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// Introduction
Hey there!
Hi, I'm Joe Ward — a PhD organic chemist by training, software engineer by inclination, and Director of Digital Infrastructure at the University of Michigan. Team Ward Labs is where I write about the spaces in between: homelab projects, custom tooling I've built for chemistry teaching labs, hobby distilling, and whatever else lands on my workbench.
// Featured Projects
Some of the work I've done
An ambient status panel that renders your Claude (Pro/Max) usage — the 5-hour session and 7-day windows — onto a USB-attached Turing 3.5-inch smart screen. It reads the OAuth usage endpoint Claude Code uses, then draws JARVIS-style HUD arc gauges or an LCARS console, rotating between them every 30 minutes. Built on the mathoudebine turing-smart-screen-python library; runs windowless at login on Windows via a logon Scheduled Task.
Python
Pillow
pyserial
Turing Smart Screen
Claude API
Chrome extension that returns a kiosk browser to its home URL when a user abandons a transaction mid-login. ~150 lines, MV3 service worker, per-tab alarms. Solves the 'someone walked away in the middle of SSO and now their half-completed login is sitting on the screen' problem on shared university kiosks.
Chrome Extension
Manifest V3
JavaScript
chrome.alarms
// Latest Articles
What I've recently wrote
An Ambient Claude Usage Panel on a Turing Smart Screen
Jun 15, 2026
#homelab
3 min read
Kiosk Watchdog: A Tiny Chrome Extension
May 3, 2026
#systems
3 min read
Photo Backup and Organization
Mar 2, 2017
#productivity
5 min read