Tofte Ventures LLC
We design, build, and host websites for small businesses, and build custom software for businesses anywhere: internal tools, online stores, and automation.
The same company runs three businesses of its own: ecological restoration in the field, sourcing and resale across a handful of marketplaces, and a small compute operation built on secondhand hardware. Different work, same approach: do it directly, keep it lean, and don't claim more than we can back up.
Websites and software are for businesses anywhere. Restoration work is local to the southwest Twin Cities metro.
What we do
Websites and software
Websites for small businesses, designed, built, and hosted for you, plus internal tools, online stores, and automation for businesses anywhere. Fixed written quotes, and you own what we build.
Websites, and how to get a quoteLand Restoration
Buckthorn removal, wetland and shoreline restoration, stormwater work, and native plantings across the southwest Twin Cities metro. Operated as Liatris Landscaping.
Read moreCommerce
Sourcing and resale across eBay, Amazon, and Facebook Marketplace, plus a small sleep and wellness product line and equipment rental.
Read moreCompute
Distributed GPU and ASIC compute infrastructure, built on hardware that's sourced secondhand, rebuilt, and put back into service.
Read moreWriting
Notes on how the things above actually work, written while building them. Mostly about the gap between what software reports and what is true.
There is an index of those: every well formed answer here that happened to be false, and what caught it.
I Said It Works in Water. It Does Not.
Two posts ago I wrote that the same machinery makes a shape slippery in air or in water and that the same call works in water. I finally ran it in water. It returned a perfectly sane thirteen percent section with a drag coefficient of 0.000000035, which is not a drag coefficient. The optimiser had not found a better shape, it had found a hole in my own cost function, and it went on finding one through four rounds of fixes.
Read moreWhy buckthorn keeps coming back
Cutting buckthorn is the easy part. Understanding why it returns is what separates a weekend of work from a woodlot that actually recovers.
Read moreDo not trust SMTP with your leads
Setting up Gmail SMTP is twenty minutes. Understanding that it will silently fail one day, and building so that does not cost you anything, is the actual work.
Read moreOrbit Golf
A flash-style physics game on real gravity: drag back, let go, and every planet on the board pulls on the ball the whole way. Sixteen levels, each proven winnable by a shot the site's checks fly on every build, and a map of all 273,600 possible shots on the first eight that caught two of my own level hints lying.
Read more
- Little Rocket: Build One, Fly It, Try to Stay Up
- GregTech's First Circuits, Built Part by Part
- Real Chips Are Crystals Too: Silicon, SoCs and GregTech's Crystal Processors
- A Physics Playground, With a Meter on Every Toy
- Foucault's Pendulum, and the Half Millimetre That Can Fake It
- Can Any Force Move Any Weight? Archimedes' Pulley, With Friction
- What a Quantum Computer Actually Does to Your Passwords, Messages and Bitcoin
- The Explorer: the Original Ship on the Black Hole Drive, With a Door Home
Get in touch
Questions about any of it, a project in mind, or just want to talk? Reach us directly.
Full contact details