The Software: Built Because There Had to Be a Better Way

Two examples

There's more on the apps page, but two projects show the pattern best. One is serious and practical. The other started as a tool for myself. Both are about handling a messy problem properly instead of approximately.

Triage

When a computer comes in for repair, the first job is finding out what's actually wrong, before anything gets changed. Guessing is expensive. So is fixing the wrong thing.

Triage is a bootable USB drive JAMARQ built for that first step. You plug it in, start the computer from the drive and walk away. It runs from its own system, so it never needs the owner's password and never touches the owner's files. It tests the hardware: memory, storage, processor and cooling, graphics and, on laptops, the battery. When it's done it writes a report to the drive and shuts the machine off.

Raw test results aren't much use to most people, so there are two more pieces. A reference database, compiled from open sources with the source recorded on every row, explains what the numbers mean. And a companion app on the Mac turns each report into a plain-English check-up the owner can actually read: what's fine, what needs attention, and why.

The first problems Triage found were on my own desktop. The memory was rated for 3200 but running at 2133, because a setting was off. The processor was reaching 95°C under load. Both were easy to fix. Neither was visible until something looked.

Mixtape

Moving a playlist from one music service to another sounds simple until you try it. Remasters, live versions, compilations, songs that share a title, artists spelled three different ways or listed in another alphabet. Most tools pick something close and move on, and you find out later that half the playlist is the wrong version.

Mixtape takes a list of songs and builds the same playlist on Spotify, in your order. When it isn't sure which version you meant, it asks. When it can't find a song, it says so instead of quietly skipping it. When it's finished, it reads the playlist back from Spotify to confirm everything landed where it should. Its latest run at the time of writing put 200 of 200 songs into a playlist in the right order.

To see whether the care was worth it, I ran a side-by-side test on the same six playlists against an established playlist-transfer service. That service couldn't find 61 songs. Mixtape couldn't find 20, and every one of those 20 was checked against the artist's full catalog on Spotify to confirm it really wasn't there. Mixtape got none wrong.

It's a desktop app built with Tauri and Rust. Support for Apple Music and YouTube Music is in progress.

Why these are here

Neither of these is a product you can buy from JAMARQ today. Triage is part of how the PC repair work gets done, and Mixtape is still mostly mine. They're here because they show the kind of work JAMARQ does underneath everything else: take a messy, repetitive problem and build something that handles it properly, including the cases where the honest answer is "I'm not sure."

Most businesses have a problem like that somewhere. Something done by hand every week. Information scattered across three places. A spreadsheet only one person understands. That's usually a conversation worth having, and the contact page is the place to start it.

Tomorrow's note is about what didn't work.