Welcome to
THE JDANKNEY VAULT
The hardware and software I've built, broken down bit by bit.
$ fastfetch
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-+oooooo+:
`/:-:++oooo+:
`/++++/+++++++:
`/++++++++++++++:
`/+++ooooooooooooo/`
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-osssssso. :ssssssso.
:osssssss/ osssso+++.
/ossssssss/ +ssssooo/-
`/ossssso+/:- -:/+osssso+-
`+sso+:-` `.-/+oso:
`++:. `-/+/
.` `/
jdankney@vault
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OS: Arch Linux x86_64 (btw)
Host: Computer Engineering Student
Kernel: Panic
Uptime: 19 years - No Scheduled Maintenance
Packages: Dreams, regrets, and one working project
CPU: Overclocked, Undervolted
GPU: GTX 1080ti Since 2019 (Still going strong!)
Memory: Leaking, probably
Disk: 5 TiB, project graveyard
Network: Self-Hosted end to end
Locale: San Diego, CA
▸ on the bench: Teaching a Base Model to Say No (Safety Fine-Tuning)
Who's behind this
I'm James Ankney/JDAnkney, a Computer Engineering student at Palomar College planning to transfer to UC San Diego. This is my project notebook: parts lists, wiring, firmware, and an honest record of the many things that caught fire along the way.
Projects
012 logged-
Running a 35B LLM on a GPU That Shouldn't
Getting a 35B model generating at 23 tok/s on a 6GB laptop card: MoE expert offload, Pascal quirks, and learning exactly where the hardware ceiling is.
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Teaching a Base Model to Say No (Safety Fine-Tuning)
An alignment project: take a model that never learned guardrails and train them in from scratch, then measure the helpfulness/harmlessness tradeoff with real benchmarks.
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Cloning GLaDOS (Voice Synthesis + Post-Processing)
Building a GLaDOS voice with local TTS: and learning that GLaDOS isn't a voice, it's a human plus an effects chain.
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Ditching Tailscale for Self-Hosted NetBird
Replacing the last piece of my stack I didn't control: a self-hosted WireGuard mesh VPN with NetBird.
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Backing up ALL of (English) Wikipedia
Creating an offline backup of the biggest open source library I know of.
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DIY BLE Analog RGB Controller (ESP32-C3) V1
Rebuilding a cheap LED controller from scratch with an ESP32-C3, logic-level MOSFETs, and custom written Bluetooth firmware.
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Self-Hosting my Calendar
Hosting a CalDAV server to sync my calendar across all my devices.
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Local DNS with Pi-hole (and Why I Ripped It Back Out)
I set up Pi-hole to give my devices real names instead of IP addresses. It worked: but I still tore it down. Here's why.
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Rolling My Own Serial Protocol (Arduino <-> Pi)
Building a real framed wire protocol between an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi: checksums, a parser state machine, and the classic serial bugs. Unfinished, on purpose-ish.
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DIY Meshtastic Base Node (ESP32-S3 + LoRa + Solar + BME680) V1.0
A solar-powered, always-on Meshtastic base station with environmental telemetry | ESP32-S3, DX-LR30 (SX1262), and a bare BME680 that fought me the whole way.
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DIY Meshtastic Mobile Node (nRF52840 + LoRa + GPS) V1.0
Building a low-current Meshtastic node for my Audi A4 featuring an nRF52840, DX-LR30 (SX1262), and a u-blox NEO-M8N.
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Making a Motion Detector/Tracker Laser Turret
Building a surprisingly simple robot with two servos, a gutted Bic pen with a laser diode in it, and a can of soup as the base.