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 |
| P1 🟢 TuneTile | Android (and soon iOS) app for display album art from a Wiim streamer (amongst other things) |
| P2 🟢 CalZam | Calendar tools such as timeboxing and printing — Outlook forward |
| P2 🟡 TeenyPlan | Very,very simple financial planning and related tools |
| P2 🟡 AirUp | AirBnb and VRBO last minute notifications |
| P3 🟠 MusicMustard | QR-driven music discovery and album coaster experiments |
Status Legend
- 🚀 Live
- 🟢 Active Development or Research/Vetting
- 🟡 Light Infrequent Work
- 🟠 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
- Losing weight and getting healthy
- 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. Grinded out first version of Now Playing!
Next: Fix my darn Linux networking.
About This Site
This is intentionally rough. The goal is to capture progress first, polish later.