I’ve been continuing work on https://mybulkcards.com, a phone app and website for scanning, organizing, and searching Pokémon card collections, especially the thousands of bulk cards that my daughter and I have in our closet from playing.
The goal hasn't changed too much, make building decks easier by knowing exactly what you own and where it’s stored. You organize cards into boxes, search your inventory, search friends’ collections, and keep track of trades instead of digging through a similar closet of cards that my daughter and I search for.
The fun part has been the AI. I trained computer vision models that run entirely on the phone to detect and identify Pokémon cards. Training has become the slowest part. For the model that needs to be retrained every new release, I’m up to about 5 hours per epoch on my M4 Mac with 16 GB of RAM.
The Android app is currently in public testing with people from my local Pokémon league. It’s built with React Native, and I’m working on the iPhone version next.
Still lots to build, mostly around product and ux, and because a recent stupid mistake on my part, backups and deployment safeguards.
I’ve continued to work on a phone app + website (https://MyBulkCards.com) to scan Pokemon bulk cards and tag/organize where they are stored. I added a bunch more features like finding a friend, searching through friends cards, and trading.
It's been pretty fun to build. Trained a couple of models to identify a card that run on the phone app. They work very well and are comparable, and much better than many, to any other card identifier in the market. As the models get more complicated training is getting a bit longer. I'm at about 9 hours per epoch on my Mac M4 with 16G of memory.
The Android phone app is in public test with a couple of my local group testing. The app is built in React Native, and I’m hoping to get an iPhone version out soon since there are a bunch of iPhone peeps.
I've continued working on a tool for my daughter, our friends, and I to scan and index Pokemon cards. The tool is a phone app and website (https://MyBulkCards.com) The phone app uses the camera to scan a card and run the image through a couple of models, a record is written of the card along with the location. It's pretty basic, but I can store cards in boxes like “Box 1 AAA, Box 1 BBB, …” and find cards easy peasy. There’s also a friends feature so I can see what others have locally. We borrow cards from each other quite a bit.
It's been a super fun tool to build. The phone app just got approved in the Android app store. I have a bit of cleanup, but plan on releasing it soon.
My daughter introduced me to Pokémon TCG. We found a local group and have been playing for about a year and a half. At this point we have so many bulk cards that it takes way too long to search through them. Other than a few specific pulls we keep in a binder, we honestly have no idea what we own.
I’ve been building a phone app + website (https://MyBulkCards.com) to scan cards and organize where everything is. It’s pretty basic right now, but I can store cards in boxes like “Box 1 AAA, Box 1 BBB, …” and find cards easy peasy. There’s also a friends feature so I can see what others have locally. We borrow cards from each other quite a bit.
It’s been a fun project to build. I trained one model to find a card in the camera frame and another to identify it. Still iterating a lot. One epoch on my Mac M4 takes about 2 hours, and I’m still seeing improvements past epoch 10. Even now, it can find and identify a card more often than not, even without the OCR bits. Both models are under 20MB, run directly in the camera frame, and are fast enough to identify a card as I slide it into view.
I started with Android since that’s what I have, and I’ve shared the app store testing link with my local group for testing. The app is built in React Native, and I’m hoping to get an iPhone version out soon since there are a bunch of iPhone peeps. A couple of the players also got me into MTG, so now I’ve got a pile of Turtles cards too. I’ll be training an MTG model next. I don’t think it’ll be too bad since I can reuse most of the same approach.
I’ve been thinking, for a while now, how I could merge a LLM and an Expert System. What I wanted was the ease of use of an LLM and the rules based processing of an Expert System. Over the past couple of weeks, I built what I thought was a unique way of merging the two. I choose to use auto insurance as an example because of my past history in the industry, but I feel as though it would be applicable in other industries. It’s still very rough around the edges, but if you are interested you can try it out at https://mktbx.com/#tryout I’d appreciate any feedback and your thoughts.
I have a couple. A fun one is catchingkillers.com. Here you are a private investigator who is trying to find out who committed a murder. Two stories are active. The third, bathtub one, isn't done.
Yeah I did just that. CatchingKillers.com hosts the game. The first two stories are playable. Sour Grapes of Wrath, taken from an excellent pdf I found online. The other, The Masquerade Murder of Charleston Manor, is custom story for the game. The third story hasn't been finsihed. So not really payable. I have set the limit on that gpt account to $5 so I don't get abused, but should be enough for a bunch of runs of the games if someone wants to try.
I built out a few utilities as experiments. One app linked to Salesforce to query/analyze sales data. Another that reads our help documentation and gives instructions via chat.
The last app, the only one that was deployed anywhere, is https://catchingkillers.com This app is a simple murder mystery game where the witnesses and the killer are ChatGPT bots. The first two stories are complete and active, the third is not complete yet. The first story of the working two is taken from another murder mystery group game https://www.whodunitmysteries.com/sour.html. The second story was highly influenced by ChatGPT.
It's a bit rough because I didn't spend too much time on it, but if anyone does signup to play, I'd love to hear feedback.
I've tried something similar with a little side project, https://catchingkillers.com. The witnesses, chatgpt chat bots, wouldn't have much of an attention span and start making things up. I think this added to the fun of the game. You had to question each witness to get verification on what another chat bot said.
Not sure if it's the best but I recently bought a "Airthings 2960 View Plus - Radon & Air Quality Monitor". Choosing the correct app and setup was a bit annoying, but not too bad. I think setup was about an hour once done. Also the phone app wanted to read results for a week or so before displaying some info. The device has a screen that will show you the current values.
I purchased the device because I was a bit worried about radon and other garbage that I might be breathing while working in my basement office. Radon and other data points were not a problem. Turns out C02 was more my problem. It's pretty surprising how quickly that number rises with a closed door. I believe I can attribute the tiredness with the C02 levels. Having history correlates with when I'm in the basement office, and opening a window, it's a walkout basement and I have windows, decreases C02 stat pretty quickly.
Overall I'm happy with my purchase, and I'm considering buying another one for the ground level of the house.
I've made a bunch of projects that hit about 80% completion that I never end up finishing. My current projects that I have most recently put in some time are:
https://cruisedirector.io/ I have it running on some of my sites. It continues to run but I have no customers, and I haven't tried to sell it as a service. Tracks user actions inside an application. Every click is tracked so you can make rules based on any user clicks and show prompts made with a graphical editor. For example: Someone is button smashing, you can ask them for feedback. Popup a message on first login in the past month... Really lots of fun stuff.
https://ezdataloader.com/ I recompiled some old c# code from about 10 years ago, and with a few tweeks the backend now can run in mac, windows, or linux. Pretty sweet, other than the interface. I used electron for an interface and got it working a bit. But, I haven't put too much time into this one either. I'm tempted to scrap the downloadable executable, and turn it into a saas app. Might be a bit easier for customers I'm targeting. I've been pretty busy at my day job though, and haven't had time for this in the past year or so.
Just as another point of reference. I followed the windows install. I'm running this on my 1060 with 6GB memory. With no setting changes takes about 10 seconds to generate an image. I often run with sampling steps up to 50 and that takes about 40 seconds to generate an image.
There are a couple negative comments here. Don't let that get you down. You've done more than most. You built a product, validated, and made real money on that product. Then you exited with a positive payout. Great job!
My father had a couple duplexes, and I learned to hack stuff together pretty well there. But I did take a class at Woodcraft that was pretty nicely done about 10 years ago. It was a simple course over a few nights. I learned a couple woodworking tricks that upped my game, but there were a couple beginners. Hopefully Woodcraft will start having classes again once things start opening up again. If so signup and they will teach you how to use the basic tools and more importantly you will walk away with a bit of confidence and knowledge on how to fix mistakes.
At the beginning half of this year I finished up an mvp of an idea that I had, took me a bit of time to build, where I could make it a bit easier for product managers to get analytics, and saas app feedback (https://cruisedirector.io). I was hoping to diversify my income a bit, but I've been pretty busy this year at my day job and haven't done any marketing or improvements. I have also redirected any potential customers, that I chatted with while building the app, to my competition. The competition is absolutely killing it in this space. Hopefully I can find some time this year to chat with some customers, maybe diversify a bit, and be able to do a bit of marketing.
I wonder, I'm not a customer so you prob shouldn't listen to me, if your problem is that you are selling something customers don't really put a value on. Security is a nice to have and only becomes a must have when a problem has already happened. Kind of like virus scanners are only purchased when someone thinks they have a virus. Is there a subset of your security tools that can help determine problem, a cause, and a possible solution to an existing problem? Maybe package up this smaller toolset with maybe a white glove cleaning/restoration service as a product.