Waxing plastic foundations
Tips for new beekeepers How to wax plastic foundations
Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft
Latest posts
DIY bee vacuum
How I made a DIY bee vacuum from a couple 5 gallon buckets, hardware cloth, and a shop vac hose replacement set.
SportsCrawl.app
This post is for people on Bluesky, if you re not on Bluesky, keep scrolling. I built an app that sends you a daily DM with final scores and today s game schedule for teams you follow. Looks like this: MLB, NBA, WNBA, NFL, NHL, MLS, NWSL, Premier League, and tournaments. Silence on days your teams don t Continue reading "SportsCrawl.app"
Honey Gate Wrench
When harvesting honey I use several five gallon buckets. The buckets I use have small gates in them to allow honey to pour out. The internal nut is hexagonal and can be a headache to tighten or loosen by hand. I remove them for cleaning and storage. So I designed a simple 55mm honey gate Continue reading "Honey Gate Wrench"
Honey Harvest – July 2026
Harvested 58 pounds of honey. After a spring when I couldn t do a lot of hive management, I feel lucky.
2025 Hugo & Nebula novel finalists
I ve read all the Hugo and Nebula nominees for this year. That was 11 different books since there s some overlap Rather than going through each one making a long video, I ll just give you the highlights.
ashlight – air quality monitor gadget
We have had a PurpleAir PA-II on our back porch for years. It works fine. The problem is that checking it requires going online to look at a map to find ours. What I wanted was a small device that is green when the air is fine and turns other colors when it s worse. Here Continue reading "ashlight air quality monitor gadget"
Quick inspection of the Pink & Blue beehives
The hives are ready for harvest
orbis – another DIY smart home controller
I saw another inexpensive ESP32 device on Aliexpress and decided to see if it would work well as a smart home controller like Tessera. The ESP32 display has wifi and Bluetooth, is about 1 3/4 inches in diameter, and has a roughly 240 240 screen. The code conversion was fairly simple, mainly focused on the display Continue reading "orbis another DIY smart home controller"
LLM-Friendly Preview – a plugin to let AI review WordPress drafts
tl;dr: https://github.com/cruftbox/llm-friendly-preview I ve gotten into the habit of asking AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini to review my draft posts before I hit publish. A second pair of eyes catches typos, confusing phrasing, and the occasional bad take. The problem was getting them to actually see the draft. WordPress s Public Post Preview plugin, my Continue reading…