Not Your Typical About Page.
This site's life began in 2014, when I received a Raspberry Pi for my birthday and wanted to see if I could host a website on it. Quickly, it became a hodge-podge of pages with different purposes. Eventually, however, the section about my projects took precedence, and the place was reorganized. Now you can find a digital showcase of things I've worked on, still hosted on the same Raspberry Pi. I've included more details about the evolution at the bottom of this page, if you're curious.
This website is running on the same hardware it always has, but it is temporarily residing on a shelf in the corner of my mother's living room. Eventually this will be mounted somewhere more discreet again, but in the meantime, bless my mom for putting up with my nonsense!
As for what that hardware is, see the picture below of the wall-mounted setup in the basement of the old house.
Because the Raspberry Pi only requires 5 volts, there are plans to eventually update it to solar power. More info about that on the Solar Projects page. There are also plans to acquire two additional servers and use one as a landing/redirection server and the other as a Minecraft server. The redirection server may be another Raspberry Pi, depending on the kind of loads it needs to handle. The Minecraft server will probably be a salvaged laptop or desktop, or a beefier SBC, as it will need more processing power. I also tried out some blogging software, and the main Pi (a pi 1 model B+) got a bit bogged down because of all the php, so I may set that up on a newer Pi (like a pi 4).
Hi, it's me. I would appear to be a human male who studied electrical engineering and electronic musical instrument design in college, and used to teach kids about engineering and work for a solar panel installer. I'm always making music and I'll try to learn any instrument I can get my hands on. But of course that's just the nutshell version. You can probably get a better sense of me from all the projects that I try to share on this website. Have a look around!
This is the part where I put all the old stuff about the early history of this site. Peruse at your discretion.
For the first 7 years of this site's life, the landing page of makington.net was a sort of nexus between several sites I was running. One of them was my personal site, one was for The Shared Document (mentioned below), and there were two more for YouTube channels I helped run. As time went on, and my focus changed, I put more of my time into the personal site, and less into the others. It was awkward having to direct people through a series of links just to get to my site, and soon it became clear that my personal site should be the first place you land when entering makington.net. And so, here we are at the current layout.
So back in middle school, we had this thing called The Shared Document. It was a google doc that was shared to a bunch or people, and we would essentially spam silly stuff in it, to our great amusement. One day, I had the bright idea that The Shared Document should have its very own website, so I suggested it. The response I got was
For my birthday in 2014, I recived a Raspberry Pi Model B, which I configured to run a simple website, writing html in a text editor my hand. I then mounted the Pi in an earring box and plugged it into the ethernet port next to the printer.
This is what the initial setup looked like:
As you can see, the setup was hardly what you'd call organized, but nonetheless it remained in this configuration for about 3 years.
I began coding the website by hand, teaching myself HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the process. I am still doing it this way. I VNC into the Raspberry Pi from my laptop and edit the html and php files in Leafpad.
After 3 or so years of the site existing, two things became clear: 1. I wanted to keep it around, and 2. if that was the case, the Raspberry Pi needed to be somewhere better than amongst a pile of junk next to the printer. I needed to devise a more permenant solution. And so, I came up with this:
It is now mounted to a wall in the basement with some other network-related things. Keen eyes may notice the Pi's case has gained a vent since its original setup. As you can see, there is still room on the board for upgrades and additions, but this harware setup has been perfectly adequate for everything I've tried to do with it since I set it up.