degraeve.com

Bookmark Log (Blog).

A simple bookmark log: music, videos, tools, and random notes I want to remember.

13 Feb 2026 - Claude Code is the most amazing programming tool I've ever used. I am easily 10x more effective. Possibly 100x.

1 Nov 2024 - I put together a soundtrack of background music to play in an elementary school gymnasium during a day-long, campus-wide Halloween festival. It was a mix of Lounge, Exotica, and feel-good Hawaiian steel guitar including: Pearly Shells, Honolulu March, and Maui Chimes

28 Oct 2024 - LA LOM look and sound like they were plucked from the late 50s / early 60s. They are the vibe of an August backyard barbecue catching the last rays of an LA sunset.

28 Mar 2024 - WJIB is finally streaming on the web

28 Dec 2023 - A tip for better coffee brewing I learned this year: if you use a cheap drip coffee maker like I do, pour the water in the reservoir but leave a tiny amount in the carafe. This small amount of water will prevent the first drips of coffee from being burned by the hot plate and flavoring the entire pot.

25 Dec 2023 - I have some Bluesky invite codes if you'd like to join.

9 Nov 2023 - RetinaFace is a deep learning based cutting-edge facial detector for Python with extremely accurate facial landmarks. It blows OpenCV's Haar Cascade accuracy out of the water. I used this python library to make a script to replace faces with emojis in an uploaded image.

28 Aug 2023 - There have been a few times this summer when I've needed supplemental electrolytes. Here's the recipe for making an electrolyte drink at home (DIY Gatorade): In a large drinking cup: 4 cups room temp water + 2 teaspoons of honey + 1/4 cup lemon juice + a few grinds of pink Himalayan salt. Don't worry about measuring exactly. It tastes just like Gatorade.

1 Aug 2023 - This is old news, but holy smokes: watch turntablist Destruction mix and cut and scratch

31 Jul 2023 - A basic Maze Generator was added today. This is another tool I wrote for the free puzzle newsletter that failed to gain traction. It supports taking a black and white image as input to create the shape of the maze.

24 Jul 2023 - I put some puzzle generators online today: Word Search Generator, Sudoku Generator (easy), Sudoku Generator (difficult). A few years ago I started a free weekly puzzle newsletter for teachers. Each issue contained a printable PDF of puzzles, word search, sudoku, mazes, quick facts, and a coloring page all centered around a weekly theme. The idea was to build up a subscriber base and advertise my own projects in the footer of the weekly emails. The newsletter failed to gain traction so I'm making the internal tools I built to generate the newsletters available for anyone to use.

25 Apr 2023 - I back up my iphone photos on my computer by exporting them using Image Capture. This stopped working recently after the number of photos on my iphone exceeded 100,000. I tried airdropping the photos and that frequently failed. What ended up working: Set my Mac up as a server. Use the "Files" app on the iphone to connect to a shared folder on the Mac. Select photos in ios Photos app and choose "save to files". Finally browse to the shared folder in the Files app and select "Save". It's way more complicated but it works and maintains the file type (HEIC) and more importantly, the created date and time.

19 Jan 2023 - Last fall I started using the InvokeAI locally-hosted, stable diffusion artificial intelligence "creative engine" to generate images for real-world use. It's amazingly powerful and can run on my old M1 Mac mini. I've used the image-to-image feature to brainstorm ideas for a silly stand-in (a board with a cutout to stick your face through) for a children's Halloween festival. I'm now using it as a step in my workflow to make plotter drawings with my AxiDraw. The input images are pictures of LEGO. I've already started generating poster and flyer designs with it for next year's Halloween festival.

6 Apr 2022 - DALL·E 2 is an AI system that generates realistic images and art from a description in natural language. It's so good it makes me sick to my stomach. Why try to make a living as an illustrator or graphic designer when some ding dong can type in a few words and get something usable for their blog post / advertisement / book / article? Star Trek's holodeck is now a reality in 2 dimensions.

3 Mar 2022 - When SSHing into dev and production machines I usually set each terminal window to use a different background color to make it obvious which window is dev and which is production. I do this to minimize the likelihood of doing something stupid in production. I've recently been working on a system where dev and production are on the same machine(!) so I had to resort to changing the color of the prompt to make it obvious when I'm working in the production directory. Adding this little function in my .bashrc did the trick.

19 Dec 2021 - 'Tis the season for old Christmas music. The Internet Archive hosts a number of old Kresge recordings that were played over department store PA systems.

10 Dec 2021 - I recently needed to pull 200+ color hex codes from an image. This online color picker was faster than photoshop. Drag the image into the page, click the color, click the 'copy to clipboard' icon. Very fast.

30 Oct 2021 - Artflow.ai is a service that uses AI to generate DND-style avatars / profile pictures from a text description. Update 12 Dec 2021, an account is now required to create avatars.

30 Oct 2021 - Night Cafe is an impressive AI art generator that takes a text description as input. Adding the word "gouache" leads to more painting-like results.

18 Oct 2021 - A couple of flyers I designed recently needed a QR code. This QR code generator is free and easy and doesn't create an intermediate tracking link.

17 Oct 2021 - I was recently having flashbacks of learning how to program in my university's computer lab full of VT220s. This Amber Theme for VSCode reproduces the emotionless and matter-of-fact appearance of programming on a monochrome phosphor CRT.