What Building Something That Could See Taught Me
The face recognition app closes this blog’s current arc at the edge of what I could build, a system with eyes, judgment,…
Desktop Apps
The story of my first software project, a Python and FFmpeg toolkit I built to cut, join, caption, and compose movie clips for recap videos, told step by step by a self taught maker, including the mistakes.
Turning Recognitions Into a Searchable Record
The cameras watch and the recogniser names, but the system’s actual product is memory, who passed, when, which door, with the image…
Handling Strangers, and the Honest Limits of Recognition
A recognition system is defined less by its matches than by its edges, what it does with a face it does not…
Running Two Cameras at Once Without Freezing
The requirement said two cameras, entry and exit, live at once, and a naive loop reading one camera then the other then…
How Face Recognition Actually Works, in Plain Words
Recognition sounds like magic until you see the mechanism, and the mechanism is beautifully plain, every face becomes a list of 128…
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
The reason a solo self-taught builder can make a working face recognition system in this decade is one open source library, named…
The First Time I Built Something That Could See
The final project in this arc is the most science-fiction sounding thing I have built, a desktop application that watches two cameras,…
The Tool That Added Nothing and Changed Everything
The visa manager is the smallest project in this blog by line count and one of the largest by daily usefulness, a…
Remembering Passwords, and the Duty That Comes With It
The cockpit’s last request was the obvious one, remember all the passwords, WordPress, Tawk.to, webmail, and fill them in whenever a login…
The Difference Between Working and Finished
The cockpit worked on my machine, launched from a terminal, inside my Python environment, and none of that survives contact with an…