The Ulanzi TC002 Pixbar Smart Pixel Clock II is a clock with a 16×52 LED pixel canvas and a built-in battery. What makes it interesting to me is the HTTP API: I can send it GIFs and text, so I can decide what belongs on that little screen. I vibe coded ulanzi-tc002 to work with it. Two uses have become part of my day: animated pixel art from my Grok Bot, and a display that tells me whether my coding agents are still working.
I already forwarded mako notifications to Pushover on Linux. The hook is tiny: mako runs a command with the notification id, the script reads makoctl list -j, skips loops and Pushover itself, and POSTs to the Pushover API. Windows has no equivalent of on-notify=exec. I wanted one binary, dn-pushover, that does the same job on both desktops: titles become [DN][hostname] … so a notification that bounces back is easy to drop. Linux stayed simple. Windows did not.
AI agents write code fastest when the work is sliced small and a human stays on judgment. My workflow runs a four-step loop: plan the feature into units, hand the branch stack to the agent, review each PR myself, then let the agent address my comments.
Stacked pull requests let you review a feature in logical slices rather than one enormous diff. The challenge is managing the branches, synchronizing PRs, and surviving rebases without breaking the chain. gh-stack handles the scaffolding. It tracks your branch stack in a local JSON file, generates PRs that base each one to its parent, and works on any GitHub repo regardless of whether your organization has enabled native stacked PR support.
I wanted MCP clients to create Google Tasks for me. The Google Tasks API requires a Workspace-style setup I don’t have. IFTTT already bridges webhooks to Google Tasks—but a Maker webhook URL is itself the credential. Storing that key in local MCP config is a bad idea.
Claude Code runs tools and shell commands on your behalf. Launched from a terminal, the CLI inherits your shell environment and everything just works. But under Claude Desktop, Claude Code is spawned from a GUI/desktop session that never sourced your interactive shell config—so if you rely on version managers like mise, asdf, or nix, the tools they install may not be on Claude’s PATH. The fix is a single setting: CLAUDE_ENV_FILE.
A monoid is one of the smallest useful abstractions in algebra: a set closed under an associative binary operation, with an identity element. That simplicity is exactly why it shows up everywhere—from summing numbers and concatenating strings to powering divide-and-conquer algorithms and elegant data structures like finger trees. This post walks through what monoids are, why they give you “compute power” for free when you can phrase a problem in terms of them, and how to think about choosing the right monoid and predicate when you do.
I’ve moved most of my small scripts to Bun. It sidesteps Windows’ lack of shebang support and the Git-for-Windows/WSL bash dance, and gives you one runtime for both ad-hoc shell-style commands and full scripts.
You can get tmux session persistence and multiplexing in Windows Terminal by running tmux inside WSL and setting the default shell to PowerShell. New panes and windows will then start pwsh.exe instead of a Linux shell. Here’s a minimal setup using small wrappers and the tmux -C attach trick to configure new sessions.
When working with Git repositories, there are often files that need to be backed up but shouldn’t be committed to the main branch. These might include local development settings, IDE configuration files, personal notes, or development scripts that are specific to your workflow. The challenge is finding a way to back up these ignored files without polluting the main repository history.