Notes & essays
Thoughts on software, strategy, and personal finance.
Proximity Watch: A Lock for When I Walk Away
I built Proximity Watch in under 20 minutes, a free menu bar app that locks my Mac when my Apple Watch walks away. The bigger story is how cheap it has become to fix small things yourself.
I Traded a Streaming Subscription for a Pro AI Account, and I'd Do It Again
Cancel one streaming service you barely watch and point that same twenty bucks a month at a pro AI account. Same money, a lot more back.
The Why of AI (Part 3 of the How and Why of AI)
Why AI is worth your time: it meets you where you actually learn and more.
Christmas Cards, Dirtbikes, and the Oracle of Omaha (Part 2 of the How and Why of AI)
I fed three real photos into Google Gemini's Nano Banana image model and had it build a Christmas card of me, Warren Buffett, and my dog, then a shot of us riding dirtbikes in ugly sweaters. It is impressively realistic and a lot of fun.
How to Try AI (Part 1 of the How and Why of AI)
The easy, free, low-risk way to actually start using AI: pick a free model, use a temporary chat, and hand it something annoying to explain, like a wall of legalese.
Mo the Milk Cow, and the Hardest-Working People I Know
Eight years with a family dairy cow named Mo, riding along on my dad's vet calls, and the show-up-every-single-day commitment those farmers taught me.
MouseyHot: I Built a Second App So I Could Feed the First One
Right after the screenshot app, I built a second one: MouseyHot maps my mouse's ignored buttons to keyboard shortcuts, natively in Swift. When building gets cheap enough, the math changes.
The Scooter That Owned Me
A $60 part fixed the boys' broken scooter, but the real cost was 20 hours of my summer. What our purchases quietly take from us.
I Built a Gravity-Fed Waterer for Our Chickens (and Learned a Few Things the Hard Way)
A cheap, kid-friendly, gravity-fed chicken waterer built from a 5-gallon bucket, plus two lessons learned the hard way.
I Built My First App, and It Finds Any Screenshot I've Ever Taken
I built my first app in a day: a private tool that OCRs every screenshot so you can search them by any text. The real story is how AI turned a wall into a doorway.
Why I Created This Site
The personal site waited a decade because I dreaded the upkeep. AI erased that objection, so I finally built it.
The Spreadsheet That Updates Itself
For years I updated my investment tracker by hand. So I built a pipeline that pulls the data, keeps it in one source of truth, and rebuilds the spreadsheets itself.
The Camera Button Won Me Over (Sorry, Apple Intelligence)
I upgraded for Apple Intelligence and stayed for a physical camera button. The flashy feature grabbed me; the quiet one won.
Six Apple Watches Later, I Finally Bought the Right One
Six Apple Watches in eight years, then the Ultra. A lesson in buying the right tool once instead of the long way around.