About

Pat Hartl isn’t your average guy. He’s a hacker, modder, web designer, and gaming enthusiast. He is currently attending the Milwaukee School of Engineering pursuing a degree in Computer Engineering. Pat, for many of his 18 years of existence, has been mostly self-taught in the areas of programming, electronics, and networking. Some of his more popular projects include The PAT, the PicturePC, and his method to reduce cable clutter. He also runs a podcast with Josh Betz titled Sudo Make Me a Sandwich, or SMMAS for short. SMMAS is a podcast about anything and everything tech related. They cover anything from technology related news to their favorite current technologies.

Yeah, that’s me. I’ve been hacking things ever since I could remember. Whether it was taking apart dead printers or building computers, I’ve always had a huge interest in technology. My interest has spanned from computers to game consoles to consumer gadgets and everything in between. I built my first computer with my dad Ray Hartl around the age of 10. If I remember correctly, it had a blazing fast 800MHz single-core AMD processor, a GeForce 2 that would blow you away, and a whopping 256MB of RAM.

I have had many hobbies over the years from model trains to electronics. I’ve always had a knack for creating things. One of my oldest hobbies is PC modding. I’ve stuffed computers into Coca-Cola crates, cardboard boxes, old AV receivers, a Power Mac G4, and even picture frames. My head is always racing with “wouldn’t it be cool if I could throw a computer in that?” Even to this day I pick up more and more projects.

I am also an amateur programmer. When I was younger I always wanted to develop a video game. In 2004 I purchased the Torque Game Engine, but I had no success with it. It was too complicated for me. In 2006 and early 2007 I began programming Nintendo DS homebrew. In January of 2007 I released a custom firmware replacement for the DS titled “CreeboMe” (Creebo is my alias in many scenes). It was ultimately a failure. I received multiple reports that CreeboMe was bricking, or rendering useless, a small handful of people’s DS’s. With CreeboMe Beta 2 I attempted to fix this issue, but accidentally wound up bricking my own DS in the process.

I left programming for a while after that as I felt I did not have enough education to pursue it. In the summer of 2008 I took an introduction to game programming class up at DigiPen in Redmond, Washington. There I wrote (along with some help of my instructor) Raging Robot Rampage, a game that gave the player control of a car in order to stop a robot invasion of a city. The game was coded in C# using an engine provided by DigiPen. I learned a lot in that class such as typecasting, the differences between data types, and vectors.

In 2009 and 2010 I moved onto web development. A lot of what I’ve learned has been self-taught through resources such as CSS-Tricks, though I did learn a great deal through the help and guidance of Josh Betz. I haven’t created any websites for anyone. I maily use my skills just to experiment on my own website, as you can see.

Please, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me.