Hotdog Planner Pt 1

Outside of the internet, and periodically deciding that I’m a writer or painter, I have been trying to learn how to do more house projects beyond just painting a wall or changing a light bulb. I’m in my “forever” home now (I hope, the world is weird who knows what could happen, but forever is the plan). It’s a 1947 Tudor style(ish) cottage. It has undergone some light remodeling and updating over the years. Nothing is in particularly bad condition. There is some questionable wiring, and we may have to replace the water heater in a couple years, but other than that it’s in great shape. At some point a previous owner turned the walk up attic into a livable space with all knotty pine walls and built in drawers. It is lovely but like any older home there are improvements to be had, and issues to be resolved.

Shocking to absolutely no one I have detailed plans for each room, either in the form of vision boards in Miro, sketchbook notes & doodles, or just in my head. Every room has a planned design, color palette, and intended purpose. Does reality align with any of these plans and ideas? Well. No, not yet. Everything is an ever changing work in progress and highly dependent on my motivation to actually do things.

“If every porkchop were perfect, we wouldn’t have hot dogs.”
– Greg Universe

So you can understand why I’d come up with something called “Hotdog Planner”. Greg Universe (pictured) of Steven Universe fame, had a common saying “If every porkchop were perfect, we wouldn’t have hotdogs.” As a recovering perfectionist this idiom really resonated with me. House projects – as long as safety is adhered to – don’t have to be white glove perfect. To DIY you have to be aware that your house is not likely to ever look like a magazine. The lesson of “good enough” is a difficult one to accept, but it will serve you in the long term. I’ve found the best way to get a result you can be happy with is to go in with a budget and plan and at least try to stick to them. The issue I run into is a lack of proper organizational tools for my novice/layman skill level.

The planner I’m working on is loosely based on my experience working in software management apps. I have found when planning a house project it ends up sort of scattered. The place I keep links to products is separate from the budget (if I even have one) and if things are connected it is through a spreadsheet that becomes cumbersome and not worth using. As with the other small projects here, I just wanted something kind of plain. I am not, nor will I ever be, a contractor. I don’t need to manage a $100,000 renovation with ten different sub contractors. I don’t need all the extra bits that come with something like Jira. I just need a little more than a basic free system offers, and a little less a paid one does. I need a hotdog level system.

As with the in-progress Physical Media Library I will share my requirements doc here.

This time I was able to set up my repository, database, etc without the help of Claude; Small victories I suppose. Something a bit funny – Claude will provide you a plan of action before it builds something large. At the bottom of the one based on the above requirements it had a note about only reminding me once to set FTP info up, because memory shows I don’t like being nagged. Claude’s internal notes include my nagging tolerance.

It’s not wrong.

A small update on Physical Media Library: I have a working prototype, but I am currently the bottleneck as I plan to design the UI myself and that takes time. I’m feeling particular because I want it to feel like Blockbuster or a grungy record store (maybe give both options as themes). Claude defaulted to designing it in the same fashion as Bookathon, which is fine while nailing down feature functionality, but it lost some of the other requirements along the way. I’ve gotta write up a “To-Fix” doc along with getting UI/Palettes made.

Physical Media Library – Part 1

A project I’ve been ideating on for a while is a way to log my household physical media. My spouse and I have been rebuilding a DVD/Blu-ray collection for the past few years, and have a pretty extensive library of books, comics, games, and CDs from past eras.

Like a lot of Xennials my memories of childhood mimic films like Empire Records and Clerks. We all either worked at, wanted to work at, or regularly hung out around movie rental stores, comic book shops, and record shops. It’s a nostalgia that naturally leans into building a physical media library.

To get started on this project I opened up Miro and started a sticky stack. I began adding thoughts to a few stickies. Ultimately I landed on this collection. Very loose, basic ideas.

From here I ironed out all the fields I would want to collect, and began creating a breakdown of what category each field will appear on.

This is completed before any conversation with AI. Claude can code, but can’t read your mind. The more information you can provide up front, the better first result you will receive. In my experience this also applies to human coders.

Claude walked me through a few set up items I haven’t created a muscle memory for yet, they were easier and less frustrating to set up than they were with Bookathon – a project which properly introduced me to Git, setting up a local PHP server to test with, and a plethora of registrations and tools I didn’t realize I’d have to deal with.

A few unplanned items I’ll be adding:

  • An import option that provides a template the user can download. This template will match the export.
  • A “Physical Location” field for users to put their own library system’s info in. This could be a room “Office” “Living Room”, or maybe a personal filing system.
  • A more original design. Right now it is defaulting to the same design used for Bookathon, which is fine, but I’d like this one to feel more like a record shop or similar.
  • Option to bring over your owned books from Bookathon. This will require going back into Bookathon and adding a checkbox for something like “Owns a physical copy”
  • A social media friendly snapshot with counts, most recently watched, most recently added. I’ll probably design a small template in Miro or Canva, leaving a space to indicate where the cover photos should appear. I’ll post that template here when I get to that point, it will be towards the end.

My biggest unknown, and biggest concern, is related to the Photo to Listing feature. I want users to be able to take a photo of a DVD cover (for example), and have AI try to fill out relevant fields based on the image. The way we are building this will first look for a barcode – this does not require AI, but does require APIs to respond in a timely manner, some of which may not always play nice because I am very cheap. The hope and the worry is AI will kick in if it doesn’t see a barcode. I am looking forward to seeing how many tokens this eats up. It may not actually be worth it to keep any actual AI functionality in the app itself.

Pain Log+

Over a year ago I started experiencing nerve pain in my right arm. At the time I thought it was simple carpel tunnel, or cubital tunnel, some kind of tunnel. I wore braces at night, but the pain got worse. I went to my GP who told me it was probably just carpel tunnel and to wear braces and take ibuprofen.

The pain continued. We sold our house and moved. I got set up with a new doctor who ultimately identified an issue with my neck. More tests showed arthritis had made it in-between my cervical discs.

God forbid I be normal about this.

I knew there was some relation between the weather and arthritis – I had grown up with all the old people around me predicting the weather based on pain. I learned that it had something to do with barometric pressure. I wanted to track my pain but every app I had included a hundred other features you had to wade through to get to logging. There was no “just click a button” app that wasn’t either filled with ads or required a lot more input (like what you ate, how you feel emotionally, etc). I already had hosting and a couple domains, so I cracked open Claude (at the time, just the chats/projects in browser – I didn’t have the Claude Code app yet) and had it build me a basic webapp.

I wanted to get an idea of what the barometric pressure was when I had pain, including the temperature, date, and time. The first go ended up getting pressure from a predictive analysis site, which was not ideal – I wanted actual readings. This image is from the second or third version. The first one I felt was truly usable. I set pain levels that made sense to me, and would simply open the app, and click on the one that matched in the moment, building a log over time, logged in a google sheet on my google drive.

This was going well for a while. The insights tab gave me a few charts to show pain over time, with a throughline for barometric pressure. I learned it wasn’t just high or just low pressure that increased my pain, but specifically the spikes. At the time it looked like there was a small window of pressure that is ok. A goldilocks zone.

Sometime after this I started on a GLP-1. The pill version. I had heard the side effects could be pretty bad, so I decided to expand my pain app to log side effects as well. Additionally, I was curious to see how much or if the pain reduced as I lost weight. I was still seeing my doctor and specialists through all of this, but referrals in my area are slow. I’m still waiting on someone to call me to schedule a nerve conduction study as I write this.

One of the things that surprised me most was once I added a thumbnail, a prompt came up asking me to “install app” on my phone. It wasn’t an actual app, just an instance of the browser in full screen, with a thumbnail alongside all my actual apps.

Then the scope… well, it got away from me. I spent hours setting up Tasker on my phone, working with Claude to manipulate TaskerHealthConnect into delivering the stats I wanted to collect. Originally I had hoped to gather steps and water intake as well, but for whatever reason Samsung Health decided it would not be sharing those details with Health Connect and I grew tired of trying. The connection is finicky, I hope to improve it one day when I upgrade my watch (I currently have a Samsung Watch 6, old, but not ancient).

I also periodically get migraines – the seeing spots, nauseous, need to reduce all forms of light around me type of migraines. Well, we were here, why not add that metric as well.

Ultimately this is the finished product I landed on. It still looks very Claude like, but utilizes the font and color scheme I requested. The pain button selected is still the trigger event to log an entry, the other fields are all optional. The dosage remains constant unless I change it. When I titrate up to 4mg, I will select the 4mg button and it will remain as the default until I change it.

The history tab is just a history of entries, I will not be showing a screenshot here – I’m sure you can imagine it. If I choose to, I can delete entries from history.

By this point the pain in one arm was occurring in both arms to varying levels of severity, so I took the opportunity to add the designation for which arm.

It took a few weeks for enough data to accumulate to make any interesting observations.

There are more charts, but they aren’t super relevant, just showing this to display what I was looking at.

The biggest revelation came from starting the Wegovy. I began taking it on June 25th. Ever since then my pain levels went from an average of about 3.5/5 to a 2/5. It is still there, and still needs to be dealt with, but that knowledge sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole.

I do not have Type 2 Diabetes, but I do have some kind of neuropathic pain going on. Studies of GLP-1s have shown to sometimes reduce diabetic neuropathy pain, so I can only assume I have swelling in similar areas that has been reduced.

Another stat showed worsening pain at night and in the morning, but with the added data it looked less and less like the correlation with barometric pressure was true, at least not to the extent early data implied.

This is an ongoing project, if I make significant changes or additions I will log them here, in a new post.

I’ve gotten some interest from friends and family to turn this into an app anyone can use. Health data is complicated, so I hesitate to build something that may collect information that may violate HIPAA or similar. In addition, any public version would likely be stripped of the ability to connect to a health app – I had a helluva time getting that to connect for just me, getting it to be something easy for users is beyond my abilities and would likely incur actual costs.

But a basic pain log for public use may be something I create in the future. Users would need to connect their own google sheet to it, so none of their data would live in my database. Something to ideate on as time goes by.

Of course, if you’re a little tech savvy, and have a place to host, you could probably build this yourself using Claude or another capable AI. With Claude, and a bit of a learning/relearning curve, this project took me a total of about 20 hours total – including tinkering and making nit picky changes.

One more try – Hello, World.

I feel like I’ve typed more ‘Hello, World!’ messages than an average human does in an average human lifespan.

Since we got our first home pc in 1995 every digital diary or blog I’ve ever had has featured it. It was the first message we were taught in middle school, when learning BASIC.

10 PRINT "HELLO, WORLD!" 20 GOTO 10

Gave the poor teacher saddled with us a heart attack as we discovered we could do the same continuous loop with dirty words.

I continued on this way, hello worlds AND dirty words, through blogs that changed with the times – Angelfire, Geocities, then to Blogger and LiveJournal and DeadJournal, followed by MySpace and Facebook. Eventually I stopped writing as much – no one seemed to care about writing anymore. It was all about photos and quips. Twitter and Instagram were the hot thing, and I am glad to look back knowing I experienced those apps in their golden eras. For a while, I was very into TikTok, but was cured of that in January 2025 when they sent a sycophantic thank you to POTUS for not cancelling them – an initiative he had started in his previous administration.

That was the final straw. I am no saint – I still watch a lot of YouTube. I still peruse shorts – though even now in 2026 they don’t hold a candle to the dopamine generator that is TikTok. I never find myself scrolling YouTube shorts mindlessly, for hours on end. The algorithm just isn’t that accurate. And I think that’s a good thing.

But I digress. This time – with this blog – I have intentions. This is not a general blog. I wont be documenting my personal life. I’ve been through that phase of life, and after an absurd amount of effort have extracted myself from nearly all social media. You may see me lurking around reddit, and technically I do have a bluesky account, but my god it’s depressing. I don’t like to look at it.

This time I want to really explore the variety of artistic, creative, and technical pursuits I have in the time I have left* on this planet.

This blog, for the first time, is for me. I find myself not caring if anyone ever reads this. I’m not sure I’ll ever even enable comments. Maybe just give readers a series of unrelated emojis to express their praise or frustration with my ramblings.

*It has occurred to me that this sounds like I am dying. I am not dying, just getting older.