Real apps for real life. Built at home, hosted for $0.

I have a custom command called /wrap. When I finish a work session, I type it. It commits the code, writes down what changed, and makes a backup zip on my NAS. I use it many times a day, across a dozen projects. This week I looked at my token usage data. One line stood out: /wrap was 30% of everything I spent. The Need: The Cheap-Looking Thing Was the Expensive Thing If you use Claude Code with a subscription, your allowance runs out before the week does. Mine did. So I stopped asking “what can I build next?” and started asking “where are my tokens going?” ...

Two weeks ago I wrote about adding voice commands to my daughter’s media player, so a parent in the car can say “[tab name] [song title]” instead of scrolling a phone screen while driving. In that post I said a few tabs were left out on purpose. One of them was a math picture-book tab: 42 books, each with a story audio track and a song. At the time, the reason sounded sensible. The reason didn’t hold up for long. ...

This is a follow-up to turning sermon transcripts into a book of verses worth memorizing. That post ended with one finished booklet and an honest worry: would the same script hold up across many more? Two weeks later I had ten booklets, and a new problem. They needed proofreading, and I wanted to hold the result in my hands as one real book. The Need: Proofreading Is Easier With a Pen Each booklet is built from a plain-text file. In theory, fixing a typo means opening the text file, finding the sentence, and editing it. In practice, I don’t notice mistakes in a text editor. I notice them when I read the finished page, the same way I’d read a printed book. And I don’t only want to fix typos. I want to say “underline this sentence, it’s the heart of the sermon,” or “this whole entry doesn’t belong, take it out,” or “move this paragraph to the end of the previous entry.” ...

If you keep an archive long enough, the same thing ends up in it twice. The copies rarely have the same name. They are hard to spot by eye, and even harder once one copy has a transcript and the other doesn’t. The Need: Two Copies That Don’t Look Like Copies I run a small, password-protected site at home for one teacher’s recorded lectures. Each episode has audio, video, and (for most of them) a searchable transcript. It lives on my NAS and is sorted into year tabs. ...

I have a small side project that turns pictures into coloring pages my daughter can print and color with crayons — nine of them so far, kept in one page she can browse and pick from. In an earlier post about this same project, I mentioned I was starting to wonder whether writing my own small script would beat leaning on general-purpose AI image tools for this one narrow job — turning an already-outlined picture into a clean, coloring-book-ready outline. It did. That script has been quietly converting one picture after another since. Last week it hit the first source image its original assumptions couldn’t handle, and fixing it properly meant editing the script’s rules, not just running it once with different numbers. ...

I did something like this once already, turning scanned sermon pages into a searchable PDF. That project made an existing book easier to search. This one is different: I’m not searching a book, I’m deciding what belongs in one — turning years of sermon transcripts into a small printed booklet of verses worth memorizing. The Need: A Sermon Doesn’t Split Cleanly Into Verses I have transcripts of a few hundred sermons from a pastor whose talks I’ve been transcribing and correcting for years, and I wanted to turn them into a different kind of book: not a record of what was said, but a short list of verses worth carrying around in your head. The reason is a familiar one to anyone who grew up in church — a verse you’ve actually memorized becomes the sword of the Spirit, something to meditate on, something to reach for when you’re tempted. A verse you’d have to go look up doesn’t work the same way. ...

My podcast app has one job: every morning at 6 AM, it pulls the newest talks from one lecturer’s feed — AI and Christian-missions topics, mixed — downloads the audio, and adds it to a list I browse and play from my phone. Six hundred-some episodes now, sorted by category, searchable by title. It does that one job well. Then I found a novel online I wanted narrated into it, and there was no button for that. ...

My daughter’s media player has several tabs now — a general folder of nursery rhymes, hymns, classical pieces and kids’ pop songs; a folder of folk songs I made pictures for myself; a Bible-verse song folder; and a couple of separately purchased audiobook and story collections. On her own device, she picks what she wants by tapping a cover picture, the same as always. That device is Wi-Fi only, though, and it stays home — it isn’t a phone with its own data plan, so it never comes along in the car. The problem was everywhere outside our own Wi-Fi. ...

My daughter’s nursery-rhyme tab gives every song a picture instead of a title, so she can tap a cover without reading a word she doesn’t know yet. Most of those pictures are AI-drawn. Last week I swapped one of them for a plain photo — acorns I’d picked up on a hike that same afternoon — and she noticed before I said anything about it. The Need: A Picture Has to Match Something She Knows This tab works the way I’ve written about before: one still picture per song, tap it, hear it. No scrolling list of titles she can’t read. For most songs, an AI-drawn illustration is enough — a frog on a lily pad, a rabbit under the moon. She matches the picture to a song she already half-remembers from bedtime. ...

I have access to a university library, so I can pull almost any academic paper I want. What I don’t have is a way to know which ones are worth pulling. So I asked Claude Code to help me build a small site that checks a handful of research fields every morning and shows me the papers that are actually generating buzz that day, not just the ones that happen to match a keyword search. ...