Skip to content

Technology

Entries related to techology in general…

The Queue helps track TV shows and movies to watch

As with Dramatis, The Queue is a Claude-developed web app. Its purpose is to help me track the TV shows and movies that I want to watch, am watching, or have watched. So as with Dramatis, the same disclaimer applies: While I managed the project, all of the code involved was written by Claude. There's no use of passwords, nor does it store or collect personal data (other than free API keys, which are store locally in your keychain). But still, use at your own risk.

Unlike Dramatis, though The Queue is completely free to use—no Anthropic API key is required. It uses the free TVmaze API to retrieve information about TV shows, and two free API keys (which you have to create) from TMDB and OMDB for movie information.

Here's how it looks on my Mac:

And here's a download link:

Download The Queue web app (591KB)

It works like Dramatis does, by running a mini web server on your local Mac.

[continue reading…]



Dramatis tracks characters in books, series, and movies

As shown in my post about Claude Code, Dramatis (from "dramatis personae," the list of characters in a story) is a tool Claude created to help me keep track of the relationships between major characters in books, TV series, and movies. Here's a look at the main screen, for season one of The West Wing:

When you retrieve data for a title, it's automatically grouped into buckets that make sense for the show's plot—by function in The West Wing, Friends gets "Main Six," "Romantic Interests," and "Supporting Cast," etc. Click on a bucket and you'll see just the characters within that bucket.

Each character can have a separate, lower level of organization—Jed Bartlett is in the Executive Branch bucket, but his info card also shows Oval Office. Click on any character for full details on their role, as well as links to other characters who interact with the selected character.

[continue reading…]



Claude Code turns my techie to-dos into to-dones

Like many of you, I suspect, I've been using AI tools to assist me with tasks both mundane ("Help me find a cat bed large enough for three cats") and complex ("Configuration recommendations for pfSense"). There are obviously tons of choices out there for AI tools, but I chose Claude—I pay for the least-expensive plan, the Pro level at $204 per year.

Until recently, all my interactions with Claude had been through either the web site or the macOS app. I was aware of Claude's Terminal-based programming-focused tool, Claude Code (and its corresponding tab in the Mac app), but hadn't tried using it yet. Why not? Because I'm not a programmer, so I figured what could it do for me?

But in the last few weeks, I've thrown some projects at Claude Code, to see what it could do. In the end, Claude Code created things that I might have been able to make on my own could never have created with this level of usefulness and completeness. And Claude Code did it all in a matter of hours (spread over some number of days), while I simply told it what I wanted, and then how to refine what it had delivered.

So what has Claude Code done for me? I used it to bring my macOS Release Dates and Rates post back to life, in a version that's incredibly easy to maintain. I used it to create a simple site monitoring script that lets me know when I need to update the macOS releases post.

Those projects were, I thought, impressive. But they were nothing compared to these two…

[continue reading…]



A helper for Connections-style word games

Connections is a New York Times word game that's played with 16 words on a four-by-four grid; the objective is to correctly group four words into four sets, where the words in each set share some characteristic. Sometimes that's an easy thing to identify (colors), sometimes it's much tougher (dog breeds with first letter changed).

To play, you click on four words then click Submit to see if you got the grouping right. The way my brain works, though, I wanted to arrange the words visually first, as that makes it easier for me to process the relationships between the words. So I "created" (more on that below) a simple HTML/JS page to do just that:

Note that this is not a clone of the Connections game! It has absolutely no knowledge of the game, its rules, or which words belong where. It's not a game in any way, it's just a tool to help you rearrange words in a grid. I open it in a window next to the actual Connections puzzle, drag words around until I like what I see, then play the game for real in the other window.

[continue reading…]



Undocumented find: A great Mac-compatible flightstick

The VelocityOne Flightsticktl;dr version: I highly recommend the Turtle Beach VelocityOne Flightstick (right) for use with X-Plane on the Mac. Despite not being advertised as Mac-compatible, it works incredibly well, and at only $129 on Amazon, is a very good deal.

There are tons of buttons, three separate analog axes, a mouse and display built into the top of the stick, LED lighting (which you can also disable), and much more. Keep reading for a lot more detail, but if you're looking for a good Mac-compatible Flightstick, I'm over a year into my VelocityOne, and haven't had any issues yet.

I recently built myself a new gaming PC—Frankenmac was nearly seven years old, and was incapable of running the games I wanted to play with any sort of decent framerates. I won't bore you with the details of the build, but the perforance jump from an Nvidia 1080 to Nvidia 4080 graphics card was very impressive!

My main gaming outlet—on both my Mac and my PC—is flight simulation. On the Mac (or PC), it's X-Plane, plus Microsoft's Flight Simulator on the PC. As I don't have a lot of spare desk space, or the desire to spend a ton of money on flight peripherals, I control the simulators with a flightstick1A joystick with features specific to flight sims, such as a yaw axis..

[continue reading…]



Remove the AI bloatware from Logitech’s mouse driver

Note: Newer versions of LogiOptions+ have an on/off switch built into the app; find it in the app's Gear icon. The following is left as a historical footnote in the annals of the societal takeover by AI.

I absolutely love Logitech's Mac MX Keys keyboard and MX Master mouse (though I've now updated to version 3 of the mouse). And generally, their software has been pretty good, too.

But a recent update added an "AI Prompt generator" feature to the mouse side of things, which is absolute garbage—I'm not saying it's bad, as I've never tried it. It's garbage as in there's no reason my mouse needs an AI prompt generator connected to a button. Even worse, as Stephen Hackett discovered, it creates a folder (at the top level of your home folder, no less!) with the ugly name of ai_overlay_tmp.

Thankfully, when Stephen posted about this on Mastodon, user @flipneus posted the solution. And in case that post ever goes away, here it is:

In Finder, open the top-level Library → Application Support folder, then navigate to Logitech → LogiOptionsPlus, and open app_permission.json in your favorite pure text editor. Add a comma after the last } on the line before the final }, then add these lines:

 "aipromptbuilder": {
  "value": false
 }
}

When done, the end of the file should look like this (though the commands in yours may differ):

...
  },
 "backlight": {
  "value": true
 },
 "aipromptbuilder": {
  "value": false
 }
}

The important part is the added comma after (in my file) the backlight-related section. Save the file when done editing, and reboot.

After the reboot, you can delete the ai_overlay_tmp folder—and there won't be an AI generator option in the Logi Options+ app any more. (Alternatively, Stephen points out you can use SteerMouse to program the buttons on the Logitech.)

Thank you, Stephen and @flipneus!



New theme with a somewhat updated look

My blog's general appearance dates back to 2014, with a face lift in 2017. But the site was still using a (very!) old theme as its base, and that old code was throwing a ton of errors into the logs (mainly warnings). I felt it was time to find a new base to build from, so the site is now using a modified version of the Neve theme.

Things hopefully look mostly the same, though there will be some minor changes made going forward as I discover things that aren't working as they should, and clean up some loose ends—and probably change my mind on fonts a dozen more times. Please let me know if you run into any issues with formatting or functionality on any of the pages.

Update: Thanks to some great help from Many Tricks' founder and resident CSS expert Peter, the theme should now look fine on all devices—and he cleared up many other minor issues I was having. Thanks, Peter!



Idiot proofing my PC’s power switch

Although I'm a Mac person, I've almost always had a Windows PC in the house—partly to stay current on the competing OS, but mostly because I enjoy many PC games that never make it to the Mac. I tend to keep these machines much longer than I do my Macs, though—my 2008 PC lasted until the 2017 Frankenmac, and that one lasted until a few months ago, when I decided it was finally time to replace it (as it couldn't run Windows 11).

Long story short, I bought an assemblage of parts and built a new PC, which I love except for one niggling issue that was bugging me. The new machine has very quiet water cooling, a higher-end video card, super-fast SSD, and (most importantly for me) a nearly-silent case. But it's that case that was causing the niggling issue: The power button design was absolutely horrid, leading me to accidentally turn the machine on and off more than once.

[continue reading…]



The most popular letters in Wordle and its relatives

Each morning, I spend a few minutes doing a set of word puzzles—I find they help clear the sleep and get me ready for the day. My daily set includes (in the order I do them):

My focus today is on the first three games in the list. Everyone is probably familiar with Wordle, where you have to guess a five-letter word in six tries.

Canuckle uses the exact same rule set, but all the words are related to Canadian history and culture.

Quordle also uses the same rule set as Wordle, but you solve four five-letter words at the same time. (If you like that kind of thing, Octordle (8 at once), Sedecordle (16), Sectordle (32), and Sexaginta (64) take it to extremes.)

When I started playing Quordle, I had troubles as I'd focus on one word and use up too many moves, preventing myself from solving the others. So I thought I'd "do the math" and see if I could find better opening words for the three Wordle-like games.

To do that, I looked at all the words that had been played so far, figured out which letters were most likely to appear, then created a set of four starting words, based on letter popularity, for each puzzle.

Note: The remainder of this post includes an analysis of all the words used in each game, and ranks the letters by occurrence counts. It also includes graphs showing the distribution of the letters. The images are hopefully unreadably small before clicking, and the top letters are ROT13'd to prevent accidental reading. Still, if you don't want to know, stop reading now.

[continue reading…]



An anywhere switch to control HomeKit devices

I recently assembled an IKEA cabinet and shelving in the corner of a room. It's a darker corner, so I added lighting to the cabinet and the shelves, all of which is then plugged into a HomeKit-compatible power plug. I can now easily turn the lights on and off with Siri, but I wanted to have a more-traditional wall switch, too.

As the wall outlet isn't switched, the "real" solution would have involved hiring an electrician to cut holes in the wall and run a new line to a new switch, followed up by a fair bit of drywall repair, texture, and painting. I didn't want to go that route.

Instead, I found Belkin's Wemo Stage Scene Controller1Apple sells this on their site, too, but at a much higher price., which promised an install-anywhere switch for any HomeKit connected devices.

(Note: I don't know if this thing works outside the USA or not; I found a note on their site indicating it may not work in the UK, but that's all I was able to find.)

I bought one to test, and after the first day, I was preparing to return it and write a very scathing review…
[continue reading…]