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. ⚾