Black Sheep Systems.

SOFTWARE

Built here, published here.

Black Sheep Systems is the umbrella the software is developed under. Each product stands on its own; this is the list of them, and an honest statement of where each one is.

These are products rather than client work. The services side of the business pays for the time; this side is what gets built with it, and the two feed each other — the tooling comes from problems seen on real systems, and real systems are where it gets tested.

One thing runs through all of it: the software runs on your machine. No accounts, no API keys you did not choose, no data leaving the building. That is a deliberate constraint rather than a limitation, and it is the same principle the services side argues for.

So is the other thing: unfinished work is called unfinished. One of these three is ready to use. The other two are not, and say so on their own pages rather than being described in the present tense and left to disappoint someone.

Software commissioned for a specific client is a different arrangement, and lives under Software Development.

Shipping

Gaia

A live Earth for your desktop.

What it does

Draws the Earth on your desktop — real terrain and mountain ranges, cloud cover moving on the planet's own wind currents, city lights on the night side, and network attacks spreading through the internet backbone.

Runs as an animated desktop background behind your icons, as a screensaver, or both at once on separate monitors. Daylight can track the real terminator, so the lit side of the planet matches the time outside your window.

Full details, install and screensaver setup →
Download Gaia.zip for Windows →

At a glance

PLATFORM
Windows · a single file · installs into your own user folder with no administrator prompt

OFFLINE
No account, no key, and no network requests at all. Everything it draws is generated on your own machine.

NEEDS
WebGL-capable graphics · around a gigabyte of RAM while running · terrain data from Natural Earth

In development

Olympus

An autonomous coding system that shows its work.

What it does

Every task comes back with the evidence attached: the code executed, the tests measured against it, the structure parsed, the rules checked. Work reaches done when it runs, the tests genuinely reach it, and the implementation is real — a measurement rather than an opinion.

A verification gate checks every output before it is accepted, and a tool that cannot check something has to say so. Unavailable is not a pass.

It runs on your own hardware on the local tier, so routine work costs nothing per token and your code never leaves the building. You choose what is ever allowed to reach a paid API.

Where it stands

STATUS
Under active repair. Not production ready.

PROVEN
The gate scores 41/41 against a corpus of deliberately broken programs across eight languages, at zero model calls. Measured 2026-08-27.

OPEN
Open items are published individually rather than summarised into a percentage, generated from the register itself so the page cannot drift from it. The live count lives there, not here. A clean-machine install has not been rehearsed end to end.

The Olympus site — the gate, the state, and the open-items register →

In development

NewsDesk Studio

A news desk for people who go on camera.

What it does

Collects news from the outlets you choose, groups the reporting of one event into a single story, and scores how well that story is sourced — from publisher tier and corroboration, never from a model's opinion of how official an article sounds.

Read it, note it, order it, and export the running order as one document you can read off while recording.

What it does in full →

Where it stands

STATUS
Unfinished. Documented to version 0.1, no download yet, and no release date claimed.

PLATFORM
Windows first; macOS and Linux planned, in that order.

Tools

Passphrase Bench

Free, runs in your browser, nothing to install.

What it does

Generates Diceware passphrases from the EFF long wordlist, with every word list and character pool editable. Randomness comes from the browser's cryptographic generator with rejection sampling, so no value is more likely than any other.

It shows the entropy in bits and the mean guess time behind it, so the number means something rather than being a coloured bar.

Open the tool →

Where it runs

LOCAL
Entirely in your browser. No account, no network request, nothing typed or generated leaves the page.

OFFLINE
An offline build is a single HTML file that works on a machine that has never been online: passphrase-bench.zip

It is the same argument the rest of this business makes, in a form you can check in about thirty seconds.

Where to go next

DEVCommissioned software ABOUTWho builds it CONTACTGet in touch