Laser and other tech projects,
always free for your use.
Every post has the details, process, and exact settings to duplicate it yourself. The site is live and maintained — and most of the work here, including this site itself, is done with LLMs.
Latest projects
Builds, guides, and experiments from the shop.
MailForge: A Local-LLM Email Assistant That Never Sends
A self-hosted email triage assistant: an IMAP listener, a local model, and a drafts queue. It classifies, labels and writes the reply, then stops. Sending is a human click, always. Free, MIT, download below.
DisPatch: A Self-Hosted Chat App for Local AI Agents
A self-hosted chat app for local AI agents, with a drag-drop file server and a server-enforced PIN lock. It replaced my 30-container Rocket.Chat install. Version 2.0 is out, and the download is a 3 MB zip.
ThemeForge: a Drop-in CSS Theme System an AI Agent Installs in One Step
ThemeForge is a single folder, `ui-theme/`, that gives a web app ten colour themes, a picker, design tokens and ready-made component classes — and it's written so an AI coding agent can install it in one step from a one-line Python command. Plain CSS, no build step, no dependencies; MIT; source and zip below.
ChatForge: a Local NPU AI Assistant for the Copilot Key
My laptop shipped with an AI key and an AI chip that had never met. ChatForge introduces them: press the Copilot key, get a 1.5B Qwen answering on the Intel NPU at 42–51 tokens/s — no account, nothing leaves the PC — with StudioForge or a cloud model one click away. MIT, source and zip below.
Winding Down OMLA: How to Shut Down a Non-Profit
I spent months building a non-profit licensing framework for open-weight AI models, then retired it without ever launching. What it was, what got built, and what shutting it down actually took — with the whole thing archived for download.
WordPress: Use AI to Make Custom Blocks (Free Accordion Example)
A free copy-paste accordion for WordPress — plain HTML and CSS, no plugin, no JavaScript — plus the exact AI prompt that wrote it.
Wood Engraving: Fire Bear
An AI-generated firefighter-bear logo, laser-engraved onto a turtle-shaped hardwood tray. The whole workflow: prompt, typeface, xTool Creative Space, burn.
What My AI Agents Actually Cost: DeepSeek vs the Big APIs
Three months of an always-on AI agent stack: $242 in June, $225 in July, $385 in August. What drove each bill, what DeepSeek's August 16 price hike did, and what the same workload costs on GPT, Claude, Grok and Kimi.
Putting a Chatbot on the Public Web — On My Own Hardware
A chatbot on a public website, but the brain is a small model running on a computer in my house — free per token and private. Here's the relay architecture that makes it safe, the security holes I had to close, and an honest accounting of how slow it is and what it would still need to be production-ready.
Browse by type
AI & Local LLM
Running AI on your own hardware — local LLMs, agents, and image generation. No subscriptions, no cloud, no computer-science degree.
Laser Projects
Cutting, engraving, and the occasional small fire. Each post has the details, process, and settings you need to duplicate it yourself.
Tools & Downloads
Small apps and utilities I built and actually use. Free downloads for personal use, source included.