iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

Opus 5.5 can apparently write code for my 45+ year old Atari 400.

Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

I've used Evaporust to remove rust from tools before, but it is kind of spendy. I've seen multiple DIY recipes for citric-acid/washing soda versions of rust removers, but I'm not very chemistry-knowledgeable, and only had heard the word "chelation", and never understood what it meant. I decided […]

mastodon.social

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

An experiment in using Claude Code to generate a music video. youtu.be/oGvJcS7oBbE?si=8JC3S4DMu7c… Blog post detailing how it was done in the next couple of days. (There are way better examples of people doing this, it was literally my first unplanned attempt.) Done using Sonnet 5.5 […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

Decided to work through all the Messier objects over time. Here are three I didn't have in my catalog before.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

I used to write renderers for profit, and now I've been known to do it for fun. I realized my "good tv" (was under $700 when I bought it new several years ago) support HDR (albeit with a not very impressive 700 nits max brightness). I thought it might be fun to understand how to author files […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

My own data determining the brightness of the supernova in NGC 7331 across the month of September, showing its flash as it fuses to Ni56, and its slower decay through Co56 and Fe56.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

"Brains To Go", a short film created by me and claude code, entirely from scratch, in less that twenty four hours.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

Yesterday my AI brief included links to a couple of projects that used AI to create animated videos. I thought I would give it a whirl. I brainstormed the idea of "Brian Wagon", the disembodied brain mascot for my blog at brainwagon.org. A couple of hours later, I had this video.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

Looks like the supernova in NGC 7331 may be beginning to fade. New data tonight acquired with my Seestar S50. #astrophotography #seestar

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

I think my current pet AI project has reached a point where I no longer have a clear idea as to the direction it is going. It's a place I haven't been before, and it feels very odd. Perhaps it is because most of the time I've approached AI with a fairly clear idea of where I was going, and have […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

Looks like I'll be attending the First Light Telescope Conference in Portland on Oct. 16-18. I hope to meet a bunch of new fellow enthusiasts there, including perhaps some of you from Mastodon! www.firstlightconference.org

firstlightconference.org

First Light Telescope Conference

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

NGC 6992, the Eastern Veil, blinked against Pan-STARRS to check which wisps are real. Every filament survives the blink. Caveats all round: 42 min is short, the framing is poor — the arc runs off both edges and NGC 6995 missed the frame entirely — and there […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

SN 2026aaiv in NGC 7331, four nights with a Seestar S50. V = 13.24 → 12.64 → 12.38 → 12.17, Sep 8.2 → 18.2 UT. Measured on linear restacks of the raw subframes — not the camera's own stack, which is sharpened and reads ~0.75 mag too bright this close to a […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

SN 2026aaiv in NGC 7331, three nights with a Seestar S50. Measured on linear restacks of the raw 10 s subframes, calibrated against APASS stars in the same frame: Sep 8.20 UT: V 13.24 ± 0.27 Sep 11.23 UT: V 12.64 ± 0.25 Sep 13.24 UT: V 12.38 ± 0.15 Still […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

Today's random project, I made a little display out of a CYD (Cheap Yellow Display) board that has an ESP32 with wifi. It monitors my Claude Code subscription so I can now when I am about to run out of tokens.

A CYD (Cheap Yellow Display) acting as a monitor for my Claude Code subscription.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

I took a Cheap Yellow Display and made a little monitor to keep track of my Claude Code usage. It probes every 15 minutes, and updates its little bar graph.

Trashbot keeps an eye on my Claude Code usage, and when it resets.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

30 minutes of exposure on SH2-101, the Tulip Nebula. The frame also contains the bright blue optical companion to the strong X-ray source Cygnus X1, the first object to have been widely accepted as a black hole. Nifty! #astrophotography

SH2-101 and Cygnus X1, shot with my Seestar S50 and aligned/processed using custom code written by Claude Code.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

New post: the supernova magnitude I posted on Tuesday was wrong. The Seestar S50's own stacked FITS is contrast-stretched and sharpened, and next to the nucleus of NGC 7331 it made SN 2026aaiv read about 0.75 mag too bright. Restacking the raw frames myself […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Three panels of the galaxy NGC 7331, north up. Left: September 8, 2026, supernova SN 2026aaiv marked just southeast of the nucleus, V = 13.25. Middle: September 11, the supernova visibly brighter, V = 12.63. Right: the difference image, Sep 11 minus Sep 8, where the galaxy and field stars cancel out and the supernova remains as the only bright spot.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2026

New post: vibe woodworking with GLM as my shop assistant. A rolling cart for a dozen IRIS storage bins, designed by arguing with GLM-5.3-Flash in opencode — a parametric 3D tool with an auto-generated cut list, and no shelves: the bins' tapered bodies hang […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Three.js render of a rolling OSB cart holding three columns of four translucent storage bins

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

Found a 2.7GB AVI on a backup disk that I barely remember shooting: 14 seconds of the moon from May 2020, taken with a $60 SVBony SV105 at prime focus on the 6" f/3.9 Newtonian I built more than 20 years ago. Stacked the best 43 of 435 frames using lucky […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The waxing crescent moon of 26 May 2020, stacked from video and sharpened, with eighteen lunar features circled and named, including Mare Crisium, Mare Fecunditatis, Cleomedes, Geminus, Endymion, Atlas, Hercules, Proclus, Taruntius and Vallis Rheita.

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Reposted by Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ

Hacker Memes @i0null.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

python wrapper functions :python:

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

I normally develop my astrophotos in Siril. This time I handed Claude Code the raw stacked FITS straight off my Seestar S50 and asked for three things only: flatten the background gradient, denoise, stretch to bring out the spiral structure. Left is the […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Side-by-side comparison of M33, the Triangulum Galaxy. Left panel: the Seestar S50's own in-camera JPEG, showing a grey sky with a visible gradient and only a faint smudge of galaxy. Right panel: the same frames reprocessed from the raw FITS stack, showing a dark neutral sky, blue spiral arms, and pink HII regions including NGC 604.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

Caught the new supernova SN 2026aaiv in NGC 7331 from the backyard — Seestar S50, 371 x 10s. Then, with a lot of help from Claude Code, I did something I've never tried before: actually measured it. V = 12.5 ± 0.2, which at NGC 7331's distance is an absolute […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The spiral galaxy NGC 7331 photographed with a Seestar S50 telescope. A yellow circle labelled SN 2026aaiv marks the supernova, a star-like point just below and right of the galaxy's bright core. A smaller companion galaxy is visible to the lower left.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026

I'm beginning to think that Facebook's entire purpose is to piss me off.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

Today's 1 hour AI coded app: a Star Wars Stormtrooper voice-transformer. Wanted to make one of these for a while. mvandewettering.com/trooper

mvandewettering.com

Trooper Voice Transformer

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

Pondering whether I should touch up/repaint the TIPPETT VFX logos on this carrying case I got at the Tippett Studio estate sale, or leave it scuffed and used. What do you all think?

Carrying case labelled with TIPPETT VFX I got at their estate sale.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

I was trying to tech myself to be able to compute the day of the week for any date (well, really only the dates in the years 1900-2099) using the "odd-11" variant of the doomsday algorithm. I had claude code help me create this little quiz application […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

You can see that I'm beginning to get better, it's taking me about 25 seconds, and my accuracy is improving.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

Hmm. The stealth "ox-alpha" model has apparently been revealed as glm-5.3-flash (and is no longer free). Also interesting is that Qwen 3.8 Flash has been made the roster on openrouter. Hoping we see the open weights for that one soon. mvandewettering.com/openrouter-reco…

OpenRouter Price Watch Live pricing from the OpenRouter models API, ranked cheapest first. Prices are USD per TM tokens.
Built by Mark VandeWettering with Claude Code, to understand what OpenRouter actually
charges and how the costs compare — not just between model families, but between slugs
inside one family, which can differ several-fold. Why a mode id is a menu and not a price.
explains what sits behind these numbers.
MW Claude 4 & older WM Claude5 WM DeepSeekV3&R1 WM Deepseekv4 Wl Gemma3 HM Gemmas HM GIM52&older ¥ GM53 Ml GPT-4&o-series WM GPT-5
MW Grok3aolder Ml Grok4 Ml Kimik2&older Ml Kimik3 Ml Nemotron3aolder Ml Nemoton3s Ml Qwen36 Wi Quen3s
#0 show :free Ml show :batch filter substring of model i, blend ratio. 3 in: 1 out Refresh Resetchangebascline Resetview
updated 421:06 PM. 417 models on OpenRouter
MODEL INPUT OUTPUT CACHEREAD BLENDED ESTLAVG CONTEXT PROVIDER
2-2i/gln-5.3-Flash | mutimedsl LM 53 Fish 0.075 0.250 0.015 se.119 s0.158 wm za
quen/quen3.B-Flash mutimodsl Quen Fash 0.160 0.470 0.016 s0.237 50.237 WM Alibaba
quen/quen3.8-27b muimossl Quen3s 276 0.425 vs.ex $2.55 vox 0.085 50.956 $1.05 Alibaba
~z-ai/gln-latest GLM Latest $1.40 $4.40 50.260 52.15 m
z-ai/gln-5.3 GLM53 $1.40 $4.40 50.260 52.15 $2.15 wm za
quen/quen3.8-2.4t-a95b Quenl® 247 A955 $2.00 $6.00 0.250 $3.00 $3.18 WM Deepinfra
quen/quen3.8-max | mulimodsl Quien38 Max $2.00 $6.00 0.250 $3.00 53.00 Ababa
> How to read this table, how a slug is priced, and how the numbers are computed
Source on Github data from the OpenRouter models API

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

Today, in "things that I'm older than" news: I'm apparently older than Fantastic Voyage.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

An uncredited model called "ox-alpha" made its appearance on openrouter.ai for free. I tried using it with the Claude harness, and managed to have it create mvandewettering.com/ox-alpha-pacman albeit not without some problems. Interesting. I wonder what lab in china it came from... #ai

mvandewettering.com

PAC-MAN

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026

Today's minor bit of time saving for AI: tinkered together a gadget that added modifier objects to a 3D print file that sets infill around holes to 100% automatically. Now, I can largely just model the holes, and worry about reinforcing them during printing later, if at all.

Yellow cylinders mark regions where infill is set to 100% to reinforce the area around holes.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

I'm somewhat suspicious every time I run an npm install -g <package> and it pulls in over 1,000 modules. Just me?

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Reposted by Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ

Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈 @lazarou.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

RE: mastodon.social/@lashman/1170374329… "We need nazis on Bluesky for 'balance'" Notice how it's never "Twitter is a right wing cesspit, something should be done to make it more Liberal" with American Social Media. Why Europeans think Bluesky is going to be any different from […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/07/2026

I wonder if the evil that LLMs could do on my behalf is severely blunted by the fact simply refuse to pay for more tokens.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026

I was reminded today that the Z-80 is 50 years old. Meaning I'm older than the venerable 8-bit microprocessor, and yet I'm still every bit as useful.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/07/2026

The ability for AI coding agents to "one-shot" applications from very simple prompts is a cute party trick, but it has nothing to do with software engineering.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/07/2026

I fear my latest AI based project may in fact be more evil than previous dabblings. First clue? The glowing circle and pentagram that now surrounds my desk.

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/07/2026

@mattblaze Nor should it. In my (former, now that I'm retired) sphere, we see an astonishing number of film "critics" who don't want to engage on the relative merits of film, but instead to just end any films which they disagree with. They want people to stop making films that they don't like […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ @brainwagon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/07/2026

@mattblaze In ordinary times, the President addressing the nation would be something worth paying attention to. But everyone knows that what he says are a convoluted collection of senile rambling and lies, and that is simply not news.

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