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. ...
I use Claude Code every day on my main PC. It’s the tool I talk to when making apps for my family. It worked well without problems for several weeks. Then I wanted to use it on a second device. This is my daughter’s PC. Sometimes I work on her apps there. Same subscription, same account, everything was the same. I installed the VS Code extension and opened it. Then I saw this error: ...
My mother is eighty-seven. She lives in the countryside, by the Boseong River. She has never made an account for anything, never typed a password she chose herself, and she would not know what “the cloud” means. But tonight she is holding a Galaxy tablet, and on it she is watching her granddaughter — my daughter — as a newborn. Then at six months. Then last week. She taps a folder marked 2026, then July, and there is a video my wife shot this afternoon. ...
In an earlier post I described cloning an app — copying the audio player I’d built onto a tablet to give away. That was a copy: same content, same speaker, a second home. This post is about a step further. I took that same engine and pointed it at a different speaker, and then at a different kind of media — and it just worked. Each time, what should have been “build a whole new app” turned out to be “feed the engine something new.” ...
I save every prompt I type when I’m building something. I started doing it long before this blog, for a dull reason: I forget what I did, and the log helps me pick things back up. Going back through one of those logs recently, I found a session worth sharing. It’s closer to what building with AI actually feels like than a clean demo is. The demos show you the good moment. You describe what you want, and a working app appears. That does happen, and it’s real. But most of the work isn’t that. A lot of it is more like this: a task that looked easy, and an AI that got it wrong a few times before we sorted it out. ...
I thought I was done. The tablet was in his hands. The ownership was his — his domain, his account, his server. A lifetime of teaching, gathered and searchable. I’d built a legacy and given it away. The end. And then, at that very handover, the eighty-year-old man told me what was missing. There were teachings, he said, that we didn’t have — recordings that belonged in his life’s work but weren’t in our collection. He knew, because it’s his life’s work, and no one knows it better than the man who lived it. So the “finished” gift wasn’t finished. The tablet is back on my desk right now, plugged in, getting its update. On Sunday I hand it back: Version 2.0. ...
Everything in this series so far — the app, the tablet, Termux, the transcription, the search — was really the how. This post is the why. And the why is a person. He is eighty this year. For decades he has studied the Bible and explained it to others, twice a week, online, asking nothing in return. He once told his listeners that you shouldn’t walk out your front door in the morning before you read the Bible. That’s the kind of man he is. He gives people their daily bread, every day, and then steps out of the way. ...
I built an audio app once. Then I built the same app again — and the second time took an afternoon. Not because I’m fast. Because I didn’t really build it again. I cloned it. I took the thing I already had, copied it onto a different machine, pointed it at a different home, and turned it on. That sounds ordinary until you notice you can’t do it with the apps you use every day. You can’t clone Netflix onto a relative’s device. You can’t copy your Spotify and hand it to a friend. The big apps are sealed boxes you rent access to. But software you build is yours, which means you can make copies of it the way you’d copy a key. ...
My daughter is three. My phone takes about 6,000 photos and videos a year — maybe more. I don’t have 6,000 interesting shots. Most of it is accidental taps, blurry motion, seventeen near-identical photos of the same bread I was about to eat. But somewhere in that pile are the clips I actually care about: her first steps, her laughing at something she found hilarious at the time, moments my wife and I know we’ll want to see again when she’s older. ...
My phone has backed up about six thousand photos and videos from 2025 alone. On my PC, I run a local browser tool — pick_yeju.py — that lets me scroll through them, pick the ones worth keeping, and copy them into my daughter’s media library on our NAS. The files are sorted oldest-first. Six thousand of them. That’s about ninety pages at sixty per page. The problem: every time I restarted the tool, it opened at page one. I’d have to scroll back through to wherever I’d left off the previous session. Ten, twenty, thirty pages — just to find my place again. ...