BARRY SMITH (caboosesw) / ThoughtGarden Lab
This is my public working log for nerd things: AI, automation, local LLMs, startup ideas, and things I am building. Whatever I stumble across.
What I’m Working On Now
Projects Waiting to Go Live or Be Killed
| Project | Description |
|---|---|
| P1 🟢 Thoughtgarden | Idea validation, referral discovery, and founder workflow tooling |
| P1 🟢 WashoutOdds | ”Should I risk it?” weather logic for outdoor events |
| P3 🟠 MusicMustard | QR-driven music discovery and album coaster experiments |
Status Legend
- 🚀 Live
- 🟢 Active Development
- 🟡 Researching / Vetting
- 🟠 Paused
- 🔴 Archived
Dev Tooling (fun but often a poor use of time)
- n8n — automation glue for personal systems and product experiments
- Docker basics
- Uptime Kuma
AI Things
- Claude, Codex and Gemini … in that order … all the bells and whistles
- OpenClaw — local agent experiments and tool-use workflows (especially maintainable and vibrant scrapers). Security first.
- Local LLM’s (primarily Gemma-12b) through Ollama and WebopenUI
- NotebookLM
Little Things I’m Playing Around With
- Soldering and electronic basics
- Very basic analog (speaker and receiver) stereo repair
- Toy V8 model setup (to understand engine basics)
- Lot surveying
Current Questions
- How can daily notes become useful public project memory?
- How much of a technical blog can be generated from raw logs?
- What should OpenClaw write, summarize, or publish automatically?
- Can one Markdown source feed a website, LinkedIn posts, and X posts?
Latest Daily Note
Getting Quartz Running
Fought through Quartz v5 setup issues and got the first version of the lab.thoughtgarden.com going on Github Pages.
Next: Fix my darn Linux networking.
About This Site
This is intentionally rough. The goal is to capture progress first, polish later.