Python

This is a follow-up to turning sermon transcripts into a book of verses worth memorizing. That post ended with one finished booklet and an honest worry: would the same script hold up across many more? Two weeks later I had ten booklets, and a new problem. They needed proofreading, and I wanted to hold the result in my hands as one real book. The Need: Proofreading Is Easier With a Pen Each booklet is built from a plain-text file. In theory, fixing a typo means opening the text file, finding the sentence, and editing it. In practice, I don’t notice mistakes in a text editor. I notice them when I read the finished page, the same way I’d read a printed book. And I don’t only want to fix typos. I want to say “underline this sentence, it’s the heart of the sermon,” or “this whole entry doesn’t belong, take it out,” or “move this paragraph to the end of the previous entry.” ...

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 did something like this once already, turning scanned sermon pages into a searchable PDF. That project made an existing book easier to search. This one is different: I’m not searching a book, I’m deciding what belongs in one — turning years of sermon transcripts into a small printed booklet of verses worth memorizing. The Need: A Sermon Doesn’t Split Cleanly Into Verses I have transcripts of a few hundred sermons from a pastor whose talks I’ve been transcribing and correcting for years, and I wanted to turn them into a different kind of book: not a record of what was said, but a short list of verses worth carrying around in your head. The reason is a familiar one to anyone who grew up in church — a verse you’ve actually memorized becomes the sword of the Spirit, something to meditate on, something to reach for when you’re tempted. A verse you’d have to go look up doesn’t work the same way. ...

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 did this once already for audio. Transcripts turned hundreds of hours of recordings into something you could search — type a phrase, jump straight to the moment. This time the black box wasn’t audio. It was paper. The Need: A Book You Can’t Search We have a set of printed booklets — a sermon series, scanned page by page from the original book. The content is good. The problem is the same problem the audio had before transcription: you remember there’s a page about a certain verse, but not which of the hundred-plus pages it’s on. A scanned book is just a folder of JPGs. You can look at every page, one at a time, or you can give up and guess. ...

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. ...

Here’s the plan I was sure would work: point an AI at a folder of thousands of mixed photos, give it a few pictures of my daughter, and let it pull out every photo of her automatically. No more manual sorting. It didn’t work. And the reason it didn’t work is interesting enough that I want to tell it straight, including the part where I was wrong. The Idea Face recognition is a solved problem, right? Phones do it. The plan was: ...

Everything else in this pipeline runs by itself. This is the one part that needs me: looking at the day’s new files and choosing which ones are actually my daughter, worth keeping in her archive. For that I built a small browser gallery. It shows the files waiting on the cutting board, I tap the keepers, and press a button. That’s the whole job. But a few small choices made it pleasant enough to actually use every day. ...

There’s a boring step in the middle of this pipeline, and it’s the step that used to kill the whole thing. Photos land on the NAS from two phones. Before I can sort them, someone has to copy the new ones onto the working folder — the cutting board — while skipping everything already handled. That’s dull, repetitive, and easy to forget. For two years, “I’ll copy them over later” was where the process died. ...

This is the post the whole series turns on. Everything before it is the problem; everything after it is possible because of the idea here. For two years I couldn’t sort my daughter’s photos. Not because there were too many — because I was trying to do it in the wrong place: inside the backup folder itself. Why Sorting Inside a Backup Is a Trap My phone auto-backs up to a folder on my NAS. My wife’s phone backs up to another. Those folders are my only copies of my daughter’s baby years. Naturally, I wanted to open them and pick out her best moments. ...