Daniel's Journal

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how lonely development can be, particularly when you’re working on something that feels a little bit on the frontier or is just niche enough that there aren’t many people around who are interested in the same things.

Over the past six months, I’ve come to appreciate just how hard computers have been to use, even for those of us who thought we were comfortable with them.

I’ve been doing a lot more remote desktop work lately.

I’ve been wondering what it would look like to build modern audio software in a world where AI agents exist without turning the whole thing into a soulless plugin factory.

There was a time when anonymity at scale was plausible.

For a long time, I thought control was mostly about discipline.

I’ve been building cross-platform software where every change needs to be validated across Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS before it can land.

RepoPrompt is a context-focused IDE with agent tooling designed for reliability and token efficiency.

Every year I make my Oscar predictions.

Today, I stumbled across an Ableton Live MCP server that lets AI agents like Claude or Codex control Ableton using natural language.

I’ve been spending some of my free time writing software to keep perfectly good hardware from becoming e-waste.

TL;DR: If you want to build audio apps/plugins on macOS (with GPU UIs via Metal), try the juce-dev Claude Code plugin.

Anthropic released skill-creator, a skill for creating and iteratively improving other skills.

If you’ve built a macOS tool that intercepts media keys or system-wide keyboard events using CGEvent.tapCreate(), you may have hit this: the tap appears to install successfully, but after re-signing the app and launching via the Dock/Finder (or open), eve…

I have a house full of Wemo switches, dimmers, and plugs, and I use Google Home speakers in pretty much every room.

TL;DR: Building a Tauri app on macOS?

XcodeBuildMCP v2.0 was recently released, introducing two optional agent skills you can add to supported CLIs (Codex, Claude, and Cursor).

CodexMonitor recently developed an iOS app for connecting to your projects running on your desktop over Tailscale.

Today I learned that a single weird Unicode line separator (U+2028) can make Codex.app skip loading session history.

TL;DR If you want Claude to get a second opinion from Codex and Codex to get a second opinion from Claude, these skills make it easy. - Install the /codex skill inside Claude → enables /codex in Claude - Install the /claude skill inside Codex → enables /c…

I used Chainer to build a small utility for anyone who uses HomeKit and wants quicker access to their devices on Mac.

TL;DR: Embedding trimmed asciinema recordings in Ghost was a little too manual, so I built a tiny tool that lets you set start/end clip times, pick a cover image (shown on the player before playback), choose a fallback image (for email/RSS clients that ca…

I've been wanting to learn how Claude Code plugins work, so I decided to build a few using plugin-dev.

TL;DR: I wanted agent terminals to live in my IDE in tabs in the editor area next to my files, not in a pane.

After upgrading from n8n v1 to v2, my workflow that uploads binary files to GitHub suddenly broke with this error: Your request is invalid or could not be processed by the service content is not valid Base64 The Root Cause n8n v2 has a breaking change sw…

While watching a full-screen video in VLC on macOS, I noticed a small purple dot appear in the menu bar which I’d never seen before.

Today I visited the Wangduechhoeling Palace in Bumthang, Bhutan and learned that Buddha statues—yes, even the giant ones—often have scriptures and sacred objects placed inside them.

A friend told me about a firmware called esp32_nat_router_extended, and it turns out you can turn an ESP32 into a cheap, low-power 2.4 GHz travel router pretty easily.

I thought it might be fun to start a new series where I share random stuff I ask ChatGPT to explain — tagged accordingly.

TL;DR: Mailgun falsely flagged me for spamming and shut down my account without an appeal process, leaving me unable to send newsletters from Ghost.

If you're using Claude Code's REPL in VS Code on Windows and Ctrl+K isn't working to clear text from the cursor to the end of line (like it does in bash), here's the quick fix.

If you use GitHub Copilot on the free plan, you’ve probably seen this message: “You’ve reached your free plan limit.

Back in August, I began noticing that whenever I started a workout, I received a warning saying, “Some information may not load.”

A few years ago, Apogee officially stopped supporting my Apogee Symphony I/O MK I audio interface.

I ran into this problem: my 2TB SSD kept filling up at an impossible rate.

Apple recently added a pretty amazing feature to AirPods — Live Translation — which lets you hear real-time translations of in-person conversations straight through your earbuds.

I use the Apple Home app for geofence automations—mainly to arm and disarm my alarm, among other things.

I use AdGuard Home with several block lists.

TL;DR: This lets technically savvy users self-host Ghost v6 on GCP for free, with straightforward backups and updates.

I've been using Alex Sidebar for a while for developing macOS and iOS apps.

Apple just released the macOS 26 beta at WWDC, and if you're doing any kind of iOS or macOS development, it's a great time to spin up a test environment without risking your main system.

I ran into an issue while trying to use Sweetpad with an Xcode project that was being generated into a build/ directory by CMake.

Update 3/5/26: I've since built a Claude Code Plugin called juce-dev that turns this template workflow into an interactive command.

If you're a developer—or just curious about new macOS releases—this guide also works great for testing beta versions of macOS (like the newly released macOS 26 "Tahoe") inside a VM.

I recently encouraged a CEO friend to try an autonomous AI coding service—the kind of tool that would’ve seemed like science fiction not long ago.

I was watching a show recently when someone used the phrase "soup to nuts".

I’ve used macOS for years and rely heavily on Command + Tab to switch between apps.

Recently, I started noticing that every time I rebooted my Apple Silicon MacBook Pro, I’d get stuck with the dreaded beachball.

Steve — my longtime friend and neighbor — and I used to occasionally compare notes on our energy use.

I recently set up a fresh Apple Silicon MacBook Pro and decided to take a stricter approach this time around: no Rosetta 2.