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ben's garden

Coming Soon

blossomblossom (?) created 2025-08-17, edited 2025-08-04 | 1406 words

Summary

A list of work-in-progress projects around the garden. The higher something is in the list, the more likely I am to be daydreaming about it.

First, a note about this folder

Most of the WIP notes in this folder aren’t intended for consumption by people other than me. They’re in various states of half-doneness and may have trailing unfinished

But, I figured it’d be harmless to keep them around. Though you’re probably uninterested in 90% of what’s here, I’ll really know something is useful if someone goes through the trouble of finding and bringing it up! Poke me if something here catches your eye and I’ll fast-track it :)

Personal history

Some fun or noteworthy past experiences I haven’t yet written about

  • Studying abroad in the Netherlands
  • transit travel log
  • Hosting a hackathon
  • Thoughts and opinions on software engineering (and/or advice for new engineers)
  • Open Computing Facility retrospective
  • Participating in game jams
  • Desk/physical space makeover

Music

Piano studies

I feel like my piano ability has been stagnating recently, so I’d like to practice more deliberately and make notes/progress reports on what I need to improve on.

I have two main goals:

  1. comfortably perform a new piece (or more) in public.
  2. slowly branch out into some less traditional music so I can obtain new styles for improv.
  • Chopin: Ballades 1&4, Polonaise-Fantasie
  • Liszt: Un sospiro, Sonata in B Minor
  • Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2
  • Hisaishi: Merry-Go-Round of Life
  • Kapustin: Etudes

Music production

I haven’t had time to make a whole lot of music, but I hope to get to a point where I can jam fairly effortlessly / make music to relax. It’ll take a while to get there, and I intend to document my process.

  • Building a music studio
  • DAW tips
  • Quick guides whenever I make a cool sound and want to remember how to reproduce it

Health

Figuring out how to create habits/systems to stay healthy for the rest of my life. (Run an experiment tracking everything for a month or 2 and report on the results?)

  • More rigorous sleep tracking w/ proper tagging to figure out what affects my sleep the most (e.g. melatonin, alcohol, caffeine, last meal time, last workout time…)
  • Meal/macro tracking and weight gain/loss strategies
  • Recipes for healthy meal prep that hits macro targets
  • Workout routines etc.
  • Trying to run faster
  • Skincare

Internet Trails

An exercise in discovering how and why I exist on the internet.

  • Internet Trails
  • mapping my corner of the internet: (i.e. everything this garden directly links to, and also everything those pages link to)
  • understanding the anthropology of social media
  • finding communities on bluesky and twitter
  • studying prosociality on social platforms
  • Being deliberate with internet usage (anti-doomscrolling)
  • Sentiment analysis for online communities (specifically regarding opinions on genai)

Software engineering

Some lessons from work that will probably be useful to someone out there.

Community

Local-first or online reporting and organizing.

Abstract topics

Synthesis pieces, future blog posts, open questions in philosophy/psychology.

  • Information asymmetry: on storytelling, Ted Chiang, and staring into the abyss
  • Sources/sinks of inspiration and creative energy
  • Opensauce, doing silly things, and increasing your surface area for luck

Homelabbing / TurtleNet S2

I published TurtleNet Season 1 back in 2023 as a beginners’ guide to running a server at home; it remains one of my most well-read posts to this day. However, it’s quite out-of-sync given how much I’ve learned since then. I’m slowly re-writing the entire series, and you can get a sneak peak over at the homelabbing folder.

I also need to build a more permanent home for the series; I think it deserves to be its own separate thing at this point. I’m not 100% satisfied with Hashnode, though I’ve been too lazy to move it off so far.

Garden Improvements

Various fixups to make this website better.

  • Custom explorer icons [completion:: 2025-06-22]
  • Make more emojis (especially for homepage headers) [completion:: 2025-06-22]
  • Comments for subpages [completion:: 2025-07-08]
  • Simple acceptance tests (page loads, private/draft pages are hidden, etc)
  • Graph to show growth in word/page count
  • More permanent top highlight banner for the homepage
  • Like/share buttons
  • 88x31 button
  • Make weather widget report time to sunset/sunrise
    • Maybe add shaders based on time of day??
    • make the weather emoji less jank
  • Add background music / jukebox
  • RAG/natural language search (aditbala.com)
  • Make spotify report local files and podcasts correctly
  • Webmention support

Recommendations

Product Recommendations

product recommendations

my many hours of scouring the depths of Capitalism might actually be helpful to someone! I struggle to find a reliable source of product reviews (the best I have are usually niche subreddits and NYT Wirecutter); aspirationally I’d like to become one if not only for my wallet’s sake. Inspiration: https://ponnekanti.net/posts/min-maxing/

  • Coffee and coffee-making equipment [completion:: 2025-08-04]
  • skincare [completion:: 2025-08-04]
  • Bedding [completion:: 2025-08-04]
  • Small phones [completion:: 2025-08-04]
  • Shoes and clothes for outdoor stuff [completion:: 2025-08-04]
  • Fonts and font foundries [completion:: 2025-08-04]

Content Recommendations

I already have some of these scattered around the internet; aggregating them in one place would be neat.

Statement of Purpose

Primary inspiration: Joss Murphy’s why I do what I do page

Figuring out how to organize my values, motivations, and short/medium/long term goals in a single easy-to-digest page will be a neat challenge. I’m still not sure how to approach it yet, but I feel like going through the process will give me some meaningful clarity around what I actually want to do with my life.

Game guides

I’m a big fan of strategy games (both tabletop and digital) and might have some words to help a beginner have a better experience.

Recipes

My recipes site from V6 is somewhat broken; I’m probably better off moving them here rather than maintaining that. There’s also some more general cooking knowledge I’ve accumulated that needs a place to live.

Misc. hobbies

A myriad of things I enjoy and probably have enough knowledge to write something interesting about.

Misc. how-tos

Things I had to figure out in some suboptimal way, and hope to spare a future stranger a bit of suffering from.

Rabbit holes

Super random and unimportant topics I want to know more about for some inexplicable reason.

Really backlogged bucket list things I want to do at some point in my life but don’t have time for right now

  • host a podcast
  • get into photography/videography/film and make cool videos and movies and stuff
  • actually be able to draw competently
  • solve a rubik’s cube blindfolded in under a minute / sighted in sub-15s
  • bike across the Netherlands
  • hike/backpack the entirety of the Bay Area Ridge Trail once it’s completed, hopefully in 10-20 years
  • Play really really nice golf courses (prerequisite: actually get good enough to play them confidently): pebble beach, spyglass, pasatiempo..
  • Design, build, and ship my own keyboard 100% from scratch
  • Make another game
  • make a map of boba shops vs coffee shops per capita in bay area cities
  • become a competitive scrabble player

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    Links to this page

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