Claude Code

The Need: you cannot judge an AI job without a price tag When I start a new AI job, I always ask the same question first: what will this cost? A job can look cheap on paper and then run for hours. Or it can look scary and cost a few cents. This week I used one DeepSeek balance for four different jobs on my family book library. I wrote down the balance after each one. This post is that list, plus what I would do differently. ...

I have two PCs and I use Claude Code on both. I wanted the second one to keep the same prompt diary as the first. I could have copied files by hand. Instead I asked Claude Code to write down, in one file, what the other PC’s Claude Code should do. Then I gave that file to it. This post explains the hook and the request file. The hook is now running on the other PC, and the last section lists what I still have not checked. ...

The Need: it works, but it looks like a prototype I am a 60-year-old non-programmer. Claude Code can build what I describe, but I cannot describe what a good e-book reader looks like. I know it when I see it on a store-bought reader app. I do not know the words: line breaks, tap zones, running heads, safe areas. My viewer worked. It also looked rough. The text broke in the middle of Korean words, the cover needed scrolling, and there was no page-turn mode. ...

The Need: a book you can read on a phone I had translated six old commentary volumes into Korean with an API. The first thing I made from one of them was a print-style PDF, and then a page-image viewer: 301 JPG files, 48 MB, one image per page. It looked fine on a tablet. On a phone held upright, the letters were tiny. Pinch-zooming a page image is not reading. ...

The Need: a big pile of old books, as plain text, on your own disk Maybe you want a private source of classic books for your own projects. Maybe you just don’t want your reading to depend on someone else’s website. Either way, the same question comes up: how big is it, and will it fit on my NAS? For one public-domain library, the answer was 28.1 GiB for 78,990 plain-text files. That fits on a home NAS with room to spare. This post shows the numbers, the commands, and the checks I ran afterwards. ...

I bought some picture books for my three-year-old on a Korean secondhand marketplace app. The seller added 19 English board books for free, as a bonus. I said thank you, took them home, and put them on a shelf. I had no idea how to use them, and she was too young for English anyway. That was a few months ago. This post is about how those books went from a shelf to a tab in her media player, and about the one thing that made it possible: I let the AI look at the books before I decided anything. ...

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?” ...

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 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. ...