Every game night in this house ends the same way: somebody grabs the nearest envelope, draws a wobbly grid on the back of it, and we keep score there until the columns stop lining up. Then somebody asks who won last time and nobody knows. So I built Meld, an iOS score keeper for card and board games. It’s in TestFlight now, and the first beta just cleared Apple’s review. The scorepad: two teams, four rounds, bids turned on partway through. ...
MiniMusic is my little menu bar app for controlling Apple Music from the keyboard: global hotkey, type, return, music. The new release, MiniMusic 26.716.1, is the biggest one yet, because the search box got a brain. Search that understands what you meant Until now, search did what search boxes do: match the characters you typed. The new version runs every query through Apple’s on-device Foundation Models first — the same Apple Intelligence stack that powers Writing Tools — and turns it into a structured search intent before hitting the Apple Music API. Everything happens on the Mac itself: no cloud round-trip, nothing leaves the machine, and it works on a plane. ...
MiniMusic is a little menu bar app I built to scratch my own itch: a fast, keyboard-driven way to control Apple Music without leaving whatever I’m working on. Hit a global hotkey, a dropdown appears under the menu bar icon, search my library or the catalog, hit return, and the music plays. It lives in the menu bar, ships updates through Sparkle, and otherwise stays out of the way. I upgraded to macOS 27 (Golden Gate) and two things were suddenly broken: the global hotkey did nothing, and album artwork stopped showing up. What I expected to be a quick afternoon of patches turned into a genuinely interesting tour of how SwiftUI’s menu bar support has aged. I worked through it with Claude Code, which was especially useful here because a lot of the debugging was empirical—build, run, observe, repeat—rather than something you can reason out from the docs. ...
Everyone worries about AI making things up or refusing to answer. The trickier failure is the calm, balanced-sounding answer that treats settled science and bad-faith contrarianism as a coin flip. Here’s how to spot it and ask your way past it.
A DIY version of what the rich have: a team of specialists coordinating your money, running on my home server. What is in it, what it caught, and why the posture matters more than the tooling.
One of the untold stories of the AI revolution is how fun it is to build stuff again. A note on homelabs, work agents, and feeling technical again after a decade in management.
Nine months of going all-in on AI-assisted development at StackHawk: the ramp-up, the custom tooling, and what actually made it stick.
Over the past couple days, I’ve been on a mission to clean up my music library in forScore, the sheet music reader I use on my iPad. What started as a simple organization project turned into building custom tooling and developing ideas for how forScore could better support power users and integrations. The real power tool here was Claude Code—Anthropic’s AI coding assistant. It handled the fuzzy matching logic to identify duplicates and normalize inconsistent names, helped build the Rust CLI from scratch, and iterated through the tricky parts like reverse-engineering forScore’s binary plist format. Tasks that would have taken me days of trial and error were done in hours. ...
This year our trees have grown large enough and my Christmas lights were old enough that multiple strands died, so we made a significant investment in new lights. At Home Depot I found $5, $10, and $20 options. Since my last lights lasted about 10 years, I’m curious whether I’ll see a difference in longevity between the $10 and $20 lights. I skipped the $5 ones—they looked disposable with no replaceable bulbs. ...
When people discuss thread safety in code it is almost entirely within the context of threading in a single process. The problems that come up are races conditions, data races, and unseen updates with solutions like locking, synchronized updates and immutability. This definition of thread safety is too focused. Much of the problems normally attributed to thread safety can be seen in programs that have no access to OS threads or are running on multiple servers. ...