nathan — engineer's notebook

hello.txt

hi, i'm nathan, a sophomore at UMD studying fire protection engineering. i like machines that fly, anything outdoors, and all kinds of music.

this site is half lab notebook and half hobbyist homepage, kind of what the internet used to be full of. everything here is hand-written, so if something looks broken it's probably load-bearing.

currently: working on FPE projects, probably climbing, and pretending my project backlog is a feature.

start_here.lnk

projects — things i've built (start here)
notes — the engineering notebook
interests — what keeps me up at night
links — find me elsewhere

featured_projects — C:\nathan\projects

fire egress sim

an agent-based building-evacuation sim i built from scratch in python with mesa. occupants react on their own timelines, follow bfs shortest paths around real walls, and queue at capacity-limited stair doors, so the bottlenecks emerge on their own instead of being scripted. v2 rebuilds the egress-deficient fourth floor of a real building i'd already analyzed by hand under nfpa 101, and it lands on the same constraint on its own. v3 sets the floor on fire. cellular fire and a faster smoke front spread over time, destroy an exit, and force occupants to reroute, and the casualty count shows the deficiency turns lethal specifically when a fire compromises the south stair (how close the fire starts to that stair correlates −0.85 with deaths).

pythonmesaagent-based-modelingfire-protection-engineeringnfpa-101bfs-pathfindingmonte-carlofire-spread

thinkpad x220 revival

flashing libreboot onto my x220 and rebuilding the hardware while i'm in there, so usb-c charge port, new display, and more ram. currently putting together the raspberry pi flashing rig and trying not to think about bricking it. no repo yet, but there's a build log in notes.

thinkpadlibrebootlinuxhardware

homelab

self-hosting jellyfin, immich, nextcloud, and a minecraft server on an hp 280 g1 running debian, with pi-hole still to set up and a diy openwrt router on the list. tailscale ties it together, so i can reach any of it from any device on any network, and my friends can actually get on the minecraft server without me opening the box up to the internet. the whole point is security, privacy, and control over my own digital utilities instead of renting them. build log in notes.

self-hostingnetworkingdebiantailscaleopenwrt

→ all projects

recent_notes.log

→ all notes

status.sys

uptime: most days
mood: nominal
reading: berserk falcon of the millennium empire arc
listening: hyakkei and sade's discographies
building: fire egress sim