Y3K

3000Lab

Built for the year 3000

Y3K Lab is a personal incubator for retro-futurist experiments: a workshop where software, hardware, and ideas are made real.

Brand Family

Y3K RC | Build · Race · Bash · Crawl

The RC car club - building, racing, bashing, and crawling scale 4×4 off-road rigs, all in Y3K livery.

open

Y3K Home | Homelab of the Future

Home Assistant, personal infrastructure, and the admin/finances stack - a household running on Y3K.

soon

ABP 3D | Always Be Printing

The 3D-print crew - filament-fed prototypes, parts, and one-off props, stamped with the Y3K look.

soon

Bolo2K | Browser-Native Bolo

A faithful remake of Stuart Cheshire's Bolo - the 1987 multiplayer tank-battle classic. Claim bases, build pillboxes, hold the island.

play

Tuesday Drockets | Model Rocket Squad

All about building and launching model rockets, with a name not to be confused with "two-stage rockets."

soon

JoPº | Grill · Smoke · Code

The family's barbecue brand - grilling, smoking, and the data that goes with them. The flame does the talking.

open
Guides

Free DIY how-tos at guides.y3klab.com. // Spotlight is hand-curated - drop the guides to feature into the three tiles below.

Wi-Fi01

Fix Slow Wi-Fi by Forcing Devices onto the Nearest Access Point

read
DNS02

Set Up Split-Horizon DNS at Home

read
Hosting03

Host a Free Website with Cloudflare Pages and GitHub

read
Read all guides
Every free how-to, hosted at guides.y3klab.com
The Law

The structural constitution every Y3K surface obeys - how everything is organized: a node describes itself, by the same rule, at every depth.

LAW · Structure

Fractal Self-Describing Nodes

Every node describes itself, by the same rule, at every depth - so there is no index to keep: the structure is the index. A folder's primary document carries the folder's name; every file that represents its container takes the container's name, never a generic one.

read
lab/ - describes the lab
project/ - describes itself
project.md - carries its folder's name
Toolkit

Blue Steel | Claude Theme + Status Bar

A really, really, ridiculously good-looking theme - the Y3K palette on Claude Code, plus a live status bar. Free download.

get

Project System | A Tiny Project OS

A tiny operating system for your projects - spin up, shelve, archive, and index a personal portfolio from the terminal. Free download.

get

Phos4 | Terminal-UI Engine

The pure-bash, themeable terminal-UI engine that renders Y3K - and owns the canonical machine-readable palette. The most central component.

read

A3K | Aesthetic 3000

The design language every experiment wears - a neon magenta→cyan ramp, double-line wordmarks, and brief power-on motion. The family's always-lit source of colour.

read

[dot]files | Shell & Terminal

Shell, terminal (Ghostty), and tool configs - the palette carried across the everyday environment.

soon
Field Work

Experiments conducted outside the lab, in the real world.

Monarch Map | the monarch migration, week by week

Every habitat registered with Monarch Watch since 2005, overlaid with weekly monarch sightings from iNaturalist. Habitat dots turn from green to orange when monarchs are sighted nearby. Press play to watch a migration cycle.

open

Solar Strategy | battery charging algorithm

A home battery that charges when power is cheap and discharges when it is expensive, timed by a solar forecast fitted to this house. The forecast is graded daily against measured production.

open