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. ...
I scan my daughter’s picture books, page by page, so she can flip through them on a tablet the same way she flips through the paper ones. Turning a folder of page photos into something that reads like an actual book means two things: straightening out crooked, badly cropped scans, and getting the pages into the right order — cover first, then left-right spreads, back cover last. I asked Claude Code to do both. It could do both. But doing both, every time, on every new book, was burning through my usage far faster than the work seemed to justify. ...
I asked for a hunter’s pistol to become a rifle. Everything else in the picture stayed exactly the same — same animals, same background, same pose. Clean, one-item edit. A few days later I asked for two things in the same request: add a conch shell that belongs in the scene, and remove a child who shouldn’t be in it. Half the animals the song’s lyrics called for vanished. Nothing I’d asked to touch. ...
Every time I type a prompt that actually matters — one that solved a real problem or unlocked something I didn’t know how to do — I prefix it with //. That double slash is a convention I made up. It tells my Claude Code hook: this one is worth keeping. The hook saves it to a file. Eventually I want those files to feed an app that writes blog drafts automatically. That is the plan for episode 20 of this series. ...
I checked the DSM auto-block list (empty), confirmed SSH was enabled in Terminal & SNMP settings, verified the iptables startup task was running, and ran a TCP port test — ports 22, 445, and 5000 all appeared blocked. After all of that, I ran ipconfig. The PC was connected to the wrong Wi-Fi network. What Was Actually Happening I have two Wi-Fi networks at home. My NAS sits on one of them. My coding PC is supposed to be on that same network — but Windows had quietly switched it to the other one automatically. ...