Opus I
The Amalfi Archive
Video seriesOn the stocks
A video series about the future, built out of 19th-century paintings of my own coast. Each episode restores one painting, lets it move again, and uses it to explain one thing that is about to change in medicine, in machines, or in both. The old frame is what makes the new thing legible: nobody panics at a wave in an oil painting, and the wave is the point.
What it cost: three of the seven wrecks were attempts at this same channel, one of them with a finished plan, a wiki, copy for every platform and not a single frame shot. The rule that came out of it is the first of the four: no plan may be longer than the thing it plans.
MediumFilm: quiet, optimistic explainers
ToolsDJI Pocket 3 · DaVinci Resolve
StateOn the stocks, first landing MMXXVI
Chapter V · Moving Pictures →
Opus II
Faro
PWAAfloat
A Morse-code trainer built like a lighthouse keeper’s apprenticeship: you learn by receiving light, slowly, until the signal stops being noise and becomes a language. It works offline, weighs almost nothing, and asks nothing of you: no account, no tracking.
What it taught: that a tool which asks for nothing gets used. It was finished because it was small, and it was small because I had just lost seventy days to something that was neither.
MediumProgressive web app
ToolsVanilla JS · Web Audio · offline-first
StateAfloat, free, open to keepers
Enter the lighthouse ↗
Opus III
Off-Season
Self-hostedAfloat
What the coast does in winter. A small platform I run end to end on my own server: the database, the backups, the deploys and the mistakes. Renting convenience is easy. Owning the whole stack, blame included, is how a man learns what the machine is doing.
What it taught: the fourth rule, in the form of a bill. You own what you can repair. I have restored that database from a backup at two in the morning, which is the only exam on the subject that counts.
MediumSelf-hosted platform
ToolsPocketBase · my own VPS
StateAfloat, in service year-round
Visit off-season ↗
Opus IV
Calco
Chrome extensionv0.1
A Chrome extension that takes a plaster cast of any interface component: markup, styles and geometry, ready to be studied and rebuilt. Named after the casts sculptors take before they dare to carve. Most of design is learned by tracing the masters, and Calco merely admits it.
What it is teaching: that copying honestly is a discipline and copying secretly is a habit. It is at v0.1 and it will stay there until it is worth more than the time it takes to explain.
MediumChrome extension, Manifest V3
ToolsVanilla JS · CSS introspection
Statev0.1, at the engraver’s
Ask me about it · Chapter VI →
Opus V
The Instruments
In the browserAfloat
Mechanisms of the body, drawn in the browser so that they can be taken apart. Lead II turns the heart’s electrical loop and lets the six limb leads draw themselves as its shadows; Half-Life lays three drugs, from nine minutes to twenty-two days, on a single curve. Each is drawn with its sources beside it, and there is nothing to fill in: no field asks about anyone’s body, and nothing leaves the page.
What it is teaching: that a mechanism is understood when it can be drawn, and that a drawing is the quickest way to be found out. So each instrument is checked against its own claims before it goes out, by a script that stops the launch if a single number disagrees.
MediumInteractive drawings, in the browser
ToolsVanilla JS · Canvas · a check before every launch
StateAfloat since 14 October MMXXVI, two of them, more on the stocks
Open the instruments ↗
