iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

no shade, but truly. I hope Lindsey Graham died doing what he loved: getting absolutely railed by a hot young escort a quarter his age.

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

AT LONG (LONG) LAST: Open Book Touch is LIVE on @crowdsupply.bsky.social! Launched this morning and already I'm overwhelmed by folks' support. Back it now, or just subscribe for updates; this is going to be a jam-packed six week campaign. www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specif...

crowdsupply.com

Open Book Touch

A pocketable, front-lit, open source e-reader — for every book, in every language

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

inside you there are two wolves. (both of them are powered by AI)

Advertisement in purple on the back of a bus: “Stop hiring humans. Hire Ava, the AI BDR.”

Advertisement in purple on a billboard. “Hire more humans,” with a dot-AI domain name seen below.

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

This is maybe the biggest FINALLY in my career as a purveyor of Oddly Specific Objects: Open Book Touch is in prelaunch at Crowd Supply! Now with WiFi, plus a higher-resolution display, warm/cool frontlight, and capacitive touchscreen. Subscribe for updates here! www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specif...

crowdsupply.com

Open Book Touch

A pocketable, open-source backlit e-reader

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

wow okay there are dark patterns and there are DARK patterns…

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

The story of our time is this: the bad guys win, and it's not even close. Remember the whole "It gets better" campaign? That was wishful thinking: a hope, not a promise. It Does Not Get Better. YOU get better at handling the bad thing. The sooner you embrace this reality, the better off you'll be.

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

when it comes time to assemble this thing, future-joey owes me a beer for being so thoughtful

Rendering of a green circuit board, “Sensor Watch Pro Tester”, with a detailed bill of materials stenciled on to the silkscreen.

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

wait so you’re telling me the NFC championship game is sponsored by TurboTax… and the AFC championship game is also sponsored by TurboTax… which means that no matter who loses, TurboTax wins? Again: this feels very on the nose.

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

Ladies and also ladies, I have good news…

a post by matthew chapman reading, "under trump's executive order, every single person in america is now legally classified as female. all embryos begin by developing female sex organs, with male sex organs only replacing them at around 6 weeks of gestation", with an infix screenshot of the pertinent EO. then a reply by cullen crawford, "lets go girls"

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

God grant me the courage to change the things that I can change, and the serenity to accept that the things that I cannot will require more effort.

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

Solving a Sensor Watch motion problem: sleep looks like long periods w/o motion, but so does taking off the watch. By adding one more signal to the mix, I think we've got it: a long stationary period generally means sleep, unless accompanied by a rapid temperature drop. Then it's an off-wrist event.

Graph of two days and nights of data: stationary minutes, orientation changes and wrist temperature. Two periods of sleep and three off-wrist events are annotated.

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

Last week I finished my final code for the Sensor Watch accelerometer. Just plotted the data I gathered at 5 minute intervals — orange represents orientation change events, and blue represents minutes without any motion at all — and I'll be damned if that doesn't look like sleep & activity tracking.

A graph plotting orange areas and blue areas from November 18 to 24. Clear blue peaks happen overnight, with variable levels of orange in between.

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Samples of a last-minute change to the accelerometer board arrived last week. Been wearing it ever since; seems all good! This morning I finished a self-test procedure that lets me quickly validate all the functionality of manufactured boards, and just like that, an order for 2000 more is in flight.

Macro photo of the “Sensor Watch Accelerometer” board.

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

found while digging around for an Arduino. This is not my handwriting.

Photo: the back side of an Arduino Mega board. Written in trembling Sharpie at the bottom left: “Cursed” in all caps.

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 05/11/2024

Need a distraction from Election Day jitters? At 2:00 EST (11:00 PST) join me and Alex Glow for a Hackster Café livestream! We'll be talking Sensor Watch Pro, my new, MORE hackable board swap for the Casio F-91W that's on Crowd Supply now. That's in 2 hours; set a timer! youtu.be/G85LlKGHFdc

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 28/10/2024

I will be bringing a couple dozen of these with me to Hackaday Supercon. The "Sensor Watch" SAO is not Sensor Watch — hence the quotes — but it is an I²C segment LCD driver that's easy to control with MicroPython. To get folks started, I have once again put copious documentation on the back side :)

Close-up of an illustration on the back, showing the layout of a 7-segment digit.

The back side of the object with documentation on how to use it.

Photo of a small gadget with a screen. Text on the gadget reads “Sensor Watch” in quotes.

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 24/10/2024

…and for Patreon subscribers, today was a twofer: for business-tier patrons, a dive into Oddly Specific Objects' Q3 financials: www.patreon.com/posts/114640593 and for everyone else, mechanical drawings of the custom spring connector we're having made: www.patreon.com/posts/114641633

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 24/10/2024

For this week's Sensor Watch Pro backer update, I wrote about the new accelerometer sensor add-on, and how I'm using it for sleep and activity tracking: www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-…

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 22/10/2024

Life Pro Tip: How to install a package using homebrew: brew install package [Ctrl] + C HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 brew install package

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 20/10/2024

Last night I finished a sleep tracking proof of concept for Sensor Watch Pro: it counts orientation changes & motion events per hour. Adds 600 nA to the power budget. Sensor Watch data at left; Oura data at right. Note the period of Deep Sleep, and that period of low motion counts from 1:00-3:00 AM…

Photo of a notepad page tracking accelerometer data next to an Oura screenshot of sleep data.

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 19/10/2024

see, if I were cleverer I would have used my return-from-the-void post to share an actual photo of Sensor Watch Pro, and mention that it's live on Crowd Supply. But hey: better late than never. www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specif...

Photo of a small round circuit board titled “Sensor Watch Pro”

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 19/10/2024

Testing, testing: is this working? I'm going to try to be active on all the non-Twitter socials, thanks to an app that lets me cross-post stuff. Anyway here's a gadget: today's work power profiling Sensor Watch Pro's new accelerometer add-on.

Photo of a breadboarded gadget plugged into a Nordic Power Profiler.

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joey castillo @joeycastillo.bsky.social · 15/02/2024

I could have sworn I posted something here once before!

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