I've been working on two small projects recently.

1. Live Kaiwa — real-time Japanese conversation support

I live in a rural farming neighborhood in Japan. Day-to-day Japanese is fine for me, but neighborhood meetings were a completely different level. Fast speech, local dialect, references to people and events from decades ago. I'd leave feeling like I understood maybe 5% of what happened.

So I built a tool for myself to help follow those conversations.

Live Kaiwa transcribes Japanese speech in real time and gives English translations, summaries, and suggested responses while the conversation is happening.

Some technical details:

* Browser microphone streams audio via WebRTC to a server with Kotoba Whisper * Multi-pass transcription: quick first pass, then higher-accuracy re-transcription that replaces earlier text * Each batch of transcript is sent to an LLM that generates translations, summary bullets, and response suggestions * Everything is streamed back to the UI live * Session data stays entirely in the browser — nothing stored server-side

https://livekaiwa.com

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2. Cooperation Cube — a board game that rotates the playing field

Years ago I built a physical board game where players place sticks into a wooden cube to complete patterns on the faces.

The twist: the cube rotates 90° every round, so patterns you're building suddenly become part of someone else's board. It creates a mix of strategy, memory, and semi-cooperative play.

I recently built a digital version.

Game mechanics:

* 4 players drafting cards and placing colored sticks on cube faces * The cube rotates every 4 actions * Players must remember what exists on other faces * Cooperation cards allow two players to coordinate for shared bonuses * Game ends when someone runs out of short sticks

https://cooperationcube.com

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Both projects mostly started as things I wanted to exist for myself. Curious what people think.