About

I'm Joe. I build small tools for problems only I have. Sometimes they turn out to be problems other people have too.

The day job is finance — spreadsheets, capital, a lot of careful arguing about numbers. This site is the other half. Evenings and weekends I end up taking something apart or writing a hundred lines of Python to make one piece of hardware behave. I'm not an engineer and I don't pretend to be. I just want to know how the thing works, and I write it down afterward so the next person doesn't have to find out the hard way.

The name is the joke: idle watts. Spare capacity. What's left once the day job has taken its share.

What ends up here#

Projects are the things I've built or opened up. The code lives on GitHub — the repo has the install steps, the page here has the reasoning and the photos.

Writing is shorter and less organized. Impressions, arguments with myself, things that didn't work.

I'd rather write one honest paragraph about why something is annoying than five paragraphs of specifications you could read off the box.

Elsewhere#

• github.com/idlewatts — the code
• josephguzik.com — everything else about me