Twelve years ago, I traded the web design field for a gig as a creative director, and while it’s been challenging to move to management from the trenches, I’m glad I did it. By the time I hung up my spurs I’d been doing it for 15 years, and I was pretty burned out. I also noticed that our shop was beginning to utilize templated designs more and more, and I could see the writing on the wall, especially at that place. I loved web design, and what it did for me, and I miss parts of it very much.
Meanwhile, I’ve kept a Google spreadsheet of my parts inventory for the trucks for several years. After parting out the green Travelall, when the number of rubbermaid bins full of parts overwhelmed my brain’s capacity to remember what was where, I did a sweep through each one and catalogued their contents. This worked well for a while, but the search function in a spreadsheet sucks, and updating the sheet is even worse on a phone. I’ve resisted spending money on yet another app because I’m cheap.
This evening I asked Codex to help write a basic PHP script for me to query the spreadsheet and return search results with the name of the bin and its location. After it helped me navigate the wilderness of Google API authorization, it built a small web app that gave me solid search results in a phone-optimized format. When I had that nailed down I asked it how hard it would be to include a way to add new items, and within a few minutes that was done as well. There’s even a flag that allows me to note when I’ve pulled something from a bin, which colors the field in the Google sheet so I can update it later.
Half of the fun of learning programming languages was the feeling you got when something you wrote actually worked. But my personal success ratio was generally 1 minute of joy vs. 59 minutes of frustration. Codex got me to where I wanted to be much faster than I ever would have been able to do on my own.
I’m glad I’m not doing web development anymore.
I’ve known about some of Google’s special operators for years, but librarian Hana Lee Goldin goes through all of the ones she knows about that supercharge search results beyond the usual five paid results and AI Overview at the top of the page. Bookmarked!
Whoami.wiki is a new project built by a software engineer that gathers information from its user, then employs AI to build an interconnected personal Wiki site tying everything together. The author fed it a series of old photographs along with notes he’d taken from his grandmother’s recollections, and then added newer photographs, timelines, online playlists, receipts, FB, Instagram, and Whatsapp entries, and bank transactions. He used Claude to spin up a local Wiki with all of this information and it built out pages of detail on his trips, where he visited, what he ate, and who he met with. It even identified locations in the photos he took.
Powerful stuff, to be sure, and very tempting to play with. I’ve spent a lot of time and a bit of money working on family history, mainly in the realm of photo archiving, but this author has found a whole new way to harness AI to connect hundreds of separate events into a coherent, searchable narrative. However, there’s no way in hell I’d ever give AI access to my personal data on this level.
On a separate note, I’ve been using Codex to help me with several different projects, and it’s been extremely useful. The first thing I had it do was build a Perl script to scrub excess HTML from an Indesign export so that it could be used in my company’s CMS—automating the process of publishing research products on our website. With some small caveats, it worked exceptionally well. The second thing I had it do was build a simple web page which pulls in my work and personal calendar information for the day, a local weather report, and the top five news articles from the AP and CNN feeds into a responsive page layout. This way I can pull up the important stuff for the day before I drag my old bones out of bed.
oooooh, this essay on technology is really good: it puts the state of current technology and its cross-section with society in really clear perspective. I won’t spoil it for you: it’s a great read.
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This tank of a laptop is an Aluminum G4 I bought off Craigslist nine years ago to repair and use as a backup/utility machine for sunsetted software. It’s been stored carefully in a bin in the basement, and occasionally it gets dusted off to be pressed into service. The last time I used it for a big project was when I batch-processed all of our first and second-generation font files into OpenType format (modern Macs and most current software doesn’t play well with TrueType or Type1 fonts) with an ancient, unsupported specialty app, generate sample sheets for each folder, and compile them into PDF booklets.
I’ve got two big bins of legacy hardware down there, everything from original MS Word 3.5″ floppy drives to whole laptops, and every time I straighten up the basement I look at the bins and think about culling the whole collection, minus one or two machines. And every time a mixture of apathy and unease stops me. Hoarding situations always start with the words, “…I might need that someday,” so I have to be very careful about what constitutes being useful and having a serious problem. In my defense, I have lightened the collection a couple of times already, but there are still more machines that probably need to be dropped off at an e-cycling center.
Yesterday Jen was working on a file provided by a client with an embedded typeface that wouldn’t open on her machine. After looking it over for a few minutes, I went down to grab the G4, booted it up, and converted the old TrueType font they sent into OpenType and got the file working for her. The machine fired right up, and even though the spinning hard drive is making some kind of vibrating noise, it worked like a charm.
Is it hoarding if they still make you money (or save it in this case)?
I got an email this morning from Bank of America assuring me that they have ruled in my favor for the fraud claim I filed last Thanksgiving. I’m glad they made an actual human review the case instead of just letting the robots decide everything was legit, because I was ready to go nuclear on them.
Bungie is releasing a new version of Marathon, the seminal Mac shooter game from the Doom/Quake era of video games, in the next few weeks. This news was exciting; I loved playing Marathon when it was first released. Then I found out this new game is something called a “PvPvE survival extraction shooter,” which I do not like to play. So, that’s a bummer.
I’ve got a bunch of open browser tabs here so it’s time to clean up.
After years of litigation, a fleet of abandoned surplus planes went to auction in Greybull, Wyoming, including a pair of KC-97 freighters (essentially a B-29 with an extra deck), a trio of C-199 Boxcars, and a pair of P2V Neptunes, as well as multiple fuselages of other models. Oh, to have the money and space to save one of those planes.
Brian started a build thread about his EV project, and our video already has more comments than any of the others I’ve posted over the last two years (sniff!) We’ve got a couple of leads on how other people have wired up their projects, and I’m currently diving into those threads to learn as much as I can.
And in musical news, Alex and Geddy from Rush announced yesterday that they’re going back out on tour ten years after the death of Neal Peart. I’m happy for them; they’re working musicians and deserve to be playing live, which they both excel at. They’ve recruited a drummer who has been playing with Jeff Beck and teaching for over ten years; she looks like she’ll be an excellent fit.
We’ve been buying renewable energy for over fifteen years through a program Maryland’s legislature put together, which allows for consumers to choose who their provider is (as long as that provider is part of the program). I just got a letter from our longtime supplier saying they’re withdrawing from the program based on Maryland Senate Bill 1, which imposes stricter regulations on retail energy suppliers to protect consumers from misleading practices in the competitive energy market. So I have to go shopping to see if there’s someone else we can buy clean energy from.
We’ve also gotten several notices from the Johns Hopkins Medicine group, which informed us that as of today they are no longer in UnitedHealthcare’s network, because they “have been unable to get United to agree to a contract that puts patients ahead of profits.” Johns Hopkins took absolutely world-class care of my family and I when I had cancer, and UnitedHealthcare’s coverage came through for us. But that was almost eight years ago, and the world has changed a lot since then. I’ve only got one more checkup scheduled with Hopkins before they cut me loose, but now I’m considering skipping that because I don’t have the money to pay for all of those tests out of pocket. Greatest healthcare in the world, etc. etc.
Tired of dealing with a pair of wired headphones for my work computer, and unwilling to use my AirPods with that machine, I bought a pair of Anker Soundcore P20i headphones from Amazon for $20 a few weeks ago, and I’ve been very happy with their performance. I’ve got a handful of Anker products here, and I have to say I haven’t been disappointed with any of them. As far as inexpensive Chinese brands go, they have had the highest consistent quality.
Here’s a great article on how to curate your own feed with RSS: Find a good reader app and connect to the sites you like the most through their syndicated feeds. Most modern platforms have RSS built in; it’s just a matter of digging out the URL and hooking it up. I haven’t played with an RSS feeder in years, but this is a great idea.
The Verge goes over the current state of travel in the U.S. and risks to data privacy; basically the advice is to leave your devices at home and travel with a dumb burner, or at the very least, disable all biometric logins like Face ID, delete all sensitive information, and make sure it’s been securely wiped from the devices.
If you’re a US citizen, “you have the right to say no” to a search, “and they are not allowed to bar you from the country,” Hussain said. But if you refuse, CBP can still take your phone, laptop, or other devices and hold onto them.