Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More
Where Can I Watch? has always answered a simple question: where can I actually watch this show or movie right now? The catch is that “right now” includes more than the subscription services you pay for.
A lot of content lives on free, ad-supported platforms like The Roku Channel, Tubi, Pluto TV, and the like. Those are legitimate, no-cost ways to watch something tonight, and the app was leaving them out.
Continue readingIf you spend any meaningful amount of time working with Claude Code, you’ve likely noticed it doesn’t actually know what time it is beyond when you start the initial session.
It knows the date, more or less. But ask it to reason about “this morning” versus “last night,” or how long a build has been running, or whether it’s even the same day you started, and you’ll watch it guess. So you do what I did for weeks: you open a message with “it’s Thursday at 9am Eastern” just to give it its bearings.
That gets old. And it turns out the fix is small.
Continue readingA few years ago I started building a thing called Backcast. The idea was simple: I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I wanted a way to back them up. I got as far as parsing OPML exports, writing some unit tests, setting up PHPCS, and documenting the whole thing on this blog. Then life happened, I lost the thread, and it sat untouched.
The itch never went away, though. I kept finding myself thinking, “I know someone said something about this on a podcast, but which one? Which episode? When?” Podcasts are full of ideas and I had no way to get back to them.
So I started over. Different project, different approach, same underlying frustration.
Where Can I Watch? 1.4.0 is out, and it’s one of the bigger releases since launch. Two ideas drove most of the work: making Today its own top-level tab, and giving Episode Detail a consistent home in every place in the app where you might tap into an episode.
When 1.3.0 shipped, the plan I wrote for 1.4.0 was a detail-page overhaul:
The more I continued to use the app, the more it was clear the foundation for those enhancements wasn’t quite in place yet:
1.4.0 puts those foundations in place. The detail-page enhancements will be in 1.5.0, built on top of everything in this release.
Lately, I’ve been using Claude pretty heavily more than other LLMs. Over time, I’ve accumulated settings, plugins, and various configurations that I don’t want to lose. If I ever set up a new machine, I want to be able to restore those settings without rebuilding everything from scratch.
So I set up a backup system using rclone and Google Drive (though you can use any cloud provider of your choice with rclone).
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