Being sick of the constant ads and endless subscription price hikes I setup my own home server with:

• Network wide adblocking

• VPN Services

• Media Streaming (Plex)

• Cloud Storage (TrueNAS)

• Local Claude Model (Ollama)

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This reduced my annual bills by over £1200, thats a months rent for me!! I did this all with a budget of £100, a dell optiplex, a disc drive and 2 old 2TB HDDs. My next aim is to switch the OS from Windows 10 to Ubuntu to improve effeciency.

With no prior hardware experience, a £50 budget and two weeks, I built the Students’ Union a bespoke timer: a web app that controls an ESP32 and LED strip in real time. The front end is HTML/CSS and the back end is Python. A comparable commercial solution would have cost around £500, so I saved them £450. The code is open source on GitHub.

I led 14 students through a 12-month agile cycle to publish a game. As lead developer I built the player camera, a spline-driven menu camera and a variable input system that makes switching controllers seamless. I also designed the first two levels, set up the Git workflow and shipped two weeks ahead of schedule.

I was brought in to make a VR experience run faster. I implemented backface culling, distance-based texture reduction and memory pooling, then built a lightweight video loader that splits footage into 20-second snippets. Load times dropped by 15 to 30 seconds per transition.

I wanted my first projected outside of education to be unique. Tiltmaze is exactly that. Utilising the built in gyroscope in modern smartphones, I developed both a random maze generator and a gravity based control system to create a totally unique mobile game base on the old school roller ball maze toys.