Personal Software

Four parts in, the pictures existed, the tool worked, and the questions I’d been carrying about copyright were settled. This last part is about what actually happened once my daughter got her hands on it. Once the song tab had pictures, did she actually use it the way you hoped? More than I hoped, honestly. Tapping through pictures to find “her” song became a favorite activity on its own — separate from actually listening to anything. She’d flip through several before settling on one, the same way she flips through book covers on the other tabs. ...

Part three was about the tools that actually made the pictures. This part is shorter, and it’s less about code than about a decision I made along the way. The Kids Player has always been private — your family, your NAS, a password on every new device. So copyright wasn’t really the issue here? Right, and I should be clear about that up front. Because it’s a private, password-gated app for my own family, I could have reused existing footage — a frame grabbed from a video of the song — the same way I already do for the audio side of the library. Nothing about that would have been a legal problem for a personal app like this. ...

Part two covered the tool Claude and I built to manage lyrics and images per song. This part is about the actual picture-making — which took more trial and error than the tool itself did. You’d never really used AI image generators before this. What changed? Nothing had needed one. I’d poked at a couple out of curiosity, the way most people have, but nothing in my daily life depended on a generated image. Once I decided the song tab genuinely needed one picture per song — good enough that my daughter would want to look at it — that curiosity turned into something I had to get right. ...

Part one was about why the song tab needed pictures at all. This part is about what I actually typed to get there — and why I didn’t know the answer myself before I typed it. You knew what you wanted. Why not just plan the build yourself first? Because I genuinely didn’t know how. I’m not a developer. I know what I want the result to feel like — my daughter looks at a picture, taps it, hears a song — but I have no instinct for how that should be structured underneath. So I stopped trying to design it and just described the situation to Claude instead, the way I’d describe it to another parent, not to an engineer. ...

I want to explain how the song tab in my Kids Player came together — not just the build, but the reasons behind it. Some of those reasons are more about parenting than about code, and I found it easier to lay them out as straight questions and answers instead of one long story. This is part one of five. Your daughter can’t read yet. How does she use an app that’s mostly lists and menus? ...

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. ...