Notes on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

rethinking notes and drawings in obsidian

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 06:57:54 +0000

I often have YouTube on our TV, mostly displaying live webcam feeds from interesting places. This week, the “recommended for you” block showed one from Nicole van der Hoeven: Visual note templates with Obsidian Excalidraw (embedded below).

I’ve been using Obsidian for a couple of years now, and have been using the excellent Excalidraw plugin to quickly add diagrams and sketches to my notes. It works well enough - and is definitely not anywhere as polished as OmniGraffle - but is integrated and integrated wins almost every time. It’s easy enough to create a new Excalidraw drawing and embed that into any note as an image - and then to be able to click into the image to edit it.

developing a custom hugo theme with claude

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 16:09:22 +0000

I’ve been using a customized theme based on the great Beautiful Hugo theme for Hugo for a few years now. It’s worked well, and I’d made a lot of adjustments to make it do what I wanted. But it never felt like “mine” and I’d always meant to take the time to build my own. So, Which was likely never going to happen, so a week and a half ago I thought I’d try building one with Claude:

Using Chatgpt-4o to Redesign My Homepage

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 07:42:47 -0600

I’ve used a custom, hand-rolled homepage ever since Google googled its iGoogle personalized homepage thing back in 2013. It’s set as the homepage for my browsers, and is a quick way to get to things that I use often and to check in on weather and status at several places at once.

Screenshot of the original version of my homepage.

But it never quite worked the way I wanted it to. It wasn’t super responsive on mobile devices, not scaling or adapting the layout very effectively. It used cobbled DIY html and CSS, and I’m sure it could be improved.

Visualizing a Teams List Using ChatGPT 4o

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 16:42:02 -0600

I am rather full of self-loathing after spending so much time using generative AI tools today. But this was actually really useful.

Our team uses a List in our MS Teams site to track projects - their status, contributors, due dates, etc. It started as a small list that was pretty manageable, but has grown into a list with 99 items. Data has been entered organically, so it’s not like it’s a fully normalized database with rigid taxonomies etc. So, making sense of it has become more of a challenge.

Figuring Out Obsidian + Ollama

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 14:19:19 -0600

I followed this howto on Innovation for Bytes¹ to set up Ollama and connect it to the Smart Connections plugin. It had the missing bits of documentation for the Model Platform and path bits.

AI-Generated Content via llama3

Based on your notes for SCUP 2024, here are the most important highlights:

Trying Out LLMs in Obsidian

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 10:51:44 -0600

After Ethan Mollick’s keynote at SCUP 2024, I decided that I need to spend much more quality time with generative AI tools so that I can better understand how they work and what we can (and can’t) do with them. I still firmly believe that running LLM tools locally is important - if I’m feeding an LLM my content (some of which can’t be shared with third parties just due the nature of my work), I need to know it’s not being shared. The only way to ensure that is by running everything locally. Which means lots of trade-offs.

Unreal Engine Log - Final Snapshots of the TI Mockup

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 10:30:59 -0700

After consolidating my Unreal Engine log notes from a separate WordPress site into my main website (this one), I realized that I hadn’t captured any of the final (or “final”, as I basically stopped that work to focus on supporting student-led deliverables that took different directions) “Taylor Institute Game” level.

It’s still empty, but has more textures and materials applied. I didn’t add a roof because I found the environmental lighting useful without having to manually light every nook and cranny…

Unreal Engine Log - adding some assets

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 20:41:20 +0000

So much for the pristine fresh start… I’ve added a few of Unreal Engine’s free asset collections to try out some ideas:

VisAI Modern AI Framework (to try adding some bots)
Basic Pickups VFX Set (to try adding some game elements)
Advanced Cel Shader Lite (to try non-photorealistic stylistic rendering)
4K Materials: Wood Flooring (I mean. The TI has so much wood, it’d be a shame to just use “wood” as the material…)

And then Unreal Engine had an update, from 5.3 to 5.3¹, apparently? Regardless. Always apply updates, so hopefully the project works now that I’ve added a couple GB of materials and some complexity.

Unreal Engine Log - A fresh start

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 19:44:33 +0000

I spun up a fresh project, re-imported the FBX models of the TI, and set up a first/third-person player with keyboard toggle. There are no textures, no lights, and lots of meshes to fix. But I let go of over 8GB of kruft that had accumulated from messing around in the previous project. There’s probably a better way to clean out old gunk, but a full restart of a project should work.

Unreal Engine Log - Friday, September 29

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 16:51:30 +0000

I’m trying to practice modelling/staging/lighting the Taylor Institute learning spaces in order to give me a chance to learn how to build stuff in Unreal Engine 5. I have some .FBX exports that a staff member had created back in 2016 from the original Revit .RVT files for the first and second floors of the TI, and have been trying to process/fix/import those. I don’t have the original .RVT files, to these .FBX exports are as close as I’ll get. They look like they get some things right – individual steps and railings on staircases are modelled – and some things quite wrong. It looks like all “ways” were just extruded from the floorplan at an estimated full-storey-height. There are no windows, and no doors. No floors, no ceilings. But, it’s a good start to get a feel for the layout of the space.

Unreal Engine Log - Friday, September 22

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 17:32:40 +0000

I had a few minutes to play around with textures a bit, and added some MediaPlate objects for each of the “displays” in the space.

Unreal Engine Log - Thursday, September 21

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 16:45:57 +0000

I messed around with the scale of my model as imported from Blender. In UE5, I just selected the folder and all descendants and bumped the Scale value to 2x2x2. It applied uniformly to all objects within the model. I had to adjust the position of the lights, but otherwise the scale of the room “feels” right.

The textures are a hot mess, but that’s easily changeable. Also, I don’t think “shiny metallic cyber femmebot” is the look I’m going for. stock models…

Unreal Engine Log - Wednesday, September 20

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 22:14:58 +0000

I spent a few more minutes trying to futz around with getting my Blender model of a learning space (loosely modelled on TI 110) into Unreal Engine. Following a godawful YouTube video that I’m not going to link to because holy crap what an annoying mess but I did glean one bit if useful info from sitting through it.

In Blender, I exported an .FBX file using these settings:

Unreal Engine Log - Tuesday, September 19

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 17:17:43 +0000

I’ve been trying to model a space (starting with a learning space in the TI) in UE5 and have been stuck by the editing tools. So, I figured why not try building a model in Blender and export that for use in a UE5 project?

I was able to get the dimensions right (based on the architectural files I have), and cut out windows and doors using boolean subtraction. It looks like it works, but I don’t have time to import it into a new UE5 project right now, but that’s the next step.

Unreal Engine Log - Monday, September 18

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 02:46:45 +0000

So I decided that editing 3D objects with a trackpad is non-optimal. I sprung for a super-fancy professional-grade mouse. Or, I picked up the first decent-looking cheap Bluetooth multi-button mouse on Amazon, because it could be delivered the next day. It came today, and seems to work well enough. I haven’t used a mouse in years, so it’ll be an adjustment.

I tried setting up a new Project, replacing the stock First-Person game with my own stuff. Really, I just deleted the initial obstacle-objects, and then started building a new space within it. Primitive, but I’m getting better. I need to figure out the rendering settings, though, because they seem to go from “Quake II” to “Cyberpunk” and I can’t figure out how to properly set it so it will play at a decent framerate on my M2 MBA.

Notes on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

rethinking notes and drawings in obsidian

developing a custom hugo theme with claude

Using Chatgpt-4o to Redesign My Homepage

Visualizing a Teams List Using ChatGPT 4o

Figuring Out Obsidian + Ollama

🤖 AI-Generated Content via llama3

Trying Out LLMs in Obsidian

Unreal Engine Log - Final Snapshots of the TI Mockup

Unreal Engine Log - adding some assets

Unreal Engine Log - A fresh start

Unreal Engine Log - Friday, September 29

Unreal Engine Log - Friday, September 22

Unreal Engine Log - Thursday, September 21

Unreal Engine Log - Wednesday, September 20

Unreal Engine Log - Tuesday, September 19

Unreal Engine Log - Monday, September 18

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