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  First birdsign in the bird house!

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  Tired of morning doomscrolling? I built Firstlight, a self-hosted app that prints a one-page morning briefing before you wake up. Just weather, calendar, sports scores, news, and to-dos. A calmer default than reaching for my phone at 6AM. https://cruftbox.com/2026/05/18/firstlight-you-cant-doomscroll-a-piece-of-paper/

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  Timelapse video of me replacing the CMOS battery and doing the "100Ω fix" on a QNAP TS-451+ https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-ARCv4aBJ4Q

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  My friend Matt turned me on to Mealie, a self-hosted app where you can keep and manage your recipes. It can scrape the web for most recipes. It doesn't directly import text or word files. Most of my family recipes are these kind of files. Made a small Python script that converts those files to the proper JSON format for mealie to consume. It uses Claude for the conversion. Repo: https://github.com/cruftbox/mealie-convert

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  Made babyback ribs today

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  How to make babyback ribs https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fz83TO3_ZmM

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  Why you are buying into the SpaceX IPO whether you like it or not https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X6YzlY_8tM

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  My friend @mathowie analyzed 26 years of his blog. I gave it a shot on the old and venerable Cruftbox. Turns out 27 years of my blogging can be distilled into a few charts and some uncomfortable truths about my posting habits. https://cruftbox.com/2026/05/01/cruftbox-archive-analysis/

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  My current theory is that crows are the creatures running the simulation we live in.

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  Sunday morning

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  Fresh beeswax

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  Adventures in beekeeping: Turned old honeycomb and cappings into clean refined beeswax. Here's how I do it. 🐝 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s311HSDO8qo

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  An idea while walking the dog turned into a working app before lunch. I used Claude to recreate the Matrix digital rain in my Windows Terminal. Creating on a whim still feels like magic. https://cruftbox.com/2026/05/03/phosphor-matrix-style-digital-rain/

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  Many people don't realize that drying laundry or streaming media consumes orders of magnitude more electricity than using an LLM. We all have different ideas about 'acceptable' energy use. Usually, it's 'waste' if you don't like it and 'necessity' if you do. I'll take the GPU cycles. Most of us aren't Amish.

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  The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. - Winston Churchill

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  Adventures in beekeeping: I tried using IKEA PÄRKLA storage cases to hold bee hive boxes. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0y_kqKL5rjQ

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  Did a last little bit of beeswax refining in the mini melter I use to make candles.

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  Adventures in beekeeping: The Yellow Hive got robbed out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um6qFHi94_I

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  My brother Matt wrote a good post about "The Curious George Effect" https://mattpusateri.substack.com/p/donald-trump-and-the-curious-george

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  Cynicism, to me, is trying to make people as unhappy as you are. - Ricky Gervais

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  I got tired of waiting for Goodreads' year-end recap, so I built my own. Year in Books pulls your last 12 months of reading any time you want and spits out a stats in various formats. https://cruftbox.com/2026/05/11/year-in-books-goodreads-tool/

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  Adventures in beekeeping: Trapping Small Hive Beetles in Diatomaceous Earth https://www.youtube.com/shorts/useCn_Dar3w

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  There's a game out there, and the stakes are high. And the guy who runs it figures the averages all day long and all night long. Once in a while he lets you steal a pot. But if you stay in the game long enough, you've got to lose. And once you've lost there's no way back, no way at all. - Dalton Trumbo

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  This Is Just To Say I am visiting Beijing while the war keeps burning and which probably doesn’t make any sense forgive me I needed everyone looking elsewhere

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  Stop doomscrolling

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  I wanted to attract birds to my new birdhouse, so I 3D printed a bird feeder and put some dried mealworms in it. Fingers crossed.

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  We have a few ceiling fans that are Bluetooth controlled, but not smart home aware. Leaping into the void, I got Alexa to control it via an elaborate path that involved spinning up Home Assistant and using a Bluetooth proxy. Not for the faint of heart. I deserve a merit badge for this.

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  Current Status

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  Making a batch of antifa super-soldier serum

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  For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition;