NJ PBS

OK, so I guess I’m writing two blog posts today! This one will be short. I was poking around this afternoon and stumbled across the news that NJ PBS is no longer run by WNET and is now being operated by Montclair State University, effective July 1.

I remember reading a while back that WNET was going to abandon NJ PBS, but at that time, it wasn’t clear what was going to happen to it. I guess it’s good that it has found a new home. Here’s an article from nj.com, and an FAQ from the NJ PBS web site.

Here’s an article about a protest letter regarding the sale, from Brenda Flanagan, a correspondent on NJ Spotlight News who retired recently. Here’s an opinion piece by Charles Stile, expressing similar concerns, with some more historical context about the station. And here’s one more article, expressing some concerns from the NJ Society of Professional Journalists.

I’m not sure how all of this is going to work out. I haven’t been watching NJ Spotlight News every day, like I used to, so I’m not sure if they’ve addressed any of this in the regular newscast. I’ve noticed that their video quality has gotten noticeably bad recently, which is probably because they had to shut down their studio and switch to doing it all from home.

If you look at the links in this post, you’ll see that they’re from a hodgepodge of sites, some reputable and some questionable. It’s getting hard to find a good source for local news, especially here in NJ. I hope NJ PBS lives on, in some meaningful way, and I hope NJ Spotlight News keeps running and providing some quality journalism.

an overdue post

Well, I haven’t posted here since May. I’ve had a bunch of stuff I wanted to post about, but I just haven’t had the time (and/or energy).

Tomorrow is July 4th, and a Saturday, so today is the official day off from work for Independence Day. We’re in a bit of a heatwave right now, so I’m not doing anything much for the long weekend. So I thought I’d spend some time writing a blog post today, and trying to catch up on some stuff I wanted to write about.

WordPress 7.0

Well, I didn’t actually intend to write about WordPress 7.0 today, but when I went into my blog admin page, I saw that it was available. So I’m currently upgrading my test site, and will update my actual blog site later, if all is well with the test site.

It seems like the big feature in WP 7 is AI integration. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about that. Not too long ago, I probably would have rolled my eyes at the idea of having AI integration in my blog site, but, today, I can think of some semi-valid uses for it. Yes, some people are going to use it to create terrible AI slop, but I’ve got a few ideas about how I could use it in a positive way.

Here are a few links related to it:

I haven’t read any of this stuff too closely yet. I’m not even sure how much of it works with the open source WordPress software, vs. how much of it is specific to WordPress.com. Anyway, I guess that researching this stuff and playing around with it is yet another little project for me.

Robot Assistant Field Guide

I mentioned the Robot Assistant Field Guide a couple of posts back. The main part of that class is all done now, but there’s a series of “Robot Builder’s Club” meetings that’s continuing, and those are fun. I learned a bit from this series, though I’m still not really on board with the full robot lifestyle, I guess you could say. I did about 2 hours of busywork this morning (or “donkey work” as David Sparks would say), and I really haven’t automated any of that. But I have gotten in the habit of keeping Claude open while I’m doing work, and using it for little tasks here and there. Here’s some stuff I did today:

  • I had it read all of the 2026 statements for a bank account I have, and create an Excel file summarizing performance YTD, including charts. It did a pretty good job. I didn’t get any new insights out of it, but it was nice. I then also had it create a CLAUDE.md file in the folder with the statements, so I can repeat the exercise, updating the Excel file regularly.
  • I asked it to read and summarize a mutual fund prospectus that I had just downloaded. It called out one upcoming change that’s kind of important: the fund is converting to an ETF next year. I’d stopped reading prospectuses at all, some years ago, but now I’m trying to get into the habit of downloading them and asking Claude to summarize them for me. There’s often nothing big in them, but sometimes, there’s something important.

Overall, I’ve started using Claude as a way to help me analyze my finances and surface trends and opportunities. It’s working better than I would have expected.

The AI Pro

I’m starting to look at something called The AI Pro, from Rob Conery. I signed up for a free account, and I might talk myself into the $300/year paid membership, though I’m not sure about that. I’ve watched one of the free videos, and it’s pretty good. And the material is definitely aimed at folks like me: senior engineers who are getting curious about getting better at AI-assisted programming.

But he uses a service called Circle to host it, and my company (for some reason) blocks that. So I wouldn’t be able to access any of the content from my work computer. In theory, I could ask work to unblock it, but I’m a little hesitant about requesting an unblock for anything that isn’t strictly work-related. I mean, this is clearly a tool that would help me do my job better, but who knows what the powers-that-be at work would think about me bettering myself on company time. (Yes, I know that sounds cynical, but that’s where we are these days.)

Books

I’m currently reading the first book in the Marlow Murder Club series. I’d previously watched (and enjoyed) the PBS series based on the book. I’m enjoying the book too. And I finished the first book in the Thursday Murder Club series earlier this year. Both of these “murder club” books were (presumably) named in reference to Agatha Christie’s “Tuesday Night Club” from The Thirteen Problems, featuring Miss Marple. So that’s another book I need to read, one of these days.

I went on a Kindle book buying binge during the Prime Day sale a week or two ago. I just counted them up, and it looks like I bought… 15 books. Yikes. They were mostly on sale for $2 or $3, so I didn’t break the bank here. But my “want to read” shelf on Goodreads is now up to 928 books.

I’ve also been wanting to switch more of my book buying over from Amazon Kindle to Kobo, but I haven’t been terribly successful at that. Kobo recently announced integration with StoryGraph. I haven’t set that up, but this could be a nudge in the direction of moving away from Amazon/Goodreads over to something else. So I guess that’s yet another little personal project for a rainy day.

Well, I have more stuff I could write about, but I feel like that’s about it for me today. I’ve spent most of the morning doing busy work, writing this post, and generally not doing the kind of things one should do on a holiday. So I think my next stop is the couch, for a quick afternoon nap.

Robert Silverberg

I found myself thinking about Lord Valentine’s Castle, by Robert Silverberg, earlier this week. I read it a long time ago, when it was first serialized in F&SF. I can see here that that was in 1979/1980, so I would have been twelve years old.

At some point, I bought a used copy of the paperback, intending to reread it. Looking through my email, I see that that was in 2010. I never got around to reading that paperback. I went looking for it a few months ago and couldn’t find it, but I stumbled across it earlier this week. (It was in a pile under a bunch of DVDs.) As with a lot of my old paperbacks, I found that the print was too small for me to read, so I put it in my “donation” pile, which will eventually get dumped into a book donation drop box. And I added the Kindle version to my wishlist, figuring I’d buy that version eventually.

That got me looking through my unread Kindle books, which led to me discovering that I had Nightwings in my Kindle library, which I bought about a year ago, for some reason. So I started reading it this week. So far, I’m enjoying it.

Then, in the course of doing some internet searching for info on Silverberg books, I discovered that there’s a Humble bundle running right now, with a bunch of his books! So I bought that, and now I have digital copies of Lord Valentine’s Castle, and all of the other books in that series, plus a whole bunch of other stuff. So that’s cool.

I definitely have too much to read now, and I should absolutely stop buying new books. But I know I won’t. I’m eyeing up the Mercedes Lackey Humble bundle right now. I probably won’t buy that one. I’ve read a few of her books already, and liked them, but I don’t know if I want to add another 37 to my library.

Time tracking and more random experiments

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me, since my last post. Lots of stuff going on at work, which I won’t get into, since most of it just stresses me out, and it’s Saturday, and I want to think about fun stuff.

One work-related thing that (on the one hand) is kind of stressful, but (on the other hand) gives me an excuse to mess around with some stuff I like to mess around with: time sheets. Yes, after not having to track my time for more than a decade, it looks like I’m going to have to start filling out a time sheet again. The fun part of time sheets is that it gives me an excuse to play around with Sri’s Downloadable Productivity Tools again. I used their “Emergent Task Timer” at my previous job (2010-2012), which was the last time I had to worry about tracking hours. This week, I tried experimenting with their “Emergent Task Planner” form. I printed one out on Thursday, and tried filling it out over the course of the day.

It worked out OK, but the results are kind of depressing. I started the day listing two major projects I wanted to work on. By the end of the day, I had about 30 minutes on the first, and zero time on the second. Then I had about 90 minutes on various support issues, 3 hours worth of meetings, 90 minutes I called “misc admin,” and (the one fun bit) 90 minutes for the “robot club” meeting for the Robot Assistant Field Guide. Technically, I guess I could have skipped that and done some project work, but it was the end of the day, and I was too tired to try to start on “real” work.

For Friday, I wanted to try it again, but Friday descended into chaos so fast I gave up pretty early. For next week, I bought one of these notebooks and will give it a try. I have no idea if I’ll stick with it, but it’ll be a fun thing to play with.

Tracking my time on paper has some plusses and minuses. Since I’m WFH two days and in the office three days, anything paper-based needs to get carried around. That’s not a problem with a small notebook, though I could see myself forgetting it occasionally. My other problem is that my eyesight is so bad these days that paper can be hard for me to deal with. I think the Mini ETP notebook will be fine, but we’ll see. The other dumb problem is that my desk (in the office) is so small that there’s not much room on it to keep a notebook handy. Again, though, I think I’ll be fine, but we’ll see how it works out.

I’ve also been experimenting with creating something kind of like the ETP form in OneNote, so that I can track my time there. That eliminates the various problems with a paper-based system, but it’s somehow not as fun.

I’ve always created weekly notes in OneNote, and made a bullet list for each day, with all of my meetings and all of the projects I’ve worked on. So switching to a daily note isn’t too big a stretch. But then I need to figure out if I want to keep the weekly notes too, or just have the daily notes. I always put a few lists at the end of my weekly notes, for projects I need to work on in that week, stuff I’m waiting on, stuff for next week, and so on. So if I make the daily note my main thing instead of the weekly note, do I move those lists from day to day? Or keep them on a separate weekly note?

One other option is to use daily notes each day, and then have a separate “sprint” note. Our sprints are two weeks long, so that would give me something like the weekly note, but I wouldn’t need a new one every week, just every two weeks. And it makes sense, since our work is (theoretically) supposed to be happening in sprints. But our sprints start mid-week, on Wednesdays, and I’ve never really been able to switch my brain over to thinking about time that way. To me, the standard Mon-Fri work week is still the way I think about things.

One of my problems with doing all of this in OneNote is that I can’t really automate anything there. The Copilot integration for OneNote keeps telling me that it can edit notes for me, but then it keeps failing to do that.

I’ve asked my boss to see if we can get somebody to OK me to use Work IQ CLI, which I think might allow me to do some cool stuff from the command line, though I’m pretty sure it still won’t allow me to automate much in OneNote. I’m definitely starting to think about switching from OneNote to Markdown files, at least for my daily/weekly time tracking. But of course I can’t use Obsidian at work, so that makes it a little harder to justify a Markdown-based system.

I’m not really sure when they’re going to ask us to start entering our time into a system, so I don’t need to start doing this yet, but I always feel like it’s good to get a jump on things, if I can.

On a different topic, I don’t have much to report on the Claude front. I recently switched from using a third-party Fastmail MCP to using the new official MCP. It works well, though I haven’t had a chance to do much with it yet.

I’ve gotten some good ideas out of the Robot Assistant workshops and “Robot Builder’s Club” meetings, though I haven’t actually done much with any of these big ideas. It’s a process, I guess.

I keep finding little things to do with Claude Cowork. Recently, I created an Obsidian note for the upcoming primary election, and asked Claude to add some information to it, based on what it could find on the internet. That worked OK, but then I got the idea to scan in my ballot, and asked Claude to add more information based on that. And that got me a much more complete note. So that was cool.

Well, this post has gotten a bit scattershot, so maybe I should tie things up. Saturday is about half done, but I’ve got all of my chores done, and I think I can spend the rest of the day goofing off.

Claude and Kobo

It’s a quiet rainy Sunday, and I’m pretty tired, so I thought now would be a good time to write up a little blog post.

The first thing on my mind: more experimenting with Claude Cowork. My most recent mini-project was to see if I could hook Claude up to my email. Claude has a built-in connector for Gmail, but of course that’s not what I use. I use Fastmail. I spent a fair bit of time looking at various MCP options. In in end, I went with this one. There are a few ways to get it working, but I went with the simplest one (I think): adding it into Claude Desktop as a Claude Desktop Extension (DXT). That worked well.

I haven’t really done much with it yet. I have a few ideas though. I keep coming back to the idea of some kind of “daily briefing” out of Claude, combining info from my Obsidian vault (tasks), email (newsletters), and news pulled from the web. But I haven’t really gotten far with that.

I just tried this prompt: “Please look at the Receipts folder in my email and find all emails from Kobo. Then make me a list of all the books I’ve bought from Kobo, including title, author, and purchase date. Also, indicate which ones are audiobooks.”

That took a while, but worked pretty well. If I didn’t already have a list of all those books in Obsidian, I could have dumped it into there. I do note that the search took longer than I think it should have; it may be that the MCP I’m using isn’t terribly efficient? Or Claude isn’t using it efficiently? I don’t know.

One thing I’m noticing in my efforts to find good use cases for Claude Cowork: A lot of the stuff that would qualify as “quick wins” doesn’t really help me, because it’s all about information organization, and I’m already really fussy about that stuff. I started watching a video the other day showing how Claude Cowork could sort out a folder full of random documents. The example input folder was full of files named “document.pdf” and “document (2).pdf” and “attachment (3).pdf”. Useless file names, basically. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I had a folder like that! My bank statements for the last ten years are all stored in folders by year and consistently named like “statement-yyyy-mm-dd.pdf”. Same with credit card statements, phone bills, and so on. So Claude can’t help me there!

Another semi-useful thing  I did recently was to pull the annotations from a a book I just finished on my Kobo and reformat them into a nice Markdown file and save it into Obsidian. I use the annotations plugin for Calibre to pull annotations from Kobo books. For Kobo books purchased from the Kobo store, you can export annotations from your account, but for EPUBs that you load yourself, there’s no supported way to pull them. For those, the annotations plugin works, but it’s far from perfect. The annotations show in the book’s metadata in Calibre. They’re in an HTML format, and they’re shown in semi-random order. So that’s frustrating. Claude managed to convert the HTML into clean Markdown, and sort the annotations back into proper order. So I think I’ll be doing that again.

I’ve thought about turning that into a skill, so I can keep using it and get consistent results, but I asked Claude if I should, and it said not to bother. So we’ll see how it works next time. If I see any inconsistency or I can think of stuff I want to tweak with it, I’ll give the skill thing another thought.

So that’s it for random Claude stuff for today. I had to work late on Friday, then all day Saturday, on a server virtualization project, so I should really just be relaxing today and not thinking about computers.

Happy Easter, still messing with Claude, and some work overwhelm

It’s a quiet Sunday here in Somerville, and hopefully, it’ll stay that way. It’s drizzling a bit, so that helps.

I had a pretty stressful week at work, mostly around fixing a critical issue with TLS 1.2 and SMTP email. (To be clear, I did not create this problem. I’m just the idiot who volunteered to solve it.) There was also stress around trying to help out on a few support tickets, and around a couple of my own support tickets that no one seems to be able to solve. I had some after-hours work Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and a little morning work on Saturday. (Not a lot of work, to be honest, but enough that I couldn’t just “unplug” at the end of the day, which can be a problem.)

So today (Sunday) is the first day this week where I haven’t had to turn on my work laptop at all, or think about work. Of course, this hasn’t stopped me from thinking about work, and I will admit that I just sent myself an email to remind myself to check some stuff tomorrow morning.

My other area of work stress this week is that everyone else in my group has been making progress with Palantir Foundry, while I just haven’t had enough time to do anything with it, aside from the very basic “speed run” training. And there seems to be a lot of management enthusiasm around that product, so I’m worried about seeming out of touch or lagging behind. And it doesn’t help that Palantir is a, shall we say, problematic company: Our product is used, on occassion, to kill people.
See also: Palantir Controversies: A Deep Dive into Privacy, Surveillance, and Ethical Concerns.
But anyway, it’s really great software and I should definitely learn it! 😵

What I’ve been trying to do in my spare time (🤣) is to continue learning Claude. To that end, I bought David Sparks’ Robot Assistant Field Guide this week, and started working on it. I can’t really make use of a lot of the stuff he does there, since our setups and use cases are fairly different. But I’m getting some ideas from it, and trying out a few things.

One idea I’m starting to like: using my Obsidian vault as a kind of “home base” for Claude Cowork. I added a fairly simple CLAUDE.md to the vault recently, and I have some ideas for skills I can add, and stuff I can do, with it.

First up will be adding Kepano’s Obsidian skills, I think. That seems like a pretty straightforward thing to do. (Of course, I’m trying to do it now, and hitting some issues, but I’m sure I’ll get it right eventually.)

I’m stumbling through stuff I can do with various plugins, MCPs, experimental features, and so on. There’s a lot of stuff that’s almost there, but not quite. Or it’s there, but not in the way I want it to be. For instance, it would be useful if Claude could control Firefox. There’s a Claude in Chrome extension, but no equivalent Firefox extension. I’ve found that the Chrome extension works in Microsoft Edge, and I have Edge, of course, so I enabled it there and tried it out. Short version: it works, but it doesn’t work on every site, and it doesn’t always work right, so I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort at this point.

And it would be great if Claude could read and write to my Fastmail account. (I have some ideas about using it to help me clean up and manage my email.) So Claude has GMail integration, but no generic IMAP/JMAP integration or specific Fastmail integration. There’s more than one third-party Fastmail MCP project, so I could try one of those, but I don’t have the time to do that right now.

Similarly, it would be useful if Claude could plug in to my iCloud contacts and calendar, but that’s not easy either. I did set up a BusyCal integration on my Mac, and that’s cool, but of course it only works on my Mac and not my PC (or my iPhone or iPad).

So, at this point, I need to zero in on one or two things to concentrate on, and make some progress on. Right now, I should probably sign off and relax. The Phillies game is about to start. ⚾

 

more fun with Claude

OK, one more post about Claude: I took some time last week to play around with the idea of using Claude to analyze my Goodreads library. I started out by exporting my Goodreads library to a CSV file. Then, I started a new “project” in Claude, and attached the CSV.

I got some interesting visualizations out of that, including reading volume per year, distribution of my star ratings, and stuff like that. Nothing I couldn’t have gotten out of Excel, if I opened the CSV there and poked around a bit, but it was a lot easier than if I’d tried to do it the “old-fashioned way.”

Next, I asked it to go a bit beyond the data in the CSV file, and tell me how many of the books on my “to read” shelf were fiction vs. non-fiction. That’s not in the CSV, so it used “a smart heuristic approach” to do that. I have no idea what it actually did there, but it seems to have done a reasonable job.

It then broke the non-fiction down into categories like tech, history, business, and so on. Then, I asked it some questions about those books, like which of the tech books were outdated and should be discarded. Stuff like that. I used it to help me zero in on a few non-fiction books I’d like to read that have been gathering (virtual) dust in my Kindle library too long.

By putting this in a project, I can come back to it and ask it more questions whenever I want to, and I can upload newer versions of the CSV to update its working data. So that’s all pretty interesting and fun.

The other thing I did recently with a Claude project was to upload some tax documents and Merrill statements and ask it some questions about them. I’ve always been very leery about giving any kind of AI access to financial documents, but I decided to give in and give it a try. (YOLO, as the kids say.) Again, I got some interesting data and ideas out of it. Obviously, I’m not trusting Claude for tax advice, but it did a good job of analyzing some stuff and surfacing some things that I need to think about. I’m not sure if I’m going to do much more with this, but it would be interesting to upload my Merrill statement every month and ask Claude to summarize it for me and highlight important info.  My Merrill statements are typically 30-40 pages long, so I don’t ever have time to read them thoroughly.

I guess I’m gradually dragging myself into the modern age of AI. At work, we’re going to need to start learning Palantir Foundry pretty soon, and that’s pretty scary!

Love & Rockets & Claude

Today, I bought a fairly large Humble Bundle of Love & Rockets comics. I then tried using Claude to help me download and organize the bundle, with mixed success. So I thought this would be a good topic for a blog post, since it allows me to talk about my two favorite things at once: comic books and tech.

Love & Rockets

I’ve been reading Love & Rockets, on and off, since the early eighties. I’m pretty sure the first I issue I bought was #2, from 1983. I think I have most of that original run, through to issue 50. (That was magazine zine, in black and white.) I think I also have the first ten or so trade paperbacks, from the original run of those. After that, things get a little fuzzy. Here’s a bibliography from 2021 and a How to Read Love and Rockets article that was last updated in 2024, both from the Fantagraphics site. I think I probably have all of the volume 2 run (comic-book size, early 2000s). I think I have all of the New Stories run in my Comixology library. (That one was done in a larger “book” format, rather than the magazine/comic format of the earlier volumes.) And I didn’t have any of the current volume 4 run, which I think is back in the original b&w magazine format.

And, in terms of what I’ve actually read, I know I’ve read all of the volume 1 run, either in the original format or the collections (and probably both, for the earlier issues). And I’m pretty sure I’ve read all of volume 2, in the original comics format. I haven’t ready any of the volume 3 (New Stories) stuff yet. Which is why I haven’t bothered buying any of volume 4.

The Humble Bundle includes 57 items, and as usual with Humble, they don’t really do any of the organizational work for you. After getting some help from Claude (more on that later), I see that it has 15 volumes of the L&R library. That might be the whole series to date. It also has 17 issues of volume 4, which is probably all of that to date too. And then it has… a bunch of other stuff. The Hernandez brothers have done so much work over the years, and it’s appeared in some many different formats, it’s really hard to figure out what you’ve read and what you haven’t, past a certain point. But, just from a reading perspective, for me, I now have all of volume 4 in a DRM-free format that I can read whenever I want, so that’s a big win. And I think I probably now have most (or all?) of volumes 1, 2, and 3 in the L&R library volumes, so that’s convenient.

Claude Cowork

So where does Claude come in? I thought there might be a few things it could help me with:

  1. Humble doesn’t give you a simple text-format list of the items in your bundle. In the past, I’d copy and paste the text from the bundle page into Notepad++, then do a bunch of frenzied deletion until I wound up with a simple list. So I thought Claude might help there.
  2. Downloading all of the items in a bundle is always a pain. There’s are various ways to help out with that, but I had some hope that maybe I could just point Claude at the download page and say “grab all this stuff for me.”
  3. After downloading the stuff, I usually spend some time renaming files and organizing stuff into sub-folders. I thought Claude might help with that too.

So here’s my actual experience with all that, starting with the simple task of trying to get a plain-text list of the books in the bundle. First, I tried giving Claude the URL to the main (public) web page for the bundle, and asking it to scrape the list of books are reformat it for me. That didn’t work, as apparently Claude is blocked from browsing the Humble site. (Looking at their robots.txt file, I guess that makes sense, and I appreciate Anthropic/Claude for respecting that.) So I then copied the text from the page myself, pasted it into Claude, and asked it to make me a list of the books. It did a good job of that, so that was one thing done.

In terms of trying to get Claude to help me download the books, that was a bust. I tried getting Claude Cowork to do it for me, but again there was the robots.txt exception. It did then generate a Python script for me that should have allowed me to download the books, but (long story short), I couldn’t get it working. So I gave up and used the “bulk download” option on the Humble download page, which succeeded in downloading most (but not all) of the files. So I then asked Cowork to look at the downloaded files, and the list it had made for me, and tell me which ones I’d missed. And it did a good job of that! So that saved a little time.

So then, having all 57 items in a single folder, I talked Cowork through doing a few things for me. First, I created a Markdown file in the folder with the list it had generated. I asked it to go out to the web and create a revised list, categorizing the various books in the bundle into groups, and adding publication date and some other summary info. It did a pretty awesome job there, creating a well-formatted Markdown file with headings and tables, separating the Jaime volumes from the Gilbert volumes, filling in publication dates, and including short summaries of what’s in each volume. I then also had it rename the files to look nicer, e.g. “pennycentury.pdf” to “Penny Century.pdf”. It did a really good job with that too. I also had it separate out all of the L&R library volumes into a sub-folder, and put the volume number at the start, so “Penny Century.pdf” became “08 Penny Century.pdf”. I did a bit more fiddling around there, and now I have a pretty well-organized collection of books, where I know which ones are which, rather than just 57 badly-named PDF files.

So that’s all pretty cool. I asked it to do one more thing for me, and that didn’t work out too well. One of the files was, for no particular reason, an EPUB instead of a PDF, so I asked Cowork to convert it into a PDF. It took a lot of spinning to get there, but it eventually did. But the resulting PDF was basically unusable. I may come back to that at some point, since I have other EPUBs that would work better as PDFs or CBZs, and I’ve done some work on that already. (I don’t think I’ve ever written a post about that. Maybe I will, when I get back to it.)

So, at the end of the day, I think I have a better idea about stuff where Claude Cowork can help me out, and stuff where it’s going to be mostly useless. I think I might point it at some of the other stuff I’ve downloaded from Humble over the years, and let it clean up and organize some files, in cases where I haven’t gotten around to it. And also ask it to create a nice summary Markdown file, the way I did here.

Future possibilities

There’s one other thing that would be useful, but that I haven’t tried. It would be great to have a way to automate getting all of the books added to my Goodreads account, and tagged appropriately. It would also be cool to have it create a Goodreads list with all of the books. But I’m about 99% sure that Claude won’t be able to automate that. If it can’t even read the Humble pages, I really doubt it’ll do work on the Goodreads site for me. I could probably mess around with it, but I’m not sure it’s worth it. I know there’s a Claude add-in for Chrome that can do some interesting stuff, but I use Firefox, and I don’t want to have to go through setting up Chrome right now. I could also try one of the fancy new AI browser tools, like Dia or Comet or something, but I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole right now either.

Maybe I could get Claude to create a CSV file that I could import into Goodreads. Hmm, that might be worth trying. But maybe not today. It’s fairly warm out today, so I should probably go out for another walk, and stop wasting time in front of the computer.

Dracula Pro

I’m one of those weirdos who experiments with fonts and color schemes and application themes more than I probably should. For the most part, I do actually stick with some sensible defaults, but I keep coming back to it and messing around. Sometimes, this is just a way to procrastinate and avoid real work. But I think there’s a fine line between procrastination and “sharpening the saw.” My eyesight is bad enough at this point that even a small improvement in legibility can help me out a lot.

So this week, for some reason, I got on a “playing with themes” kick again. I’m not even sure what kicked it off. But my focus this week was the Dracula theme. The basic free version is available for quite a few apps! I first started using it with git bash, the version of bash that comes with Git for Windows. That was quite some time ago. Dracula was included with the default themes there, and it was easier on my eyes than any of the other defaults. I’ve seen it included here and there with other apps, but hadn’t paid much attention to it.

But, again, something drew my attention to it this week, and I got curious about the paid Dracula Pro version. It costs $80, which seems like a lot just for a pack of themes, but they throw in some other stuff too. After some dithering, I decided to go ahead and pay for it. I haven’t seen a lot of reviews of it, so I thought I’d write one up here.

I’m not specifically a “dark theme” or a “light theme” guy. I lean more towards light themes, so paying for a pack of mostly dark themes doesn’t really make much sense for me, but I found Dracula to be more usable than most other dark themes, so I thought I’d give the Pro version a try.

After you pay for it, you’re directed to a Gumroad page where you can download a zip file. It’s a big 750 MB file, which surprised me a bit. Most of that space (about 600 GB) is the audiobook version of the creator’s book, 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. I think maybe they should have put that in a separate zip file, but I guess it was simpler this way.

I’ll walk through the contents of the zip file here, with some comments on what I’ve tried so far.

  • As mentioned above, there’s a content folder with copies of the ebook and audiobook for 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. The ebook is available in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. EPUB and MOBI versions are included for each. The audiobook is available in English and Portuguese, in MP3 format. I haven’t tried reading/listening to any of it yet, but I did copy the EPUB to my Kobo. I’ll probably compress the MP3s into a single M4B file and copy it over to my iPhone at some point too.
  • Next, there’s a design folder, with some info about the color palettes that I guess would be useful if you were designing a theme for a new app and wanted to use the Dracula Pro palette.
  • There’s a fonts folder, with five fonts, all of which are already available for free. So it’s useful to have them all together in one place, but it doesn’t add any value really. The fonts are Cascadia Code, Fira Code, Inconsolata, JetBrains Mono, and Victor Mono.
  • There’s an icons folder, with custom icons for a bunch of different applications. I don’t see much point in messing around with icons. I guess some people like doing that, but to me, it seems like a lot of work for little gain.
  • Then there’s the themes folder, which is basically what you’re paying for. It includes themes for 21 different apps. I’ll get into some details on that below.
  • And last is the wallpapers folder. There are a bunch of files here, but they’re all basically the same wallpaper design just in different sizes/resolutions, and with slightly different color combos.
  • I should mention that the description of Dracula Pro says that it comes with a “bonus screencast,” but I don’t see that in the zip file, or any reference to it in the email receipt.
  • I’d also mention that the description on the website says “Your license covers multiple computers with activation on up to 3 devices.” Based on that wording, I was a little worried that there would be some kind of half-assed activation software included with the package, but there isn’t. (Not that it would even be possible to enforce that for most of this stuff, but I’m glad they didn’t try.)

So that’s a bunch of stuff, and it’s well-organized, but it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth $80 or not.

There are seven variants of the theme, six dark and one light. The main dark theme is called Dracula Pro. The light theme is called Alucard. the rest of the themes are all named after various vampire-adjacent characters (Buffy, Blade, Morbius, etc). It’s cute. So far, I’ve only messed with Dracula Pro and Alucard. The other dark themes seem to be minor variations on the main Dracula Pro theme.

Here’s what I’ve tried out, and what’s worked for me and what hasn’t:

  • I’ve applied the Visual Studio Code theme on my home and work computers. It’s distributed as a .VSIX file. (The free Dracula theme is also a .VSIX file, available in the VS Code extension marketplace.) Since the Pro VSIX file isn’t freely available, it’s not in the Marketplace and needs to be installed manually. And it won’t sync between computers like the Marketplace extensions will. So that’s a bit of a pain, but not a big deal. It’s working well for me, and I think I’ve going to stick with it.
  • There are no themes in the pack for the regular Visual Studio product, which was a bit of a disappointment. The free Dracula theme is available in the VS Marketplace (here), so I’m not sure why they didn’t create a variant for the paid theme. Honestly, though, for VS 2026, the “Cool Breeze” theme (one of the included default themes) seems to work really well for me, so I’m sticking with that anyway.
  • On my Mac, I tried the Dracula Pro and Alucard themes for the Mac Terminal app.  Both are fine, but I don’t do that much work in Terminal on the Mac, and was happy enough with the default theme.
  • For Windows Terminal, I imported the Dracula Pro theme, and I’ve decided to use that as my new default for git bash and Ubuntu tabs, but I’m leaving the PowerShell default as-is (the “Campbell” theme), since I think Dracula Pro doesn’t work as well with PowerShell.
  • I tried Dracula Pro and Alucard in Notepad++, but have had some issues there. I won’t get into details here, but I might not bother going further with that. (Or I might, if I get bored and want to mess around with XML files for a while…)
  • There’s not much else in the way of themes that I want to try. My main text editing environments at this point are Visual Studio, VS Code, Notepad++, and Dynamics AX 2012, which isn’t customizable at all. Terminal windows, for me, are mostly through Windows Terminal and sometimes Mac Terminal.app. So this is covering most of my bases.

As to fonts, I’ve been reviewing my font settings too, and for now, I’m trying to standardize on Cascadia Code. I was already using that for a lot of stuff anyway.

So that’s my review of Dracula Pro. Was it worth $80? Is it that much better than the free version? I don’t know. But it was a good opportunity to review all of my font and color settings and try to make things a little better, so I don’t regret it.

movie and TV complaints

I have a note in Obsidian (originally from Evernote) that I wrote up in 2022, with some links I was going to use to support a blog post I was going to write, complaining about various issues with modern movies and TV. And I never got around to writing it. I was looking at it today, and was going to just move it from my inbox to my archive folder, but decided that actually writing the post might be more fun than starting on my taxes. So here we are. (And yes, I actually had the note sitting at the bottom of my inbox folder for four years.)

Now, plenty of other people have pointed out the stuff that’s bothering me, so this post is mostly just going to be a collection of links. If I’d actually gotten around to writing it in 2022, it might have been more detailed.

My first point of contention is sound. I find myself turning on subtitles a lot lately. Now, I’m fairly old and have a fair degree of hearing loss, so some of that is just me. But some of it is not. I don’t generally need subtitles for Tom Baker era Doctor Who, or old episodes of Murder She Wrote.

Here’s my first link: Here’s Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It). This is actually a pretty detailed article, and I don’t have much to add to it.

Next link: Why We All Need Subtitles Now. (Not much new there, but still interesting.)

Next complaint: picture. Everything is way too dark these days. I’ve actually given up on a few TV shows and movies, just because the picture was too dark and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I can fix the audio problem by turning on subtitles, but there’s usually no good way to fix this problem.

I just recently finished watching the last few episodes of Stranger Things, on Netflix. While I loved the show, this last season has gotten a little too dark at times. John Oliver called this out briefly on Last Week Tonight: “Loved The Ending Of ‘Stranger Things,’ By The Way — Very Brown.” (And that reminds me: I need to read some of the articles I bookmarked about the Stranger Things finale, now that I’ve watched it, including this one by Linda Holmes from NPR.)

Anyway, here are a couple of articles I saved about this:

And the last complaint for today: length. Movies are all too long these days! I only have one link for that one: Why Are Movies So Long Now?

I worked my way through the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies a while ago, and they where glorious: None of them are over 90 minutes, and most of them are closer to 60 than 90. The dialog is perfectly understandable, and the picture is great. (Assuming you’re watching the restored versions. If you’re watching a random version on YouTube, you might be getting a good version or a crappy one.)

So now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I can finally move that note to the archive folder, and get on with my day. (Though I might still try to avoid starting on my taxes for a while longer.)