iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

It's annoying when you step away from a hobby for juuuust long enough that all the software has changed and you don't remember the workflow that was working before.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

A whole generation of people spent their childhood playing the Sims, and now that they have a little bit of disposable income all they can think about is burning a hole in their pocket recreating the Sims on Mac minis with their anthropic and OpenAI API keys

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

I made a website. It's pretty sparse. But I made it. It's got some thoughts in it. You should look at it. thoughtsofmike.com

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

I wanna see The Big Lebowski reimagined as a movie about some dudes in a curling league.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Shoutout to @adafruit.com for the open source schematics and inspiration. Finally mustered up the courage to design something of my own and it’s shaping up to be pretty awesome. As it turns out, KiCad isn’t so scary after all.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

New project in the works, and I think I might be in too deep already

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

The big gunfight in Heat might be the high-water mark for action thriller scenes of the 90s.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

Spacetime curves differently when you have a baby.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

symmetrical multi-gig fiber is everything

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

All the developmental guides I’m reading about my kid are like “…by nine months, your baby may begin pulling up to stand…” and I’m here looking at mine wondering if I should be worried.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

When it comes to practical jokes, there aren't many tools that can compete with a big bag of heavy duty zip-ties.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

I really do love recursion but I'm pretty sure the last time I used it was this time last year, during #AdventOfCode

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

#AdventOfCode is my annual opportunity to bust out my finest recursive functions.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

I love it when Indian takeaway restaurants actually trust me when I say that I want my curry spicy.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

Alright, I'll bite - Let's see what you've got for me @profanity.accountant

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Shoutout to the nice Dutch orthopedic surgeon who kindly reminded me that "this might hurt a little" before jamming the gigantic needle directly into my knee.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Hey @adafruit.com! I'm thinking about building a project that would benefit from something like a neopixel grid, but I need to be able to see through it from the un-lit side of the matrix between the modules. Do you know of anything like that? Ideally something flexible...

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Went in for an MRI today and couldn't help but think about how Sci-Fi modern medicine really is. If you teleported someone out of the 1920s to the modern day and showed them this tech, their mind would boggle.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

I think the station in Haarlem might be my favorite in this whole country.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

Got a babysitter tonight for the first time since the hellbeast was born. Holy shit y'all.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

Right now, somewhere out there, a company is fine-tuning an LLM on old company documents before deleting them in the name of "efficiency" and I can't wait to read about it in WIRED.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

London with a baby is a different experience altogether.

A baby sitting in a pram at a crosswalk, as viewed from above and behind. The top of his head, and his little feet are visible. The crosswalk is in the UK, and has “<- look left” written on the street so that pedestrians know where the traffic comes from.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

Really hard to overstate how amazing it is to be able to flash totally new firmware to my ESPHome devices wirelessly.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

Finally mustered up the courage to design a custom PCB in @kicad.org and send it off for manufacture. Only one bodge wire required, to deal with an island in my 3.3v plane. Very pleased with myself. This is a 16 channel temperature probe that I'll be using to monitor each loop in my floor heating.

Bare black PCB in my hand, with component footprints visible in the silkscreen. The board is titled "Raspberry Pi Pico W Thermocouple Multiplexer"

The PCB with a handful of components placed on top of it, including the pico board and the two ADC chips with their corresponding screw terminals.

View of the board in its enclosure from an off-axis, where the holes in the side of the enclosure are visible. The USB port on the long side of the enclosure allows the Pico to be plugged into power.

Top down angle of the assembled board placed inside of a 3D printed enclosure. There are NTC thermistor leads strung through the side of the enclosure and connected to each of the 16 terminal blocks.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Travel websites should let you filter out properties with squeaky floors and door hinges.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

People look at you differently when the only thing you’ve got in your basket is 4 packs of diapers, 2 beers, and a huge block of cheese.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

5 hours into a brisket cook. Ask me anything.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Wait, so Apple doesn't offer 64 gigs of ram in a mobile platform anymore?

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

Today I used the latent heat of water to precisely calibrate some thermometers I'm using to measure the temperature of the smoker in my garden. Water freezes at 0°C, but before it does, it sits at 0 for a while before crystalizing and continuing to cool off.

Screenshot of the temperature history of 2 thermometers. One in yellow is taken from an ambient air temperature sensor inside my freezer. It reads about -10 degrees, and the cyclical pattern of the compressor is visible in the trace of the temperature line. The other, in blue, is the temperature I'm measuring with a probe in an ice cube tray. The temperature dropped steadily until it hit the freezing point of water. It has since plateaued at that temperature while the latent heat of the liquid water is abosorbed by the freezer. Eventually, when it crystalizes, the temperature will continue to drop. but until then, this horizontal line serves as an excellent reference point for 0°C.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

My first car was my mom's hand-me-down Previa. It was powder blue, had all wheel drive with a manual transmission, and by the end of its life it had flames and a racing stripe painted on it. I loved it so much. One day, we'll be reunited.

A photo of the front of my van. Its racing stripe runs from the front to the back.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

Today I learned that the SDA and SCL pins on my Adafruit feather ESP32 are pulled high, making them bad choices for use with the corresponding ADC on those pins. Save yourself the hours of hardware and software debugging - don't do what I do.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

First batch of blackberries came off the vines this weekend. So I made jam:

450 grams of blackberries in a bowl on my kitchen scale.

Blackberries cooking in a pot on my stove, to become jam.

Jam on sourdough toast with butter underneath. Delicious

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

It's official, I've joined the dark side. Can't wait to inundate you all with my AI and Machine Learning hot-takes.

Screenshot of my LinkedIn header, with my new title as Machine Learning Engineer

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

One thing I love about engaging with music content on YouTube is the strategically placed adverts right at the spot where the drop is meant to happen.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

It's been 6 months since I saw Snarky Puppy recording the new album and I'm getting unreasonably excited about the release this fall. Can't come soon enough.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

Death Stranding 2 is on another level of weird

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

It's ironic that many of the country's staunches social darwinists are people who, when asked, would enthusiastically reject the Origin of Species as heresy.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

I love the induction hob we installed in our new kitchen, for all of the reasons listed here.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

I love it when you die so many times in a video game that the respawn menu starts giving you tips on how to lower the difficulty.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Also, shoutout to @openstreetmap.bsky.social, @qgis.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy and the Dutch government for the commitment to easily accessible geospatial #opendata. All of this was obtained and plotted using free online tools and software which makes me really happy.

A pen-plotter drawing of the city of Haarlem in The Netherlands. It's drawn on blue paper, reminiscent of a blueprint. The ink used for the bodies of water was gold metallic, highlighting the Spaarne river running up the right side of the image in a lazy winding pattern. The north embankment of the city forms triangular points, indicative of the city's old fortifications from centuries past. The handful of canals in Haarlem are also gold, and frame the outline of the old city in bright color against the blue background. The city itself is drawn with a mixture of white and black pens. The white outlines of every building in the city create a mixture of geometric and organic patterns, depending on the age of the neighborhoods being mapped. Black roads and bike paths are dark against the deep blue paper, only barely visible in comparison to the white house outlines. The rail line that passes through the north side of the old city cuts across horizontally, and is drawn in silver. The paper this was drawn on is 50x70cm and there is a visible margin around the outside where the pen plotter stopped drawing its lines. I'm really proud of this piece of art.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

As it turns out, machine learning engineering is just 11 data pipelines in a trench coat.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

I streamlined the toolpath algorithm and it cut the print time down by 75%.

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

I find this endlessly fascinating and it makes me want to write my own tool path algorithm. #plotter #plotterart

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Mike O’Connor @mikeoconnor.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

My wife, for Father’s Day, commissioned an illustrator to produce vector graphics of me and my son. I love them so much, and they provided the perfect image for me to plot on my new scratch-built pen plotter.

Black construction paper on a white table. The construction paper has a line drawing of a father and son. Their foreheads are touching, father‘s eyes closed. The pen is silver, and stands out strongly against the black paper background. The robot used to print the images visible in the margins of the photograph.

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