I’ve collected a large number of hardware and software projects over the past few years. These served as wonderful distractions during the pandemic but now feel like they’re stopping me from completing anything—especially when the software components often require on-going effort to simply keep up with operating system and language updates.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to very consciously stop working on a few projects and limit the scope of others, starting with Spherical Display and Locate.

Spherical Display

The project never made it out of the prototype phase

My attempt at a spherical persistence-of-vision display, this now feels like a textbook sunk cost fallacy—I have invested a lot of time in designing and assembling the mechanics of the display yet I find myself a long way from even a working demo. The idea and approach feels sound and I’ve learned a lot on the way, but it’s clear there remains a huge amount of work required to produce the kind of robust display I would need to be able to take it to festivals. With that in mind (and as cool as the idea might be), I’m putting it on indefinite hold and archiving the GitHub project to let me focus on other things.

Locate

Locate is macOS app that lets you add URLs to a map and tries to automatically detect a suitable location for web pages wherever possible. While I built Locate to serve a need when we were apartment hunting, it was primarily intended as a proof of concept; a way to test out ideas that I hope to roll into Bookmarks in the future. Instead of investing effort keeping Locate building, I’m going to archive the project and focus my efforts on adding the location-based view I’d always planned into Bookmarks.