Right on. Reminds me of Richard Feynman or Steve Wozniak, the way they just casually talk about taking things apart and putting things together while following a curiosity on an adventure. This is representative of the sort of ethos that drew everyone here in the first place, I think.
You seriously need to consider starting a Patreon[0] campaign. I'm sure many people would be interested to see more from you. There are individuals on there who are making significant salaries based purely on interest from the crowd.
Don't that require making regular content? My posts are fairly random by time and quality, and most are just rants on various philosophical nonsense [0] or game design [1].
Wouldn't be fair to people who signed up for something like this camera.
Perhaps not as a regular income; but if funding for these projects is a limitation I bet crowdfunding would bring in funds to keep these posts coming :)
Could there be a version of Patreon, where not the author themself but instead the fans start the pledges. The author could choose to take the money or not, and could prove their identity by putting their bitcoin address in a <meta> tag on their website.
So we could create a project on the site say "support sound camera posts from ribbonfarm.com" and money would be gathered for it, then when a new qualifying post would be made the site owner would be contacted "hey, you have $500 waiting for you, put this meta tag in your <head> to accept it".
This way modest authors wouldn't need to think "am I good enough for Patreon?" and people could support them. People could provide wallet addresses to which the money would be returned if not accepted.
This would almost certainly not work due to how easily most sites can be hacked by experienced and motivated hackers. That website would essentially just be a bounty list for hackers. The better option would be requiring an extra DNS entry meaning the hackers would be trying to hack into a registrar which is probably a fair bit harder on average.
The cynic in me wants to say that bosses tell their talented workers that pursuing personal projects is delusional simply because it keeps the labor cheap!
