I decided to take two months off in August and September of 2026. Now that my time off is coming to a close I thought it would be nice to jot down all the nice ways I got to spend my time. The highlights:

• A week in Dublin.
• I can now do a couple pull-ups.
• Set up my home server, now hosting 8 neat things!
• Made a new scifi game Asteria, a book AI app Turtle Shelf, my own news recommendation algorithm app Riverbed, and a new gag game Overplastered.
• I got AI to do the most impressive thing I've seen yet: a full ChessCraft port to Godot.
• Books: Because Internet and Waste Wars for a book club. Read The Shortest History of Ireland in Ireland. Dungeon Crawler Carl book 5.
• ChessCraft: release 1.17 moved from open beta to full public release on Android and Steam.
• Camping: Black Lake with my wife, Gatineau Park with family.
• TMNT (1990) movie and pizza night with friends.
• AI events: AI ML meetup, Running AI locally, and All In AI (thanks Antonio).
• Anniversary at Gibby's.

Dublin

I spent a solo week in Dublin which was fun.

Oscar Wilde... or Justin Trudeau? You decide.

Some highlights:

• National Museum of Ireland: Great Viking displays including the 12th century (or so) Ballinderry bow.
• Randomly stumbling upon a sculpture of the Utah Teapot.
• Bus day-trip to Dunluce Castle, Giant's Causeway (hexagonal stones), and Belfast (Northern Ireland).
• Literature pub crawl.
• Two comedy shows, especially: Deirdre O'Kane.
• Three walking tours, especially the mythology and folklore one.
• Two music shows: one paid and one free at a bar.
• Several meals and reading at places, especially The Winding Stair and Bestseller.

Random notes about Dublin:

• Irish people really do talk a lot about pubs and potatoes.
• Conflicting tour-guide information about Ireland, Irish, Northern Ireland, unification, history, and the zeitgeist. Some tours it felt like I was taking a tour of Montreal and they'd say "here in Quebec we believe Quebec is its own nation, and we're well on our way to separating from Canada" as if "we" is a meaningful thing to say in this context.
• I saw a shocking number of beautiful people in Belfast.
• Lots of couples holding hands.
• Polite drivers.

Choice quotes I overheard:

• "The service industry is a load of wank."
• Two very old ladies in a flea market: "Did yoo see something you liketted?" / "I cawnt see anything."
• Young Irish couple talking: "These people don't know how to cook a potato."
• Paying for my meal, I thanked my waiter for the great stew. He says "That'll keep you going for a bit."

Rampart

My new home server is a Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q-1 16GB with the hostname "rampart" running proxmox. This means that instead of paying a cloud provider I can launch services and virtual computers at home instead for free. With help from AI, it didn't take long to migrate or launch a lot of great services:

• Nextcloud: open source Google Drive and video chat.
• VPN: used in Dublin, worked great. My phone and laptop thought they were still in Montreal.
• Grafana: visualize metrics with dashboards. I have dashboards for ChessCraft and all my home services.
• Prometheus: metrics database.
• Matomo: open source Google Analytics for website tracking. Used on my many websites.
• Skarlet: fun blood pressure tracking app based on the Mortal Kombat character with hemokinesis.
• Riverbed: crawls my favorite 120 sources of news and entertainment, and recommends what to watch every day based on my ratings.
• Turtle Shelf: take a photo of books and this recommends which you would most like. The phone app needs this tiny backend service.

Rampart is on a backup power supply but if my home internet dies, all these services become unreachable until it's restored. So my production services with users like ChessCraft still run on the cloud, however new projects with few or no users like Turtle Shelf now have a free place to get started.

Overplastered

My sister loves a game called "Overcooked" and her husband is a drywaller. To demonstrate how incredible AI is these days, I made a drywall themed clone in 20 minutes called "Overplastered" which you can play in your browser here.

OMSCS

I'm still registered as a student for the online master's in computer science at Georgia Tech called OMSCS. However I didn't register this semester so that I could focus on all these brilliant and exciting AI projects instead. No regrets. We'll see how I feel in December.

Closing Thoughts

Back to work soon!