Thoughts of Mike

Image Encoders

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been slowly trying to add more of my photography to this site over the last few weeks. I spent a few hours over the weekend adding images to folders and getting things organized. Most of my photography is digital, with a handful of film scans as well. And they take a variety of sizes and aspect ratios. To keep the hosting costs under control, I figured I would crop and resize the images I was adding so they’d be a more uniform size. And in the process, I went overboard and ended up making them too small to be useful. And they were all renamed by that point.

Local LLM

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been posting a lot about my Daft Punk project, and one of the things that I’ve been relying quite heavily on is local large language models for coding assistance. It’s one of those things that I thought would be interesting to play with, and ended up actually being kind of useful. I really do think that these kinds of models are going to play a really big role in the future of AI assisted software development and last week’s announcements by Apple about their M5 chips, combined with large scale outages of services like Claude code make me increasingly convinced that local language models aren’t going anywhere. It’s really amazing what you can accomplish with an open source model that you’ve downloaded for free from the Internet.

Hello, World

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first post. But there’s plenty more to come.

Seville

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Part 3: The Electronics Package

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

I talked a bit about the process of building the shell in part 2. Now it’s time to figure out what goes inside it — the electronics.

1. Rough Plan Outline Link to heading

I spent a lot of time before beginning this project thinking about the way I wanted to light it. The images of Daft Punk from the early 2000s and Bangalter’s glowing lights immediately came to mind. Over the years I have seen other people recreate this helmet with varying degrees of polish and sophistication. The ones that went all the way were usually soldering loose LEDs together and multiplexing with Arduinos and big bundles of wire. And I don’t think I saw any that allowed the helmet to talk to other devices. That left me with a few ideas to work with.

Part 2: Printing the Shell

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

In part 1, I laid out the plan for this project. Since then, the printer has been running. This post covers the first real milestone: a printed helmet shell.

The Model Link to heading

I covered model selection in the last post. I landed on this one from Thingiverse — good detail, clean geometry, and workable topology. The first order of business was getting it into Fusion 360 to scale it to wearable dimensions and cut it into chunks that would actually fit on the build plate.

Part 1: The Plan

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 09:49:05 +0100

For many years, I’ve wanted to make a replica of Thomas Bangalter’s Daft Punk helmet — the silver one. Full size, wearable, with working lights. And recently I decided to do something about it. This is one of those projects that floats around in my head in different forms but never materializes because of the scope and complexity. But that ends now.

Why? Link to heading

A lot of elder millennials will remember when Daft Punk first made an appearance. I listened to a huge amount of their music when I was in high school and college, and it’s still on a steady rotation today. I always liked the costumes they wore. I guess it was to help separate their personal identities from the music they created.

Anthony McCall at the Tate Modern

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Barbican - London

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Brittany

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

NYC 2024

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

London 2024

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Alsace

Wed, 17 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Amsterdam Night 2022

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Africa

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Paris

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Utrecht

Sun, 23 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Black and White Favorites

Thu, 13 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Manasquan

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Quarantine

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Eye Museum

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Barcelona

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sagrada Família

Thu, 13 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Scotland

Sun, 15 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Autumn Leaves

Sat, 19 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Amsterdam 2019

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Norway 2019

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Norway 2018

Sun, 24 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Tuscany

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

WMATA

Thu, 04 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I'm Mike

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is a place where I write down what I’m up to. It’s a bit of an experiment for me so we’ll see how it goes. I’ve decided that I need a place to share my ideas and little projects, and this is what I’ve come up with.

Who am I? Link to heading

By day - machine learning engineer working on “the algorithm”