III · The Works

The things he has finished, with their reasons.

Four works, in the order they left the shipyard: two at sea, two still at the engraver's. Under each one is the rule it cost him, because a project that taught nothing was only a way of passing the time. Seven others are not here: they are on the bottom, in a register of their own, with the days each stayed afloat and the cause. The way to it is at the foot of this leaf.

Opus I

The Amalfi Archive

Video seriesIn production

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
StateIn production — first landing MMXXVI

Chapter V — Moving Pictures →

Opus II

Faro

PWALive

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, only the lamp.

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
StateLive, free, open to keepers

Enter the lighthouse

Opus III

Off-Season

Self-hostedLive

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 actually 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
StateLive, 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 →

Fig. III

Two points, moved by one hand.

Fig. IIIcraft — a pair of dividers: care on one point, repetition on the other.