Personal Software

I built TransLee for my own family, using the same Gemini Live API that Google publishes starter code for. That raises an obvious question I hadn’t actually answered yet: does something like this already exist, built by someone else, that I could have just used? So I searched GitHub for it. What’s Already Out There A few projects showed up using the same Gemini Live API for translation: kazunori279/live-translator — three modes: an agent mode, a simultaneous-translation mode, and a conversation mode for two people talking to each other. Built by a Google Cloud developer relations engineer. google-gemini/gemini-live-translate-livekit and livekit-examples/gemini-live-translate — official Google examples for broadcasting one speaker’s voice to many listeners, each hearing their own language, built on LiveKit. kazunori279/adk-live-translator, noodleA1/live_translation, folubebe/gemini_realtime_speech_to_text — smaller projects, closer to learning exercises than finished apps. The Feature I Thought Was Unique, Wasn’t TransLee has a “translated voice” checkbox for its conversation mode. Check it before you speak, and your Korean gets translated and spoken out loud in whatever language you picked, so you can take part in a meeting in a language you don’t speak. I wrote about how that checkbox came to be in an earlier post in this series — it took fourteen discarded attempts at automatic detection before I realized the checkbox already did the job. ...

I’m a 60-year-old dad with no coding background. Before I try a new tool, I usually spend a day just reading about it. I didn’t do that with Claude Code. I opened it and started building right away, adding small amounts of credit whenever I ran low. Add up all those small payments, and the first month cost about $75. Two Doors, and I Walked Through the Wrong One I didn’t know Anthropic has two completely separate ways to pay for Claude Code. ...

Rewriting an app from scratch forces a question you don’t usually have to ask: of everything the old version did, what actually deserves to exist in the new one? What Survived Session saving. Every translated conversation gets stored so I can look back at what was actually said. The old app also had a meeting-minutes mode, hiding the translation, enlarging the transcript, and alternating the background color for each recording segment so a long meeting stayed readable instead of turning into one wall of text. That mode carried over into the new web app unchanged in spirit, just triggered by a CSS class instead of a native screen. ...

The Korean tagline I wrote for the original Play Store listing translates roughly to: “Even a whisper gets translated, reading YouTube by ear.” It was a promise about one specific feature, not a slogan I picked for how it sounded. What “Listening to Its Own Speaker” Actually Means Most translation apps expect you to talk into them, or hold them up to someone else talking. TransLee has always done something slightly different: it can also just sit next to whatever sound is already in the room, a phone playing a YouTube video, a TV, a radio, and translate that sound live, without any screen-sharing or app integration on the source side. ...

This is the map. If you’ve followed the series, this ties the pieces together. If you’re starting here, this is the whole system in one view — how my daughter’s photos and videos get from two phones to my eighty-seven-year-old mother’s tablet, sorted by month, for nothing per month. The Whole Pipeline [Dad's phone] [Mom's phone] | | Synology Drive auto-backup (over the internet) | | v v [ Home NAS: two backup folders ] <- never edited | hourly check copies NEW files (skips anything already handled) v [ Working folder: the "cutting board" ] | I open a browser gallery and pick the keepers v [ One "Import" button ] - convert videos to H.264 720p (ffmpeg) - resize photos - file into Year / Month by the file's date v [ Growth archive on the NAS ] | served over a free Cloudflare tunnel v [ Kids Player app -> "My Records" tab ] - tap a month - videos play continuously - photos drift by, gently zooming v [ Grandmother's tablet. Daughter's tablet. ] Every arrow except one is automatic. The single human step is “pick the keepers,” and it takes about a minute a day. ...

A perfectly sorted archive is worthless if the people it’s for can’t watch it. My two viewers are an eighty-seven-year-old and a two-year-old. Between them, they can’t manage menus, can’t type, and won’t tap through a playlist. So the watching part had to be as close to zero-effort as I could make it. The rule I designed to was simple: pick a month, then sit back. Everything after that first tap should happen on its own. ...

Here’s a problem that sounds harder than it is. New files arrive on the cutting board every hour. I sort them in passes, over several days. The automatic check keeps copying. So how does the same photo never get imported twice? No database. One small ledger, plus a cheap shortcut, do the whole job. The Ledger Does the Real Work When the hourly check copies a file onto the cutting board, it writes one line in a small record — a plain text ledger I’ve been calling R throughout this series. ...

There’s no database behind my daughter’s archive. No table of photos, no index, no metadata store. When the app needs to know what’s in “July 2026,” it opens the July 2026 folder and looks. That sounds lazy. I’d argue it’s the opposite — it’s the one decision that keeps the whole system simple enough for one person to maintain. How It’s Organized The archive is just folders on the NAS: ...

By this point in the pipeline, the boring parts are done. New files have been copied to the cutting board. I’ve picked out the ones that are my daughter. What’s left is the step that turns “a pile of selected files” into “a browsable month in her archive.” That’s one button. By now the picker has already moved my chosen files into a hand-off folder. In the app’s My Records tab, there’s a count of what’s waiting in that folder, and next to it a button that says, in effect, bring these in. I press it, and the rest happens on its own. ...

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. ...