Every good desk gadget needs a dual personality. When I'm locked into deep focus and the room is quiet, my workspace shouldn't really scream for attention. So the idle state is a digital clock which stares back at me, flanked by localised weather icons and a subtle date readout.

Fighting the pixel wars

Building for a 320x240 screen is equal parts liberating and agonizing. Every single pixel counts.

Early on, my album art was behaving like a stubborn puzzle piece, rendering only half of the cover or clipping awkwardly off the edges because the container size didn't match the scaled-down JPEG output. Worse yet, when long track titles kicked in, they collided straight into the progress bar, creating a cluttered mess.

Fixing it meant dialing in the math, (since I actually have no clue if there's a UI visualiser for ESP32s):

• Centering the album art precisely within a 150x150 boundary so 300x300 JPEGs decode cleanly.

• Creating a dedicated vertical hierarchy (TITLE_Y, ARTIST_Y, ALBUM_Y) with protective spacing buffers.

• Padding the bottom layout so the elapsed time numbers and the progress bar never step on each other's toes.

Debugging

The biggest heartbreak of working with hardware isn't wiring mistakes or bad code; it's the random bugs that happen to appear in the middle of the night.

In my early versions, the display would run flawlessly for a few hours, and then completely lock up. I’d walk back to my desk to find a frozen screen, forcing me to yank the USB-C cable and replug it.

The culprit? Heap fragmentation. Every time a track changed, my code was dynamically calling malloc() and free() to handle the incoming 40KB JPEG image buffer. Over hours of continuous API polling, the ESP32's heap memory became Swiss cheese until it choked and crashed.

So I killed dynamic allocation entirely for the buffer. By pre-allocating a global jpgBuffer right at startup, the memory footprint stays dead-steady. The board doesn't have to scramble for breathing room anymore, making it stable enough to run indefinitely. I'm still on the lookout for many more unprecedented problems.

Aesthetics

Final Thoughts: Why We Build

At the end of the day, plugging a raw microcontroller into a USB port and watching it come alive with your own layout, your own fonts, and your own API keys is an unmatched feeling! In case you want to spin up your own desktop companion, the source code and everything else is linked in my GitHub. (I update it regularly for bugs, and feel free to suggest changes).

If you've got an ESP32 CYD gathering dust in a drawer somewhere, pull it out, flash the code, and give your desk the companion it deserves.

Hardware tinkering has always been a fascination of mine, but software-wise, diving deeper into Linux and managing a headless single-board computer is a whole different kind of rewarding. Recently, I got my hands on a Raspberry Pi 3B and set out to understand the ins and outs of this magnificent hardware.

Moving away from a graphical desktop environment to operating entirely through CLI taught me a lot. Breaking things and having to reflash the SD card became part of the tuition...

Building a Pi-hole

With the Pi up and running, I wanted a practical project - which was when I decided to install Pi-hole, acting as a DNS sinkhole for network-wide ad blocking.

The installation process was remarkably straightforward, but configuring my router to hand out the Pi’s IP as the primary DNS server required lots of work. Firstly, I didn't know my router gateway credentials, so that took an entire week to figure out (including calling support from my ISP, which was not pleasant). So once setting up DNS to route to the Pi and binding my it to a static IP was complete, as well as configuring SSH for a headless setup, it was all good to go!
In all honesty, the thing shouldnt've taken so long, but figuring it out myself was the rewarding part of it, I guess.

Contexto first caught my attention during tutor time and in class, where my friends kept coming back to it. They really enjoyed trying to find the hidden word, and seeing how much fun a simple guessing game could create made me want to build my own version. I called it Contexto, after the game that started the conversations.

Guess by meaning, not spelling

Instead of telling you whether a guess is spelled correctly or shares letters with the answer, Contexto ranks words by how close their meaning is to the secret word. A low rank means you are getting warmer, while a high one sends you back to explore a different idea. That makes each guess feel like a clue, and the next word is often a small leap of intuition.

A daily puzzle, or another round

I wanted the extension to work for a quick daily game and for those times when one round turns into several. You can play the current puzzle, choose another game, or jump into a random one. Guesses are ranked by closeness, and a history panel keeps completed games and personal stats in view. Hints and a give-up option make it easier to keep moving when a word has you stuck.

Keeping the game close at hand

Contexto is a Chrome extension with a compact popup and an option to open a larger view. The game uses the Contexto service to check guesses, while browser storage keeps the current game, settings, and history between visits. That combination lets the game stay lightweight without losing the progress that makes a longer guessing session satisfying.

I've always been intrigued by color theory and how a small set of values can describe a shade with surprising precision. While scrolling through reels, I came across a similar color-memory idea and wondered how simply it could work as a game. It helped me develop spectrum, an extension that asks players to remember colors and recreate them from memory.

How the mechanics work

The gameplay is quite straightforward. Players are presented with five random colors in sequence. Each color flashes on screen for five seconds with a countdown. Once the timer expires, players adjust sliders for hue, saturation, and lightness to recreate the shade they just saw - easily said than done though!

Scoring chromatic accuracy

Scoring is calculated using an algorithm based on HSL color space geometry. Hue is weighted most heavily since our brains perceive angular color shifts drastically, while saturation and lightness are graded using smooth power curves. Scores range from zero to ten per round, leading to a maximum possible score of fifty points, in which you get a message depending on your accuracy. (Out of all the people I know, not many score over 45).

Under the hood with Plasmo and React

It's built using modern web tooling, using React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS. Persistence is handled via Chrome storage with automatic session recovery.

KojoNote (which originally started as StudyForge) is a platform designed to make revision more accessible, engaging, and effective for KS3 students. It is particularly beneficial for students who require additional support in subjects such as Science, while encouraging independent learning beyond the classroom. The core aim is to provide students with a single platform that brings together everything they need for effective revision—including a dashboard, revision notes, student notes, flashcards, and interactive practice modules.

Grounded in the KS3 curriculum

To ensure the content aligns closely with the school's curriculum, the KS3 curriculum has been integrated directly into the system. Mathematics as well as the three core Sciences (Biology, Chemistry, and Physics) have already been implemented, with content specifically tailored to our curriculum requirements. As the platform develops, there is significant potential to extend its scope to support iGCSE and, eventually, A-Level students.

Bringing learning together

Feedback on the concept from staff members has been overwhelmingly positive. One of the platform's key strengths is its ability to combine teacher-assigned work and independent revision within a single environment. Rather than students relying on multiple systems for homework, notes, and revision materials, KojoNote aims to provide a unified experience that simplifies both learning and organisation.

The platform draws inspiration from services such as Khan Academy, Save My Exams, and Carousel Learning, while seeking to offer a more personalised experience. Although external resources such as PMT and Sparx continue to play an important role, KojoNote acts as a central hub that directs students to the most relevant materials and resources. Furthermore, content can be developed collaboratively by both students and teachers, allowing the platform to become increasingly tailored to the needs of the community over time.

Building together

Building this isn't a solo journey—I'm lucky enough to have my wonderful friend who is helping me with illustrations, and I hope to build and expand an ambitious team around the project as it grows!

Keeping notes accessible

Another major challenge in school environments relates to Microsoft Teams and Class Notebooks—when student Teams are archived or deleted at the end of an academic year, notes stored within the associated OneNote Class Notebooks can become difficult or impossible to access. KojoNote addresses this challenge through a permanent 'notes' system (currently a work-in-progress), enabling students to retain access to their notes throughout their time at school regardless of changes to Teams, classes, or year groups. I hope to get a tenant to simplify login via Azure AD integration!

Get involved

If anyone is interested in collaborating or coming on board, feel free to join us here!

The idea

The idea is fairly simple. CompassBite finds your current location, looks for nearby food and drink places using OpenStreetMap, and shows restaurants, cafes, and bars on a map. I currently have a basic version running through a sandbox. Currently data caching, filters for opening hours and location type is available. The app is still in development though.

Building it has been harder than I expected. I thought getting the location and showing nearby restaurants would be the easy part, but I had to learn way too much just for this one project, one of which was understanding how to work with Overpass queries. MapLibre brought its own problems too, especially frequent rendering bugs I kept on encountering. You cannot believe the amount of times I threw my phone over the couch in frustration.

General programming forums did not help much because my problems were very specific to OSM, so I found help elsewhere:

• The OpenStreetMap Forum became my primary place to refer to about all things OpenStreetMap.
• A thread on forum.openstreetmap.fr helped me understand server timeouts and alternative Overpass instances.
• GIS Stack Exchange helped with geospatial logic.
• For MapLibre issues, fortunately OSM's US Slack helped with it.

I *also* got a lot of help from my lovely buddy Codex. Whenever I was stuck on a build error or a bug, it helped me fix the problems, but eventually stumped at the nicher problems that required looking into the forums manually. They taught me how OSM worked, and Codex helped me build the app that talks to it.

CompassBite is still a work in progress - which I hope one day my parents can use it to find breakfast without the weekly struggle! But when I open my local build on a weekend, it can show me a local cafe nearby that we never noticed, and that makes the hard parts so worth it. It was a great learning opportunity that also gave me a deeper understanding of how geospatial data is processed and used to power location-based features.

I also look forward to sharing more updates as the app develops, and hopefully open source the software for all Android users! (or publish it to the Play Store).


A little bit more on OSM, if you'd like to read more:

A general overview of OSM

OpenStreetMap stores "the planet" (the full global dataset) in a PostgreSQL relational database. It relies heavily on PostGIS, an extension that adds support for geographic objects, allowing SQL queries to calculate distances, map areas, and run spatial coordinates. Initially I thought it (OSM) would just fetch from Google's existing infrastructure, but oh boy was I wrong.

To get data smoothly in and out of the database, the backend uses tools like osm2pgsql to convert standard map data into PostGIS format, and Osmium, a fast C++ "Swiss Army knife" framework for processing raw mapping logs and tracking file updates.

To turn raw coordinates into a visual map, OSM uses a rendering toolkit called Mapnik. It converts geographic data points into images, which tile servers then chop into small square pieces so web browsers and apps can load local areas instantly.

Map searches are powered by Nominatim, which translates text addresses into map coordinates. For developers looking to extract specific information from the map, the Overpass API acts as a fast data filtering engine that pulls custom location datasets without taxing the main database.

Lionel Messi

Where do you even start? There’s nothing left to say about Messi that hasn’t been said, and yet somehow every time he touches the ball it feels like a new sentence. What I love most isn’t the goals (though, yes, those goals). It’s the way he sees the game three seconds before anyone else: the pass nobody else spotted; the dribble that shouldn’t work against three defenders and yet does. Watching Messi is like watching someone play chess while everyone else plays checkers, and I feel lucky to have watched it live rather than just in highlight reels. As an FC Barcelona fan, I’ll never stop being grateful that the best years of his career, including the 2008-12 years under Pep that made Barca undefeatable.

Robert Lewandowski

If Messi is poetry, Lewandowski is engineering, and I mean that as the highest compliment. There’s something deeply satisfying about a number nine who does exactly what he’s supposed to do, only better than anyone. The positioning, the movement, the finishing with either foot, the headers. Five goals in nine minutes is the kind of thing you tell your grandkids about. He’s proof that relentless consistency and hard work can be just as awe-inspiring as raw genius. And seeing him bring that ruthlessness to Barca after everything he achieved in Germany has been a proper treat: we finally got the number 9 we’d been missing.

Antoine Griezmann

Griezmann might be the most intelligent player on this list. He’s never been the fastest or the flashiest, but watch him off the ball and you’ll see a player who reads the game like a novel he’s already finished. He drops deep, links play, defends when he has to, and pops up with big goals when it matters most. The 2018 World Cup was his masterpiece. He’s the kind of player who makes everyone around him better, and honestly, every team needs a Griezmann.

David Luiz: Chaos, But Make It Art

Okay, hear me out: David Luiz is not on this list because he’s the most reliable defender in history. He’s here because football is entertainment, and nobody understood that better than David Luiz. The marauding runs from centre-back, the 60-yard diagonals, the free-kicks, the tackles: either genius or disaster, with absolutely no middle ground. He played every match like it was a cup final and he’d bet his house on it. And let’s not forget: he was genuinely brilliant in that 2012 Champions League run and the 2014 World Cup until… well, you know. Football needs characters, and David Luiz is a character.

Neymar: The Showman

Neymar is the player who makes you gasp and groan within the same ten seconds, sometimes with the same touch. The pure audacity of his game (the rainbow flicks, the elasticos, the dribbles that seem designed to humiliate) is exactly why I watch football. Yes, he goes down easily; yes, the drama is exhausting. But when he’s on song, he’s unplayable, and the Santos and Barcelona versions of Neymar were some of the most electric football I’ve ever seen. That MSN front three is still the most fun I’ve ever had watching football - the best version of football I think anyone can achieve - being selfless. He played like the game was supposed to be fun, and to be honest, more players should.

The common thread

Looking at this list, I notice something: none of these players are boring. Five completely different ways to be brilliant at football, and that’s exactly why I love this sport. There’s no single right way to play it.

And yes, being a Barca fan definitely shaped this list. Three of these five gave me some of my best memories in blue and red, and the other two are exactly the kind of players you’d want in a Barça shirt anyway.

Who’s on your list?

StudyForge is a fresh side project I’ve been hacking away at recently, in order to solve an abundant need in the academic space! The philosophy behind it is simple: to get core revision tasks done as quickly as possible.

Focusing on the scope

Too many study tools suffer from feature creep before they even solve the primary problem. With StudyForge, I wanted to strip away complex dashboards and unnecessary settings to focus purely on creating a reliable place for essential notes and quick flashcard practice, similar to SaveMyExams.

The interface is purposely bare-bones for now, while I try to define the scope of the project.

Building the foundation

Since this is a brand new project, the primary goal right now is testing out core UX patterns for organizing revision materials. I’m experimenting with simple ways to render markdown notes and build fast, responsive quiz modules. Built on Vite+React though, so I have a lot of flexibility in how I approach the development.

It’s an early experiment, but getting the core functionality right first will give a solid foundation to iterate on as new ideas take shape down the line!

I’ve always loved building things: from tinkering with early code projects to reverse engineering things and (hopefully), creating something useful for others. Having my own website feels like having a proper digital workbench where I can publish write-ups, tutorial notes, and side-project deep dives without relying on algorithms or big social platforms.

Expect posts about web development, embedded systems, open-source tools, and occasional experiments. Thanks for stopping by!