It's been a minute since I rounded up what's happening on the build front, so here we go. A quick tour of the projects, the wins, the losses, and one suspiciously specific compass.
Frisco Filth keeps getting filthier
friscofilth.com has crossed the 30+ venue mark. The scraper now pulls from a wider net of dive bars, DIY spaces, and proper venues across the city, and the AI classification has gotten noticeably sharper at telling a metal show from, say, an indie folk night that someone tagged "heavy" in the listing because the lyrics are about feelings. If you live in SF and like your shows loud, give it a refresh. There's almost certainly something terrible (in the best way) happening this week.
N2nap: rest in peace, sweet prince
Bad news on the nap detection front. Apple came back and said no, they don't allow realtime heart rate data for non-workout apps. Which is a bummer, because the entire magic of N2nap was in the heart rate signal. The local dev build works really, really well. Like, I use it every day.
I'm thinking about a motion-only version, accelerometer plus a little smarts, but I'll be honest, it won't be the same. Catching a nap from heart rate alone feels almost spooky in how reliable it is. Catching it from "the wrist stopped moving for a while" is going to misfire every time I sit very still. Still, there might be something there. We'll see.
SurvivalRAG marches on
Several new commits have landed on SurvivalRAG. The corpus has grown with additional curated sources, more field manuals and more public domain reference material packaged into the offline image. More notably, the first working version of the Meshtastic integration is up and running. The ultra-response mode was not working. You really can't get good instructions on such a low character count. So now the full response gets written and broken into multiple messages.
There's more cooking, and I'll do a proper writeup when the Meshtastic side is a bit more polished. But the basic loop of asking a question over mesh radio and getting a sane survival answer back from a fully offline model works.
TB Compass: somehow, this is the one Apple approved
Yes. The joke app got in. TB Compass is a compass for your Apple Watch that points to the closest Taco Bell. That is the entire app. That is the entire pitch. I built it mostly to see if I could ship something silly through the full App Store gauntlet, and apparently the answer is "yes, as long as it isn't reading your heart rate."
It is now live. You can install it. You can spin around in a parking lot until the little arrow agrees with you. I take no responsibility for what happens after.
Coming soon-ish: messing with gaussian splats
The next thing on my workbench is gaussian splatting. If you haven't seen this stuff, the short version is: you take a bunch of photos or video of a scene, and you get back a weirdly photorealistic 3D representation that you can fly through in real time. It looks like a hologram you can almost touch.
I've been experimenting with the capture and reconstruction side, and I'm pretty seriously considering building an iOS app for capturing splats from the phone. There's something very satisfying about turning a corner of your living room, or a back alley in the Mission, or your friend's weird ceramic collection into a little 3D artifact you can scrub around in later.