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AI Tools

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.

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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.

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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…

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