lmorchard.com - about me

That's me!

About Me

TL;DR: Tinkerer; maker of things; webdev; crazy cat gentleman; serial enthusiast; Mozillian. He / him.

I don't like writing my own bio. So, I've been kicking around that too-clever thing above for the last decade or so. Seems like it's been a stable description, if you don't mind reading curly braces.

Tinkering with data & code is something I like much better than writing a bio. So, the rest of this page is a collection of my personal data exhaust and featured projects.

If you feel like it, drop me an email or a tweet or a toot — or find me in one of the other usual places below.

Project: Twitch Streaming

Lately, I've been thinking I should start trying to get out of my head more and share what I do via streaming on Twitch.

Chiptunes and coding, come say hi.

Typing (typing.lmorchard.com)

1 month ago A river, not an inbox
Feed readers work best for me when they're rivers, not inboxes.
2 months ago Done with Google’s Feed
For the past year or so, I've been using Google's Discover feed from my phone's home screen for part of my daily news habit. It's been mostly okay and often relevant. But, little paper cuts have finally hit my annoyance threshold.
2 months ago I ❤️ Glitch
Lately, when I start tinkering with a side project, I reach for Glitch.
5 months ago GOTO Hell
Here's a spoopy little story I wrote. The gist of it comes from a dream. There's blood, murder, an unhealthy relationship, and a bit of existential angst.
5 months ago Generating a Firefox static theme from a web page
Folks would like to export their themes from Firefox Color as standalone theme add-ons. These can be submitted to AMO and allow for further advanced tinkering not supported by the theme editor in Color. Up until today, I was thinking that we'd need to do this with server-side code like an AWS Lambda function. But, with more due diligence, I realized all the pieces exist to make this happen completely in the browser.
5 months ago Insultron2000 is here to serve!
It was a rainy, chilly day this past Sunday. I had been meaning to work on Picodon. But I was feeling low enthusiasm for that project. So, I spun my Wheel of Side Projects. It landed on "ActivityPub insult bot"--a similar theme but it felt like something I could actually get working in a day. So, Insultron2000 was born!
5 months ago Embracing stasis to get unstuck
By letting things I've made go static, I can shed encumbrances to try new things. And I want to try new things to see if I can remove limiters on my writing.
6 months ago When Yak Shaving is The Point
I've been working on some side projects lately. I feel good about that. But, I usually don't finish them. I feel bad about that. I always feel bad about that. But, maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself.

Glitch Projects (lmorchard)

I'm a core contributor on the Firefox Test Pilot project. Test Pilot invites Firefox users to try out experimental features. We build the features as rapid prototypes and measure usage to help decide whether the feature might be worth inclusion in Firefox.

Project: Firefox Color

"Firefox Color makes it easy for anyone to change the look of Firefox."

It's also a Test Pilot experiment that I helped build, playing with new Theme APIs in Firefox and user interface ideas for working with and sharing themes.

Blog (blog.lmorchard.com)

Github (@lmorchard)

23 minutes ago commented on Issue #6210 in mozilla/fxa-content-server: Quite a lot of outdated dependencies
16 hours ago submitted Issue #5186 to mozilla/fxa-content-server: Make authorization code error field-specific
16 hours ago commented on Issue #5186 in mozilla/fxa-content-server: Make authorization code error field-specific
17 hours ago commented on Issue #4046 in mozilla/testpilot: Rename Price Wise to Price Tracker
19 hours ago commented on Issue #6594 in mozilla/fxa-content-server: Make profile picture selection keyboard accessible

Toots (@lmorchard)

10 hours ago
I think I need to make this my ringtone
http://vm.tiktok.com/eV5vDQ/
3 days ago
🎵 The birds are back in town! 🎶
4 days ago
Laser cat
http://vm.tiktok.com/eCd2rw/
4 days ago
@June I'm so sorry that happened to you. Fuck the fucking fuckers.
4 days ago
ACG soundsystem?
4 days agoretooted https://sunbeam.city/users/weapxnfriend
uwu Soundsystem
4 days ago
@Danhon They're pretty independent, I neglect them for months at a time and just read their diaries later

Twitter (Les Orchard)

7 minutes agoWell, I sure didn't expect a Barbarella reference in my @onthemedia email this morning https://t.co/pNRnhjYjEV
11 hours agoWe won't like their answer because we'll be jealous? https://twitter.com/NikkiHaley/status/1108473913984647170 …
11 hours agoI've never seen an episode of the show "God Friended Me", but I've seen enough commercials to wish that they'd do a… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1108582620055642113 …
11 hours ago@JewishWorker https://t.co/YYjYqs82Dv
12 hours agoI love this thread so much https://twitter.com/JewishWorker/status/1108564906956214278 …
12 hours agoRT @EliFitch: Hell Yeah I know about linked lists <ul> <li> <a>sup</a> </li> </ul> What else u got
17 hours ago@jrconlin *closes TikTok after the 36th video* Oh, yeah, so as I was saying...

Pinboard (u:deusx)

2 days ago How Inuit Parents Raise Kids Without Yelling — And Teach Them To Control Anger : Goats and Soda : NPR
But if you practice having a different response or a different emotion at times when you're not angry, you'll have a better chance of managing your anger in those hot-button moments
2 days ago Messed Up Teeth - Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up? - SAPIENS
We rarely consider just how amazing our teeth are. They break food without themselves being broken, up to millions of times over the course of a lifetime; and they do it built from the very same raw materials as the foods they are breaking. Nature is truly an inspired engineer.
3 days ago The Things We Did on the Atari ST - Guido Henkel: Guido Henkel
Using raster timing to switch palette per line, yow!
3 days ago Creating an RSS Reader in Godot Engine (part 1) – Andrew Wooldridge – Medium
This article will discuss my own efforts to create a simple application using Godot Engine — specifically an RSS reader. It’s probably one of the more common simple applications one might create for a given framework — which tests out things like networking, parsing, rendering, and saving preferences.
3 days ago Atari 65XE as USB keyboard
Making retro Atari 65XE as USB-keyboard for a modern computer. And it will leave the opportunity to use this Atari in the native mode. Arduino Leonardo is used for connect the Atari's keyboard to an USB. With an UNIX this keyboard will works without any restrictions.
4 days ago The End of Affordable Travel – 2069 – Medium
It could well be that future generations spend a fraction of the time we do today in transit but see far more of the world. Like preindustrial humans, they may work mostly in their homes
6 days ago The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is Google Docs - The Atlantic
When the kids in Skyler’s school want to tell a friend something in class, they don’t scrawl a note down on a tiny piece of paper and toss it across the room. They use Google Docs.
1 week ago You are never too old to be a kid : aww
1 week ago SAM: Software Automatic Mouth
Sam is a very small Text-To-Speech (TTS) program written in C, that runs on most popular platforms. It is an adaption to C of the speech software SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) for the Commodore C64 published in the year 1982 by Don't Ask Software (now SoftVoice, Inc.). It includes a Text-To-Phoneme converter called reciter and a Phoneme-To-Speech routine for the final output. It is so small that it will work also on embedded computers. On my computer it takes less than 39KB (much smaller on embedded devices as the executable-overhead is not necessary) of disk space and is a fully stand alone program.
1 week ago GitHub - corax89/esp8266_game_engine: Used ili9341. Contains a virtual machine running games from RAM.
lmorchard starred corax89/esp8266_game_engine
1 week ago GitHub - codercom/code-server: Run VS Code on a remote server.
lmorchard starred codercom/code-server
1 week ago Your Front-End Does Not Have To Be Rich
So, when you embark on your next project, take a moment to remember all the choices out there - it’s not just React vs Angular, but leaving most of your business logic server-side could be the right choice for your website.