I’m VibePapa — 60 years old, by the Boseong River in rural Korea, with no coding background. Yet eight apps run on one small NAS in my home: worship, parenting, learning — no ads, no hosting bills. This is how I build them with AI, one small fix at a time.
Translee : A Real-Time Translator I Built on Gemini Live Translate
I put my phone next to a TV playing a Kenyan news broadcast in Swahili, low volume. My translator picked up the sound and started speaking the English translation back to me as the newscaster kept talking. No 5-second wait. No 15-second wait. The words just kept coming. It’s a Progressive Web App: open the link on a phone, add it to the home screen, and it behaves like a native app, no App Store or Play Store involved. ...
Your Phone Saves H.265. The Browser Wants H.264.
The photos were easy. The videos nearly stopped the whole project. A video of my daughter would back up to the NAS perfectly, and then, when I tried to play it in the browser, I’d get sound but no picture. Or a black rectangle. Or, for the big ones, an endless spinner while it buffered. The file was fine. It just wouldn’t play. Two separate problems were hiding here, and it took me a while to see they were separate. ...
The AI Couldn't Recognize My Own Daughter
Here’s the plan I was sure would work: point an AI at a folder of thousands of mixed photos, give it a few pictures of my daughter, and let it pull out every photo of her automatically. No more manual sorting. It didn’t work. And the reason it didn’t work is interesting enough that I want to tell it straight, including the part where I was wrong. The Idea Face recognition is a solved problem, right? Phones do it. The plan was: ...
A Browser Gallery for Choosing Which Moments to Keep
Everything else in this pipeline runs by itself. This is the one part that needs me: looking at the day’s new files and choosing which ones are actually my daughter, worth keeping in her archive. For that I built a small browser gallery. It shows the files waiting on the cutting board, I tap the keepers, and press a button. That’s the whole job. But a few small choices made it pleasant enough to actually use every day. ...
The Hourly Check That Quietly Does the Boring Part
There’s a boring step in the middle of this pipeline, and it’s the step that used to kill the whole thing. Photos land on the NAS from two phones. Before I can sort them, someone has to copy the new ones onto the working folder — the cutting board — while skipping everything already handled. That’s dull, repetitive, and easy to forget. For two years, “I’ll copy them over later” was where the process died. ...
Two Phones, One NAS: Automatic Photo Backup with Synology Drive
The whole archive starts with one simple rule: every photo either of us takes should land on our home NAS by itself, with no monthly cloud fee. Two phones, one box in the house, automatic. That’s the first stage of the pipeline. It mostly “just works” — until, one day, it quietly doesn’t. This post covers both: how to set it up, and how I noticed one phone had stopped. ...
A Photo Taken at Noon Is on Grandma's Tablet by Dinner
My wife takes a photo of our daughter at lunch. That evening, my eighty-seven-year-old mother taps 2026 → July on her tablet, and there it is. No one uploaded anything. No one shared a link. The photo just traveled, on its own, from a phone to a grandmother’s screen. This post walks the whole path and tells you honestly how long each step takes. The Path, Stage by Stage Here’s the trip a single photo makes: ...
The Cutting Board: Never Sort Photos Inside Your Backup Folder
This is the post the whole series turns on. Everything before it is the problem; everything after it is possible because of the idea here. For two years I couldn’t sort my daughter’s photos. Not because there were too many — because I was trying to do it in the wrong place: inside the backup folder itself. Why Sorting Inside a Backup Is a Trap My phone auto-backs up to a folder on my NAS. My wife’s phone backs up to another. Those folders are my only copies of my daughter’s baby years. Naturally, I wanted to open them and pick out her best moments. ...
Two Years of My Daughter's Life Sat Asleep on a Hard Drive
My daughter was born in 2024. By the time she turned two, my wife and I had taken about 10,000 photos and videos of her. Every one of them was safely backed up to my home NAS. And every one of them was, in practice, lost. Not lost like deleted. Lost like a box in the attic you keep meaning to open. The files were there — I just could never find the ones I wanted, because they were mixed in with screenshots, receipts, memes, and every other photo two adults take in two years. “Backed up” had quietly become “buried.” ...
My Daughter Would Rather Watch Herself Than Baby Shark
Give a two-year-old a tablet and you know what usually happens. A cartoon starts, then autoplay picks the next one, louder and faster, and twenty minutes later she’s somewhere you never chose. My daughter has a different first choice now. She opens her own player, taps My Records, and watches herself — as a baby, at her first birthday, on an ordinary Tuesday last month. She’ll do this for an hour. She skips the cartoons to get to it. ...