In 2015 I made a little webapp that would use the NextBus API to show predictions for the MBTA:

A few years later they moved from NextBus to their own API, and it stopped working. Back in those days programming required effort, and since there were other apps that did almost what I wanted it wasn't worth it for me to update it. But now that we have genies (for better or worse) I had Claude one-shot the fix:

A decade ago I built jefftk.com/nextbus/ which is no more, but the code still exists at ~/code/nextbus . It was a thin wrapper around the MBTA nextbus API, but when they redid their API to no longer use nextbus it wasn't worth it for me anymore. Could you get it working again?

And it does:

Switching back to this as my daily driver, I especially like that it will show me how stale the prediction is, so I have a better sense of how much to trust it.

What set me off on wanting to revive this was being grumpy that the predictions API doesn't do a good job with inbound at Ball Square. Now that I have my own tooling, I'm working on this too: Claude wrote me a logger and in a week or so I can have it compare a few prediction approaches and implement.

A few days ago I took the kids to Canobie Lake amusement park. It's the closest one to Boston, and while it's not a serious roller coaster park I don't actually like roller coasters (and the kids aren't pushing for them yet). We went on a Wednesday, and going midweek was a good use of a vacation day: the lines are so much shorter.

I've done this a few times before, but this was my first time taking Nora (5y). Last year she was still highly dependent on naps, so we would have had a very short day. I did set expectations with the older two that bringing Nora might mean leaving early, but her stamina was impressive: we were there open (10:30am, though we got there ~10min earlier) to close (7pm). Very glad we brought her: she had so much fun, and her joy was infectious.

I had all three in bright colored broad brimmed hats with a strap under the chin. Normally when going out in the summer they can choose between hats or sunscreen, but for this trip I required the hats specifically because they are so much easier to pick out in a crowd.

When you have a lot of browser tabs open it can be very hard to tell them apart, especially if they're from the same site:

Since monitors are wide and websites are tall, we should very clearly put tabs on the side in a vertical stack. I was a heavy user of these in Firefox, and when I switched to Chrome I used their experimental --enable-vertical-tabs flag. When they removed it I wrote a post about how I love side tabs and switched back to Firefox:

White noise machines are widely used for sound masking, increasing privacy in offices and helping people sleep. The classic approach is a fan in a box, though in the past ten years people have mostly switched over to electronic ones. But a fan is really a great approach; you just need to put it to better use: have the fan clean the air.

Leading up to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival the organizers asked Dudley Laufman to put together a band. He got together some folks he'd been playing for, and this was the start of the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra. They quickly became one of the leading bands of the contra dance revival, and in 1972 released a self-titled album (F-72-FW-3). I found a picture of the liner notes:

I couldn't find the text of these anywhere, so I had an LLM convert them to text and manually cleaned up the output:

Someone submitted my musical multitasking post to Hacker News, where Rochus Keller saw it and left some fascinating comments. He's developed a method of foot drumming, using midi organ pedals: