Projects

My First Project: A Gaming PC

My gaming PC was my very first project. I built it when I was 11, and it's still running today. It has an Intel Core i7-12700K, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080, and 16 GB of DDR4 RAM.

It also ended up doing more than gaming. This was the computer that powered some of my early TinAI models, so a project I started at 11 became part of another project a few years later.

I think that's one of the things I like most about computers. You can build something for one reason and end up finding completely different uses for it. This PC has been part of a lot of my learning, and I'm still getting use out of it.

Home Assistant and Automations

I use Home Assistant to bring a lot of our smart devices into one app and automate things around the house. Our setup includes Tuya sensors, Kasa smart light switches, and a Zigbee dongle to connect the Zigbee devices.

One of the main things I've automated is our lighting. We sometimes forget to turn off the lights in bedrooms and other rooms, including the laundry room. Having automations handle that means we don't always have to remember to go back and turn them off ourselves.

I've also automated the bathroom vent fans. My family has a tendency to forget to use them when showering or using the bathroom, so having the fan turn on automatically helps with moisture and bathroom odors.

We usually keep our doors open, which makes door sensors unreliable for figuring out whether someone is in a room. An open door doesn't necessarily mean nobody is there, so I had to take that into account when setting up the automations.

Another thing I like about Home Assistant is being able to connect devices from different brands and have them work together. It makes the setup easier to manage instead of needing a separate app for everything.

The goal is to make things easier for my family and reduce wasted electricity from lights and fans being left on unnecessarily. I enjoy working on projects like this because we actually get to use the results every day.

Home Server and AdGuard Home

I also run a home server, which gives me somewhere to host this website and try out software myself. It's useful to have a computer that can keep things running without needing my gaming PC for everything.

One thing I set up on it was AdGuard Home. It handles DNS-based filtering to help block advertising and tracking domains on our network.

I wanted to replace the filtering we were using eero Secure for, which worked out to roughly $5-$6 a month for us. I don't think AdGuard Home is as good as eero Secure overall, but it's good enough for what we need.

I'm also not much of a fan of eero routers in general, so I wanted to see what I could run myself. Having this part of our setup on my own server gives me something else to learn about and manage.

A lot of my projects end up connecting to each other like this. The server hosts the website, handles filtering, and gives me a place to experiment with other things as I go.

TinTechnologies

This website is a project too. It originally started because I wanted somewhere to make TinAI public. That plan changed, but I still wanted a website where I could share projects and keep useful tools together.

I watched YouTube tutorials to get started and changed things from there. It's built with HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript. I keep the files in GitHub and host the website through Nginx on my home server.

Cloudflare is a big part of how the website runs. My server is on a residential internet connection, so our public IP address can change. I needed a way to keep the website accessible without depending on that address staying the same.

I also didn't want to make the server directly accessible through port forwarding. Having services exposed to automated scans and connection attempts was something I wanted to avoid.

Cloudflare Tunnel helped solve both problems. The server connects out to Cloudflare, and visitors reach the website through that connection. That means I don't need to forward incoming ports on our router or update a public IP address in DNS every time it changes.

I also use Tailscale for private connections between my devices and the server. Cloudflare Tunnel handles access to the public website, while Tailscale gives me a way to connect privately to my setup.

Getting a page to look right was only part of making this website. Figuring out how to actually host it from home taught me about networking, DNS, and how all these pieces fit together.

I'm keeping the website fairly simple because I want to understand the code and be able to make changes myself. Some tools on here are open-source projects made by other developers, and credit for those projects goes to their creators.

TinAI (Discontinued)

TinAI was a local AI project I worked on in 2025. I wanted to make something that could help with math problems, especially for TMSCA and UIL, and eventually make it public through TinTechnologies.

It first started with GPT-2, which I fine-tuned for the project. Later, I moved to a distilled DeepSeek-R1 model. I kept trying different things as I learned more about what I could run and what the models could actually do.

Eventually, I realized it wasn't really practical for me to keep going. After moving to a school where UIL and TMSCA weren't as big, I had less of a reason to focus on such a specific use case.

I also couldn't realistically keep up with ChatGPT and other AI models. They were more general-purpose, more practical, and more accurate for what I needed. At that point, continuing TinAI didn't make much sense to me, so I stopped development and scrapped it.

I still learned a ton during that time, though. Working on TinAI taught me about AI models and fine-tuning, and trying to make it available online got me into web development. Even though I quit the project, I got a lot out of working on it.

This website is probably the clearest example of that. TinAI is gone, but TinTechnologies started because of it.

More to Come

I'll add more projects and details as I have things to share. I'd like to show how some of these setups work, including what I had to change to get them working the way I wanted.

If you're looking for TI Connect, TI-84, or the background remover, you can find those on the Tools page.