Category: AI

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. ⚾