About This Forge

Restless Forge is a one-person workshop. I'm Ken. I build tools because I can't stop building things, and I share them because useful things shouldn't be locked behind sign-up walls.

Why I Build

I started building tools to solve my own problems. The first was a calculator to figure out what my time was actually worth — not my salary, but my real hourly wage after commute, taxes, and the hours I spent recovering from work. That became What Is My Time Worth?

Then I wanted to make hologram GIFs for a pyramid projector and couldn't find a decent tool that didn't require a subscription. So I built HoloPath — a 13-stage rendering pipeline that turns any image or video into animated holographic art, entirely in the browser.

SandPath came from watching kinetic sand tables trace patterns and wanting to feed them my own art. It converts images and SVGs into .thr and .gcode files for Oasis, Sisyphus, and ZenXY tables.

How This Pays For Itself

Advertising, and nothing else. There is no premium tier being held back, no data being sold, and no affiliate arrangement behind any recommendation on this site. Stating that plainly seems better than pretending there is no business model at all.

The reason that works is that these tools are genuinely cheap to run. They execute in your browser, so serving one more person costs me essentially nothing — there is no per-user compute bill that would need recovering through a subscription. A static site and a small server is the entire infrastructure. When a tool genuinely cannot work that way, it gets a ☁ Cloud-assisted badge and its own page explaining exactly what leaves your browser, so the question "does this send my data somewhere?" is answerable at a glance instead of by reading source code.

What that buys you is the absence of the thing this site was built against: being charged monthly to process files on hardware you already own. That argument is made at length in A Floor of Curiosity.

What Gets Built, and What Doesn't

Four tools are finished. Considerably more are not, and they stay unlisted until they are — a directory full of half-working links is worse than a short directory. Some of them will never ship, because the test for shipping is whether I would use the thing myself, and a fair number of ideas fail it once they exist.

A tool earns a place here when it solves a problem completely enough to stop thinking about, and when it can do that without a server. Those two constraints rule out a great deal, which is the point: How a Tool Gets Built walks through the machinery from scaffold to deploy, including the parts that exist mainly to stop me shipping something careless.

Philosophy

Every tool on Restless Forge follows a few principles:

• Free and open source. The code is on GitHub. Always.
• Privacy-first. Calculations happen in your browser. Your inputs and files never leave your device — none of it is sent to our servers, and Restless Forge itself sets no cookies. (Ads are served by Google AdSense, which may use cookies — see the Privacy Policy.)
• No gatekeeping. No accounts, no paywalls, no "sign up to unlock." If you need the tool, use it.
• Honest and useful. I'd rather build something small that works well than something big that doesn't.

The Tools

• What Is My Time Worth? — A real hourly wage calculator and DIY-vs-hire decision engine.
• HoloPath — A hologram GIF generator that processes images, GIFs, and videos in the browser.
• SandPath — A converter that turns images and SVGs into sand table patterns (.thr / .gcode).
• TattooSafe — A tattoo sizing, camera try-on, and pricing preview tool.

Connect

I write about tools, time, and side projects on Substack. If something I've built has been useful, you can support the workshop through Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee.