buddy Pocket836. Below is the promo video for the Arudino Opta aux out adapter, and the drum video is after that. There are a few other videos on my (main) YouTube channel that relate to this project, as the whole thing was quite a learning journey. I also put up more exclusively audio-focused stuff on this “Cooked Audio” channel, though I struggle with where to draw the line between the two at times.

Experiment, Solve, Profit

So what’s the lesson here? If you’re like me and enjoy making things — and experimenting in areas that may be brand new — pay attention to any ancillary doodads that you have to invent in order to make your main project work. I doubt I’ll ever sell a robot tongue drum (get in contact if you want one👇), but the I2C/Serial/MIDI adapters that I had to make to make this happen have been moderately popular.

There’s a similar story with my EZ Fan 2 board, which I developed when I wanted an “EZ” way to control a fan on a Raspberry Pi SBC. I’ve sold upwards of 750 of these devices because others had the same sort of need I did. For various reasons, sales have slowed down considerably, and I may retire (or not restock) it at some point, but it was my first real foray into the world of custom electronics sales.

So pay attention when you find a creative solution to a problem. Others may need it too!

Techadjacent is where I share engineering ideas, builds, and practical tech analysis. Subscribe to get the next post in your inbox — published weekly👇

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Thanks for reading! I hope you follow along on this Techadjacent journey. Fair warning: I can and do get a little off-topic in the footnotes.

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Addendum/Footnotes:

However, thanks to a contest that made then-postdoc Brent Gillespie $50 richer, these devices were renamed cobots. In THE YEAR 2000, the Wall Street Journal published a list of future terms that we were going to use in THE YEAR 2000 and beyond. Most were wildly, and hilariously, inaccurate, though some are quite prescient. Among these, “cobot” seems to have survived the initial hype and/or was resurrected and redirected for marketing purposes.2

As it turns out, the WSJ article has a lot more awesome tidbits which you can check yourself. Or see my thoughts on this piece from my vantage point in the closing days of 2026:

Predicted terms for THE YEAR 2000

First, the terms: anacronym, cellie, cobot, cred, DINS, dirt road, EGD, embedded ubiquitous computing, emergent, 404, Frankenfood, girlcott, homepreneur, hourglass mode, identity theft, infowar, keyboard plaque, keypal, memes, mobile server, mouse potato, open, optical computer, optionaire, Outernet, pagejack, percussive maintenance, permalancer, plug-and-play hire, POTS, -scape, searchjack, -sphere, smartsize, smartway, splurgent, time suck, tribal marketing, Turing Test, unified messaging system, uninstall, venture catalyst, venture philanthropy, vertical portal (or vortal), voice-jail system, voice novel

Terms actually in use today: cobot, identity theft, memes, time suck, Turing Test. Also cred (maybe) - was in active use a while in the early 2000s, but I’m not going to count it as of today.

47 words of future past, 5 of which are in use today. So a success rate of 10.6%; roughly on par with other futurists if you’ve perused any outdated forward-looking works.3

In-Use Terms Commentary

Below are the WSJ definitions of the five terms deemed (by me) as in-use today, followed by my thoughts. Feel free to agree/disagree/add your own words in the comments!

• meme: noun, plural. Building blocks of culture, similar to genes but passed on by imitation, not heredity. Examples include tunes, ideas, catch phrases, ways of building arches, belief in life after death. Some scientists think memes even affect biology -- that increases in human cranium size were driven by cultural forces such as the creation of language.
  
  -JC: I’m honestly still not quite sure what a meme is.4 This apparently became a thing in around 2006 or so, which seemed to mean an image with text superimposed. But it also seems like more than that. So this is probably a good enough description… though increasing cranium size seems like a stretch.

• cobot: noun. A collaborative robot designed to help workers on the job instead of replacing them. For example, in an auto plant, a cobot might help a human being guide a bulky dashboard panel into a car.
  
  -JC: Slightly different than our current understanding of cobots, but pretty close. Almost like some marketer read that very article and said, “yep, we can use that one.”

• identity theft: noun. Stealing of human credentials, such as a Social Security number. Many people fear that if they shop on the Internet they will fall prey to identity thieves.
  
  -JC: Again, I feel like this is something heavily promoted by marketers to help sell a product, i.e. identity theft protection services. Unlike how cobot highlights helpfulness, identity theft highlights negative actions in the world from which you need protection (Which I think itself is a marketing concept that wasn’t covered in Clemson’s Mechanical engineering curriculum).
  
  Sort of like in any number of gangster movies where you “just might” get a brick through your window from some… unnamed bad people in the neighborhood if you don’t buy protection.

  

  On a related note, ever try to uninstall antivirus protection services? Seems to me they were a sort of virus themselves.

• time suck: noun. Slang for something that wastes time. Usage: “I spent three hours sitting in traffic this morning -- what a time suck!” Predecessor idiom: time sink.
  
  -JC: one might say that our entire modern economy is built on time sucks.5 I’ve yet to use Tic Tok to any great extent, but I did sit by someone on a plan who just kept scrolling through videos after apparently buying the airline’s in-flight Wi-Fi service. Not that video games that I played quite a bit in the past… and occasionally now are really any better.

• Turning Test: noun. A test proposed 50 years ago by British mathematician Alan Turing as a yardstick for artificial intelligence. One part of the test checks to see whether a human interlocutor engaged in casual keyboard conversation can distinguish between the responses of a person and those from the computer.
  
  -JC: In our age of AI advancements, this term seems to have been common in technical discussions a few years ago, but the test was supposedly passed in 2014, perhaps making it largely irrelevant now. Interestingly enough, The Imitation Game movie, about Alan Turing, came out in 2014, which likely gave the term a bit of a boost at the time.

JC commentary:

It’s kind of disappointing that voice-jail system hasn’t become a common term, though maybe I have heard it thrown around here or there. Look for the voice jail concept, if not the term itself, to become even more insidious as AI takes over operator jobs once held by humans.

Or maybe AI can wait on the phone for your… OR they could even call you back rather than making you listen to hold music. I heard AI is in operation at Wendy’s6, drive-throughs, and perhaps a other fast food establishments.

DINS does not stand for Deutsches Institut für Normung, sorry to my 11 subscribers in Germany. POTS, however, does stand for Plain Old Telephone service. This term might be familiar to phone phreaks of old, but seems rather dated now. Who uses landline phones outside of work anymore?

Other notable terms:

A short list, i.e. not a time suck. Do read the rest of the WSJ piece for more info:

• Real concept, different term: embedded ubiquitous computing, mobile server, homepreneur

• Especially ridiculous/notable: DINS, girlcott, keyboard plaque, keypal, optical computer, pagejack, uninstall

What new words for THE YEAR 2026?

If history is any judge, whatever I would write here would be wildly inaccurate. In fact, I’m impressed with how on-target one or two terms seem to be from the Y2K list. I suspect we will see signifiant terminology pop up referring to AI, its impact on our lives, and how annoying it is generally. Please let me know your thoughts on upcoming Y2.25K terminology in the comments!

Of course, if AGI is realized in the next few years, I’d like to note that I was making a lighthearted joke here, and not demeaning any capabilities of our new robot overlords. I come in peace. Actually, I was here first... Given the history of humanity when interacting existing cultures, and sci-fi related to intelligent robotics, we may all be in for a wild ride.

Hope this article has given me some further cred, going into THE YEAR 20267 and that whatever connection sent it your way isn’t a dirt road. -JC

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly-ish about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness. -JC

Any Amazon links are affiliate

Addendum/Footnotes:

3

My grandmother had a copy of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book, Future Shock. I read quite a bit of it, but my impression was that it was way off-base even 15 years ago or whenever I picked it up. Seems like there was something about feeding disembodied dog heads with a nutrient solution… though I might be getting that very mixed up with something else.

If you’re looking for an offbeat, tech-adjacent title, may I recommend: The World’s Worst Weapons (From Exploding Guns to Malfunctioning Missiles). It’s kind of silly, but I thoroughly enjoyed it after picking it up at Barnes and Noble on a whim years ago.

As for the $15/hour floor, Florida’s minimum wage is now $14/hour. It’s supposed to go up a buck next year, so that’s not too far off where I live.

To tie this back into business/technology, as a self-employed person I constantly have to consider how far my money goes. I’m not sure if Biggie Bags are a perfect inflation indicator, but it’s fun to think about, especially if you get a little discouraged occasionally.

What has helped me get a better grasp on what I should charge for services is talking to people in my own and related industries1 and comparing notes. No, you (usually) shouldn’t throw your salary or pricing out there for everyone to see, especially in a braggadocios manner, but a limited comparison of notes can be healthy.

Also, subscribing to financial-centric publications like the Wall Street Journal, or those that discuss business and finances every once in a while (like Techadjacent) can help keep you aware of overall inflation in your area and beyond. So:

If you’re into offbeat engineering, real-world builds, and practical tech thinking, subscribe 👇

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As for the question you’ve all been asking:

Does the Biggie Bag Indicator (BBI) have any practical use?

Actually, I think it does. For at least two reasons:

#1 - How much is something worth in another country/region? Last US summer/ZA winter, I visited South Africa. While there are many things I could say about the trip, one of the more interesting conversations that I had happened at a rather nice restaurant where we were having dinner. In my mind, the prices there didn’t seem to properly reflect the environment.2

I commented to an Afrikaner with whom we were dining that — even though there is a set conversion from USD to ZA Rand — it was difficult to really get a feel for how much things cost to people there in terms of their labor/versus other items. I.e. did this restaurant seem expensive to someone that lived there?

His response was that good way to get such gut feeling for prices is to convert them into how many McDonald’s Big Macs you could buy for the same amount of cash in a given country/region. Given the Big Mac’s near-universality, and consumption — or at least familiarity — by pretty much everyone, it’s a good way to at least get a general feeling for things.

Perhaps the BBI isn’t as useful as a Big Mac Indicator, but you get where I’m going with this. Also, there’s no strangely ironic BMI abbreviation to contend with.

#2 - If you wake up one morning and find that the number of Biggie Bags that you can buy with your paycheck has gone down, you’re past due for a raise. Go demand what you’re worth. Feel free to use this very post as supporting evidence, and to claim that you want at to be paid at least X Biggie Bags per hour from now on.

Or maybe you’re not performing well enough, and you’re actually worth fewer square slices of beef, cheese, onion, condiments, and bread. Either way, it’s time to make some changes. Also, I’m getting hungry.

#3 - Appreciate that we’ve got it pretty good. While not everyone around the world can afford multiple biggie bags per hour or the equivalent, I’d hazard to guess that most people reading this can. So if you make $40/hour, you’re pulling in 8 Biggie bags/hour, or 64—64!!—Biggie Bags per 8-hour shift, enough to feed a small private school.

And if you still don’t feel sufficiently valued, consider that Checker’s3 has had, until recently, a $4 meal deal, consisting of a drink, burger, fries, and a fried empanada filled with apple-flavored molten lava that they call a pie. You might even be able to sue if you crack one in your lap and spill the 500ºC (est) filling.

If that’s not enough of a bargain, you can get a soda and hot dog at Costco for $1.50, though I believe you’re supposed to have a membership. A private supper club, one might claim. I usually want a hot dog when I go to Costco, but about halfway through said hot dog, I typically start to reconsider.

Finally, if you are reading this and go by the abbreviations RFK,4 you might argue that the negative health effects of eating 64 Biggie Bags, 80 Checker’s molten lava apple pie meals (formerly), or 213.33333 Costco hot dog combos per day far outweigh their nutritional value in any fiat currency.

But are these combos good to eat? Who knows. Probably in moderation. Eating them is certainly better than starving! -JC

Techadjacent is where I share engineering ideas, builds, and practical tech analysis. Subscribe to get the next post in your inbox — published weekly👇

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Thanks for reading! I hope you follow along on this Techadjacent journey. Fair warning: I can and do get a little off-topic in the footnotes.

Note: Some links may be affiliate

Addendum/Footnotes:

3

Checkers: a restaurant chain mostly in Florida that seemed to be growing like crazy in the 90s, but has dropped off in recent decades. They famously(?) feature double drive throughs straddling the RV-like structure that forms the restaurant itself. Make whatever Florida jokes that you wish, but their fries were/are really good. It’s probably best there’s not one nearby, otherwise I might be eating there more than I should.

As to their decline, a friend of mine in Florida briefly worked at a checkers that was just across the street from our neighborhood. According to him, there were so many rats in the AC system that you could see the conduit flex under their weight as they ran from one section to another. Also, there was reportedly some illegal substance usage in the bathroom by the employees.

After I heard about conditions, I still ate there per its proximity to my house. Teenagers have very low standards. Just don’t ask for extra mayonnaise.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you get paid the $14 minimum wage in Florida, you can get ONE combo meal at Chick-Fil-A. However, rodent content is minimal AFAIK. You often get what you pay for.

👆 photo via this WSJ article. CFA’s new mega-drive through concept that just so happens to look like an aircraft carrier. This particular location (unofficially called the USS Fil-A*) made its debut in 2024, a mere two years after Top Gun: Maverick came out in theaters. Coincidence? I can’t be the only one that sees it. I also can’t be the only one thinks it looks awesome. They could really lean into it with a replica F-16 or two in the parking lot. Maybe even an F-35 flyover or VTOL drive-through pickup.

*unofficially, i.e. I just made up the name USS Fil-A. I can’t be the first.