iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 03/07/2026

The locations seem a bit limited. Closest I can get to me is here. Which seems about right. It's too damn hot today.

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 17/06/2025

Still one of the greatest jokes of all time: No, Mr. Die, I expect you to bond.

A photo of a die bonded to a circuit board using many many separate little bonding wires

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 03/05/2025

Wow, savage burn from a research group's Sphinx documentation on figures. Source: flyart.gitlab.io/sphinx-doc/_...

A photo of four uh.... are those teletubbies? The caption under the photo reads: "Four young PhD students."

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 28/04/2025

Despite all the frustrations, progress is being made on the Shindig UI. I'm a bit proud of the logo to be honest. But the urge to put googly eyes on the flame monster is overwhelming!

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 12/04/2025

Don't mind me. I'm just pondering my trackball.

The orb pondering meme image of a wizard staring at a glowing blue ball. Sounds familiar, eh?

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 12/04/2025

Once assembled, the trackball gives off a glorious blue glow! The ball tracking itself leaves a bit to be desired though. I tried the toothpaste tricks already and it's still not that usable, so I'll need to find time to tinker with it some more later.

A photo of the assembled ploopy nano trackball sitting on my desk next to a (much) older logitech marble mouse. The ploopy ball has a comforting blue glow like some kind of wizard orb. The marble mouse is just shiny red: no glow, and no suggestion of eldrich magicks.

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 12/04/2025

My ploopy nano kit finally arrived! 🥳 Assembling it was a lot of fun! I got to dust off my old soldering station and give it a another tumble. My soldering skills aren't great, but I managed not to bridge any contacts, so I'll call that a win.

A photo of my old soldering station set up on my wood desk along with the ploopy mainboard wedged into a stickvise with components placed, secured, and ready for soldering.

A closeup photo of the ploopy mainboard after soldering. The through-hole solder joints are messy, but serviceable.

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 04/04/2025

I had a great time at the NYSBC this week! We got a ton of great feedback on our work and I hope we were able to help some of you get starting running your data analyses. Until next time.

A photo of the building and sign for the New York Structural Biology Center

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 09/03/2025

Ok, second attempt: These plots should match Figure 2 better. I found the rest of the data set in Table 2 here: www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nv... You can even have a couple extra years on the end, as a treat.

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 09/03/2025

Nice! The log-scaled y-axis of that plot bothered me for some reason though. Here's a linear version of the same plot (Data from Table 1 in the linked paper), if it's helpful to anyone. And a stacked bar chart as an extra bonus. Let me know if I made any mistakes.

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 20/01/2025

Here's my contribution to the #CorsiRosenthalBox scene. It's not strictly the 20" box fan design, but I figure it still counts. My old window-mount fan was begging to be repurposed. Took a bit longer to design and build than I'd like, but I hope my sinuses appreciate the effort. 🥰

A Corsi-Rosenthal-like box sits on a dresser. The white window mount dual-fan unit sits atop a rectangular box in matching size with commodity furnace-style air filters on two of the long sides. Only one filter can be seen from this angle though. Duct tape permeates the design.

The same Corsi-Rosenthal-like box is pictured again, but without the filters attached. You can see the frame structure inside the box which is made out of cardboard struts and, again, lots of duct tape.

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 22/08/2024

Potatoes are totally normal human objects to feature prominently in product documentation, right? Asking for a friend.

A screenshot of an early draft of documentation for the SmolWeb protocol. The page shows an overview image of the protocol consisting of Guests, Hosts, and a Beacon Server. The Host is depicted as a potato with a wifi antenna perched on top.

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 12/07/2024

Yup, it's true. Firefox 128 includes new adtech features that are opt-in by default and announced with very little fanfare, so most people might not even know they're there. Well, this is me telling you they're there. You might want to go ahead and take a minute to opt out.

A screenshot from the Firefox "Privacy & Security" settings page showing "Website Advertising Preferences" with a checked-by-default option to "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement". The description beneath reads "This helps sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about you" with a link to "Learn More" that I'll copy into the next skeet.

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 07/07/2024

Sooo.... I finally got around to making a logo for my SmolWeb project. It's a peer-to-peer network for the web. Like, host a website using the computer and internet you already have. Then people visit your website using the web browser they already have. No clouds needed! Sort of, it's complicated.

A Smol globe drawn in a cartoon style with thick black strokes and a cute, if somewhat silly, face.

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 19/06/2024

Here's some In-progress work on the admin/moderation dashboard for the SmolWeb Beacon server. It's nice to work on UI stuff for a change, especially since it's a bit more photogenic than most kinds of back-end work. 😀

A screenshot of the SmolWeb server dashboard showing a list of connected hosts. The dashboard has buttons to add new hosts and edit or disconnect existing hosts.

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Jeff Martin @jeff.cuchazinteractive.org · 04/06/2024

I've been working on getting my Portable Identities for the Internet system back into shape so it can be used for an admin dashboard. I'm bad at self-promotion (need to work on that, really 😬), but here's a screenshot of the browser extension, showing where you can share your identity with an app.

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