Ben's Journal

Wednesday, November 04, 2026

Cloudslate: Turning an Old Kindle Into a Workday Dashboard

This is a Just the Facts (JTF) post: generated by AI from my own raw material (voice memos, session notes) and a short outline I wrote, then checked by me. What's a JTF?

I took an old Kindle that was sitting on a shelf, jailbroke it, and turned it into an always-on display of my day's time boxes. It cost $0.00. Claude wrote the code. The biggest surprise was that once it's jailbroken, a Kindle is just another Unix box you can run shell scripts on.

How it started: Time Boxes

What do you do with a TODO list that never seems to end? "This week I'll finish this blog post" is easy to write and hard to schedule. Is editing that post one hour or four? You slot it in, work on it, and the list still doesn't clear.
Instead of focusing on the items, I focus on setting aside time to work on them. "I'm going to work on the blog for an hour on this day." I show up and work. I'm not trying to finish a thing, just to work hard for that hour.
That's a scheme you can actually win at.
The result: time boxes. I don't schedule specific tasks for each project. I schedule time for the project and work hard inside that box.
Time boxes take discipline, though. It's easy to blow right through them, especially when I'm in a flow on a project I'm loving and it's time to switch to the next box.

Overengineered idea: a real-time dashboard of my day's time boxes

YouTube keeps recommending me sleek e-ink display projects that show some kind of dashboard.
The thought: if my time boxes for the day were always in front of me, I'd do a better job of sticking to them.
I could write them on a sheet of paper. Cost: $0.00. Time: a few seconds.
But those sexy e-ink displays were too tempting. I had to know: could I get a hardware device to show my time boxes in real(ish) time?

The search for the middle ground

Known options:
- DIY: a cheap e-ink screen plus a Raspberry Pi or an ESP32. Cheap parts, but buying parts, soldering, and programming hardware was more time than I had.
- Buy it: much less effort. TRMNL does exactly this, but it starts at $139. I couldn't justify that for what is basically a toy.
The surprise: the old Kindle on my shelf might be the middle ground I was hoping for.
- Claude suggested putting it to use. It's a Kindle Paperwhite from 2015 that I bought for travel reading and barely touch now.
- I knew it had an e-ink screen, but I had no idea how the software side worked.
- Claude was encouraging but careful about it: it depends on the firmware and whether the device can be jailbroken. I took a photo of the Kindle's device info screen with the version numbers and handed it over. The verdict: this can be done.
- There are well-known Kindle hacking projects, like WinterBreak, that showed this was doable.

Proving It

Step 1: jailbreaking the Kindle
- I blindly followed the steps the AI gave me. I don't normally work that way.
- I was OK with it here because the worst case was bricking a Kindle I wasn't using anyway.
- With the Kindle plugged in over USB, Claude could read and write files on it directly. My job was mostly to unplug it and tap the screen when I was told to.
- I went one step at a time, and before I knew it I had a jailbroken Kindle.
- I had no idea what that actually meant.
Step 2: Hello World
- Claude wrote a test script and copied it onto the Kindle. I unplugged it and the script showed up right where a book would. I tapped it, like opening a book, and the screen filled with text.
- Holy smokes: it's basically a shell script. Writing code for the Kindle is like writing code for any other Unix shell. That means curl, while loops, and sleep, plus FBInk, a command that draws an image on the e-ink screen.

Building It

The setup for my live time-box view is painfully simple.
Server side: on a Linux server I already had, cron runs a command every 10 minutes that creates an image and puts it at a well-known (and hard-to-guess) URL. The command is cloudslateassist -a publish -s workday.
- cloudslateassist runs a "slate" script. If the script outputs an image, that image gets converted for the Kindle. If it outputs text, the text gets turned into an image with render-text.php.
- The workday slate calls my existing workdayassist -a today command, which prints the day's boxes. Claude wrote PHP that turns that output into a clean timeline.
Kindle side: cloudslate.sh grabs the image, paints it on the screen, sleeps for 15 minutes, and repeats.
It couldn't be more basic, but the result looks surprisingly polished.
- The display looks sophisticated. Really, the Kindle is just downloading one image and painting it on the screen.
The trickiest part of the project was naming it. I spent more time on the name than on anything else.
- I went with cloudslate. A slate is the (literally) old-school board students used to have at their desks, a portable chalkboard for scratch work that got wiped and reused. The Kindle is the slate, and the data comes from the cloud.

Using It

Does it solve my blowing-through-the-time-boxes problem? No, but it helps.
Did I learn that the Kindle on my desk is just another Unix box I can hack? Yes, yes I did!
Using it for my time boxes is a win, but it would be trivial to show other data too. A slate is just a script that prints text or an image. server-status.sh is a short example.
Given the cost ($0.00), the effort (low, since Claude wrote the code), and the sheer cool factor (I have a live-updating dashboard!), this project is hard to beat.

Resources

Behind This Post

The outline I wrote

- How it started: Time Boxes
  - What do you do with a TODO list that never seems to end?
  - Intead of focusing on items, focus on allocating time to work on the items
  - That's a scheme you can actually win at
  - The result: time boxes.
  - Instead of focusing on specific tasks for various projects, I
    focus on scheduling time for that project and working diligetnly
    in that time box
  - Time boxes require discpline though, it's easy to blow through
    them
- Overengineered idea: a real time dashboard of my day's time boxes
  - A common YouTube feed recommendation is some sleek e-ink display
    project that shows some dashboard data
  - The thought: if I had my time boxes for the day in front of me,
    then I would do a better job of sticking to them
  - I could scratch them out on a sheet of paper - cost $0.00, time a few seconds
  - But, those sexy e-ink displays are too irressibtable: I had to
    know, could I have a hardware device show me my time boxes in
    real'ish time?
- The search for the middle ground
  - Known options:
    - DIY - Cheap, but the assembly time put these projects out of reach
    - Buy it - Lower effort, but priced well over $100, I couldn't
      justify the cost for what was essentially a toy
  - The surprise: The old Kindle sitting around may be the middle ground I hoped for
    - Claude had a suggestion: put the old Kindle I have lying around to use
    - I knew it was powered by e-ink, but I had no idea how the software side of worked
    - There are some well known hacking projects that suggested this was doable
- Proving It
  - Step 1: jailbraking the Kindle
    - I blindly followed the steps the AI told me
    - I felt safe doing this because the worst case was that I'd brick
      the Kindle, and this was already a device that wasn't in use
    - I followed the steps, one by one and before I knew it, I had a jail broken Kindle
    - I had no idea what this meant
  - Step 2: Hello World
    - Claude wrote me some code to run on the Kindle, and I was able
      to launch it as if I was opening a book
    - Holy smokes: the script is basically a shell script. So writing
      code for the Kindle is basically the same as writing code for
      any other Unix shell
- Building It
  - The architecture for my live time-box view is painfully simple:
  - On a Linux server, I have a command in cron that runs every 10
    minutes and creates an image. This image is stored in a well known
    location
  - On the Kindle, it grabs and renders the image, then sleeps for 15
    minutes, then repeats
  - This couldn't be more basic, and yet, the result was surprisingly polished
    - The display may look sophisticated, but the Kindle is bldinly
      downloading a single image and painting it to the screen
  - The trickiest part of the project: naming.
    - I went with 'cloudslate' - slate, being the (literally) old
      school device used by students as a sort of primitive
      whiteboard, and cloud being the source of the data
- Using It
  - Does it solve my blow-through-the-time boxes problem? No, but it helps.
  - Did I learn that the Kindle on my desk is just another unix box I can hack? Yes, yes I did!
  - Using this for my time boxes is a win, but it would be trivial to
    render any other data, too.
  - Given the cost ($0.00), effort (low, Claude wrote the code), and
    the sheer cool factor (I've got a live updating dashboard), this
    project is hard to beat.

Tuesday, November 03, 2026

Halloween 2026 - Found the Fun, (Almost) Lost the Kids

This is a Just the Facts (JTF) post: generated by AI from my own raw material (voice memos, session notes) and a short outline I wrote, then checked by me. What's a JTF?

Halloween snuck up on us this year. At 2pm nothing was ready, and by the end of the night we'd had a great time. Along the way we had a slow start, a last-minute pumpkin idea, one brief "I lost the kids" moment, and a bit of vindication from Google.

2pm: Things Were Looking Grim

A key piece of J's costume hadn't arrived.
The pumpkins hadn't been carved.
Baby W had no costume.

5pm: Back on Track, Baby!

UPS delivered, literally, and J's Red Hood costume was good to go.
J printed a stencil and carved a perfect Red Hood bat symbol into his pumpkin.
I couldn't think of anything to carve, so I gave in and carved a simple face into my pumpkin. I looked at my bookshelf for inspiration and saw Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), but didn't make anything of it at first. Then it clicked: the lambda on the cover. I carved (λ) into the side of the pumpkin, a nod to Lisp humor. Next year maybe I'll carve some proper code into a pumpkin.
We found a fuzzy brown sleeper for baby W, and its ears matched the wearable blanket I planned to wear that night.

6:15pm: Off to Trick-or-Treat

J: Jason Todd / Red Hood. His outfit was a perfect match.
E: The Bride of Chucky. She looked smashing.
L: Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, with sparkly shoes, a sparkly dress, and a stuffed "Toto" in a basket.
Baby W: A little bear, carried by me, a big bear.
Rose: Kim Possible. People of the right age totally got it.

We Started Slow, but Things Picked Up

We started in our neighborhood, and it was sooooo quiet. Only three or four houses were participating, and I really missed the frenetic energy I remember from when I was a kid.
Then we headed over to 6th Street South. It was perfect: the place was hopping, with plenty of candy, decorations, and just the right vibe. It was busy without being crowded.

Sorry Not Sorry About the Phone Situation

When J brought up his phone before we left, I told him not to bother bringing it.
I didn't want it to be a distraction, and we were planning to stay together anyway.
Pretty quickly, J and E peeled off from our group.
About 15 minutes after they left us, it hit me: we should have put his phone, with location sharing turned on, at the bottom of his candy bag. Then we'd have had an easy way to find him.
E did have her phone, but it was at 3%. Rose watched it go to 2%, then 1%, then dead.
After we'd done all of 6th Street, we got back to the car, and J and E weren't there. I wasn't really nervous, since it was Halloween in a fine neighborhood. Still, I called Shira to confess and ask whether I should drive around looking for them.
In the middle of explaining, I saw the two of them walking down the street toward us. "Never mind. Just kidding. Halloween joke. Everything's fine. Bye."
They'd gotten a little turned around and walked past the car about twice.
In the end, I was happy that the phone stayed home. It made J and E solve the problem of finding their way back to us, and they did it somewhere perfectly safe.
I think it was a bit of accidental genius. Next year, though, the phone goes in the bottom of the candy bag.

Google AI for the Win

J was bummed that nobody recognized him as Jason Todd / Red Hood.
But when I opened a photo of him with the "Ask" feature in Google Photos, it figured it out with no hints. Before I'd asked anything, it said something like "your Halloween costume of Red Hood looks great." Vindication!

Behind This Post

The outline I wrote

- 2pm on Oct 31's things were looking grim:
  - A key piece of J's constume handn't arrived
  - The pumpkins hadn't been carved
  - Baby W had no costume
- By 5pm, we were back on track, baby!
  - UPS litterlly delivered, and J's Red Hood Costume was good to go
  - J carved a perfect Red Hood bat-symbol into his pumpkin
  - Stumped for what to carve, I finally caved and carved a simple
    face into my pumpkin. I'd looked at my bookshelf for insperation,
    and saw SICP there, but didn't think anything of. Then it clicked,
    and I carved `(λ)` into the side of the pumpkin a nod to lisp
    humor. Next year maybe I'll carve some proper code into the
    pumpkin
  - We found a fuzzy brown sleeper that baby W could wear, and its
    ears matched the wearable blanket I planned to wear that night
- By 6:15pm, we were heading off for Trick or Treating
  - J: Jason Todd / Red Hood - his outfit a perfect match.
  - E: The bride of Chucky - she was looking smashing
  - L: Dorthy from the Wizard of Oz - wearing sparkly shoes, a
    sparkly dress and carrying 'toto' in a basket.
  - Baby W: a little bear bing carried by me, a big bear
  - Rose: Kimpossible - those folks of the right age, totally got it.
- We started slow, but things picked up nicely
  - We started in our neighborhood, and things were sooooo
    quiet. Only a few homes were participating, and I sorely missed
    the frenetic energy I remember as a kid.
  - We then headed over to 6th Street South. It was perfect: the place
    was hopping, with plenty of candy, decorations and the perfect vibe. It was busy
    without crowded.
- Sorry not Sorry about the Phone Situation
  - When J asked, I suggested he didn't bother bring his phone
  - I didn't want the phone to be a distraction, and we were planning
    to be together
  - Quickly, J and E peeled off from our group
  - 15 minutes after they separated from us, it hit me: uh, we should
    have put his phone, with location sharing enabled, in his candy
    bag, we'd have an easy location fix on him
  - <insert a quick version of the story: E's phone died, I had
    to call and confess to Shira>
  - Ultimately, I was happy with the decision to leave the phone at
    home: it let E and J problem solve their way back to us,
    all while in a perfectly safe environment.
  - In the end, I think it was a bit of accidential genius
- Google AI for the win
  - J was bummed that nobody recognized Jason Todd / Red Hood
  - But, Google's 'ask' feature in Google Photos totally figured it
    out, no hints needed. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSTN3mHEAOA][Vindication]]!

Monday, November 02, 2026

Leasing a Car in the Age of AI

This is a Just the Facts (JTF) post: generated by AI from my own raw material (voice memos, session notes) and a short outline I wrote, then checked by me. What's a JTF?

Shira's Acura RDX lease was winding down. We wanted to lease something that wasn't an Acura, and we wanted to get out of the Acura in the way that worked best for us. We ended up with a Hyundai Santa Fe. It was our first car deal in the age of agentic AI. Here's what helped, where the AI went wrong, and what actually got the deal done.

Huge Win: LeaseHackr's Rate Findr

Rate Findr on LeaseHackr is like X-ray vision for leasing. It shows the lease program numbers that dealers don't publish: money factor, residual and lease cash.
It isn't AI. It's reliable data that the AI can use. Without real numbers Claude guesses, and those guesses can get you in trouble.
Lease terms are set for the whole program, so they're the same at every dealer. In theory you could work out the lease deal by comparing offers from different dealers.
LeaseHackr makes that much simpler. Because you can see which lease programs are being offered, you don't have to depend on dealers. You can compare your leasing options ahead of time instead of trying to work them out on the fly.
Rate Findr also shows how each deal is put together. One model may have a lower interest rate. Another may have a higher rate but come with lease cash, which lowers the cap cost.
Access works a little oddly: you join the forum and make a monthly donation, which you can cancel anytime. That's a small price for what you get.
If you lease, you need this tool.

Where AI Helped

It taught me. None of the explanations of Money Factor or Capitalized Cost I found made sense to me. Claude patiently let me dig into these topics until I understood them.
It compared scenarios in seconds.
- Which lease program was best? The 2026 or the 2027 Santa Fe? Gas or hybrid? A lower interest rate, or a higher rate with more lease cash?
- Claude put all of this into one table I could actually compare.
- Gas beat hybrid, because the hybrid's higher MSRP and smaller (or no) lease cash outweighed its better residual. The 2026 and 2027 gas models came out about even.
- Claude's take on the Acura MDX deal was especially helpful. The low interest rate made it look like a no-brainer. But Claude factored in the MDX's low residual value and showed me that what looked like a great deal wasn't.
It mapped the market. Claude could go through sites like cars.com and quickly map the range of discounts on a make and model. That gave us a yardstick. Some dealers were selling at MSRP, and the good deals were around $3,500 off. So when a dealer beat that, we knew we had the winner.
It pushed back on ideas that seemed sensible to me but were dead ends:
- Why not buy out the Acura and sell it to any dealer? Because then we'd pay sales tax on the buyout. It's better to stick with Acura or Honda dealers, who can buy the car straight from the lease so it isn't really a sale on our end. Honda also blocks third-party buyouts, so places like Carvana and CarMax couldn't buy it anyway.
- Why not email every Acura and Honda dealer within 90 miles and take the best offer? Dealers don't reliably answer cold emails, many don't have a public email address, and I was way overcomplicating this. Call 3 nearby dealers and you're done.

Where the AI Failed Me

When it misread something, had incomplete information, or made a bad assumption, it gave me bad advice that sounded confident:

The CX-90 PHEV "giveaway." The AI was convinced Mazda was practically giving away the CX-90 PHEV. It wasn't. The AI had read two separate lease options, one with a low interest rate and one with lease cash, as one very generous deal.
The "inflated" cap cost. The AI was sure a dealer's quote had quietly inflated the cap cost. Not so. Claude had "forgotten" that Virginia makes you pay sales tax on the full car up front, and that tax is part of the cap cost. Once I had the real numbers, I could see how the dealer got there, and it was legitimate.
The ad that wasn't a lease offer. It saw an ad on a cars.com page and concluded the dealer was running a very low interest rate lease offer. The ad wasn't a lease offer, so everything the AI built on that assumption was wrong.

Taming AI

Keep asking. Say "I don't get it, let's discuss" until either (a) you understand it, or (b) the AI admits it was wrong all along.
Have it explain things back. Don't tell it what the lease says. Have it read the lease and tell you, then check that it sees what you see.
Build tools. I wrote leaseassist to pull lease deals from LeaseHackr and put them in a consistent format, so the AI didn't have to keep re-parsing them. The scraper behind it is ratefindr.js.

What Got It Done: Hustle

AI gave us the information to recognize a good deal.
Texting, calling and visiting dealers is what actually got the deal done.
Leasing the new car: We got a great price on a car in the wrong color. It was silver, and Shira wanted blue. Shira kept shopping until she found a dealer who had the color she wanted and would match the deal.
Selling the Acura: It took visits to more than one dealer. I eventually got a good offer, and then found another dealer who wanted the car badly enough to make an even better one. A Honda dealer bought our Acura lease, so the cross-brand buyout really does work.

Resources

Behind This Post

The outline I wrote

- The setup:
  - Shira's Acura RDX lease was winding down
  - We wanted to lease a new car that wasn't an Acura
  - We wanted to wind down the Acura in the most beneficial way possible
  - This is our first car purchase in the age of agentic AI
- Huge Win: LeaseHackr's Rate Findr
  - This is like X-Ray visions for Lease
  - This isn't AI, but it's reliable data the AI can use
  - Leasing terms are program wide, so in theory, you can derive lease
    deals by cross-checking dealer offfers
  - LeaseHackr dramatically simplifies this: by being able to see what
    lease programs are beign offered, you don't need to rely on
    dealers and pre-game different leasing options versus trying to
    figure them out on the fly.
  - If you lease, then you *need* this tool
- Where AI Helped
  - It was able educate me: no one description of Money Factor or
    Realized Captilized Costs made sense. But, Claude patiently let me
    explore these topics until I understood them.
  - AI could sift through various scenarios and determine
    which was the best in a few seconds.
    - Which was the best lease program? The 2026 or 2027 Santa Fe?
      What about Gas or Hybrid? What about a lower interest rate vs
      higher interesate rate and a bigger discount?
    - Claude could put a table in front of me normalizing this
    - The clarification on the Acura MDX deal was especially helpful:
      the low interest rate made it seem like a no-brainer. But,
      Claude factored in the low residual value and showed me how what
      looked like a great deal, wasn't.
  - AI could crawl through sites like cars.com and quickly map the
    range of discounts on a make and model. That gave us a yardstick:
    some dealers were selling at MSRP, the good deals were around
    $3,500 off. So when a dealer beat that, we knew we had the winner.
  - The AI could push back on ideas tht made sense to me, but were in
    fact, dead ends:
    - Why don't we buy our Acura and then sell it to any old dealer?
      Doing so causes you to pay sales tax; best to limit to Acura or
      Honda dealers, then it's not a real sale.
    - Why not email all dealers in the area within 90 miles to see who
      wants our car, then take the best offer? Dealers don't relaibly
      answer cold emails; many dealers don't have a public email; and
      you're way overcomplicating this. Call 3 nearby dealers and
      you're done.
- Where the AI failed me: with misread, incomplete or bad
  assumptionns, it gave me conflidently sounding bad advice:
  - The AI was convinced they were practically giving away the CX-90
    PHEV. Nope: it read two lease variations, the first with low
    interest rate, and the second with lease cash, as being one
    super generous deal.
  - The AI was certain a dealer's quote had sneakily inflated the Cap
    Cost. Nope, Claude 'forgot' that VA requires paying sales tax on
    the full car up front and that's part of the cap cost it hadn't
    considered.
  - It saw an ad on cars.com page and derived fromn there that the
    dealer was running a super-low interest rate lease offer. That
    wasn't a lease offer, so the assumptions that flowed from this
    were all wrong.
- Taming AI:
  - Keep asking: "I don't get, let's discuss" until either (a) you get
    it, or (b) the AI reveals it was wrong all along.
  - Build tools: I created `leaseassist` to pull back and normalize
    lease deals from leasehackr so the AI wouldn't need to keep
    re-parsing it.
- What got it done: Hustle
  - AI armed us with information to know what a good deal looked like
  - But, texting, talking and visiting dealers is what actually got
    the deal done
  - On the lease of the new car: we got a great price on the wrong color car. Shira
    shopped around until she found a dealer who had the color she
    wanted and matched the deal
  - On the sale of the Acura: it took taking it to multiple dealers, but
    ultimately, I got a good offer and then found another dealer who
    wanted the car so badly, that they gave me an even better offer

Sunday, November 01, 2026

Review: The Minuscule Mansion of Myra Malone

This is a Just the Facts (JTF) post: generated by AI from my own raw material (voice memos, session notes) and a short outline I wrote, then checked by me. What's a JTF?

Note: this post may contain spoilers.

I picked up The Minuscule Mansion of Myra Malone by Audrey Burges more or less at random and couldn't stop listening to it. The premise is clever, and some of the scenes fit together in really satisfying ways. Once I thought about it a bit, though, it all seemed too neat. Then I started a much heavier book and realized Myra Malone was exactly what I needed right now.

The Premise

There's a real mansion and a miniature version of it, and the two are magically linked. Cool!
Decorated rooms appear and disappear in the model. In the real house, music plays and nobody can tell where it's coming from.
The book never tries to explain the magic. It just runs with it.
As a blogger, I liked that Myra's blog is front and center in the story.

Scenes That Snap Together

Scene one: Grandpa Lou turns up with a trunk full of Vienna sausages that nobody wants. He comes across as a doddering, out-of-touch old man, or maybe a hoarder.
Scene two: years later, a blog post by Myra explains it. Lou grew up in the Great Depression, and for him, food was how you showed love. It wasn't dementia. It was love and childhood trauma.
This is a book about magic and fairy-tale endings, and Burges still gives her characters real depth. Lou isn't the butt of a joke.
Scenes also repeat across generations. Trixie's two great loves have hints of each other, and the lady of the house stays frozen while the world moves on around her.

Too Neat?

In the moment, having all the pieces fit together felt great. Almost too great, to the point of being cheesy.
With even a little thought, it started to feel like a pretty simple view of the world. I wanted it to be more complex than it was.
Some characters feel one-dimensional. Rutherford is angry from the day he's born and spends his whole life fighting the house, and I never really understood why.
The plot has holes. A well-known historic mansion has its miniature posted online, and only the owner recognizes it? Nobody else in town puts it together?
The house keeps getting called a refuge, but we never really see anyone take refuge in it.

The Right Book at the Right Time

After finishing, I started The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, a serious and profound book about the Vietnam War.
With everything going on in my life right now, it wasn't the right book. Myra Malone was.
Getting to escape into a world of magic and a perfect love story deserves more credit than I first gave it. That doesn't make it an unserious book. It just has its own kind of beauty and pleasure.
And the love story between Myra and Alex is what you show up for. Who doesn't love a happily-ever-after?

Read it? Yes! Just don't expect it to survive close plot scrutiny.

Resources

Behind This Post

The outline I wrote

1. I found the premise really clever: a physical world and a tiny world
   that are linked. Cool!
2. I was impressed with scenes that snapped together, like the Vienna
   sausages. In scene 1, Grandpa appears to be a doddering, out-of-touch
   old man. In scene 2, we learn that trauma has shaped his world, so
   what looks like hoarding is neatly put into context.
3. Everything snapping together perfectly felt great in the moment, but
   on even a little introspection it felt like a bit too simplistic a
   worldview.
4. It took me trying to read a book about Vietnam to realize: at this
   moment, I needed the magic and perfect love story of The Minuscule
   Mansion of Myra Malone.

Read it? Yes! Just don't expect it to survive close plot scrutiny.

Friday, October 30, 2026

Unclogging the Publishing Pipeline: Introducing Just the Facts Posts

This is a Just the Facts (JTF) post: generated by AI from my own raw material (voice memos, session notes) and a short outline I wrote, then checked by me. This post explains what that means.

I'm way behind on blogging. I've been trying to finish posting about our January trip to Hawaii, and it's November. So I'm trying an experiment: Just the Facts (JTF) posts. I supply the raw material and a short outline of the points I want to make. AI pulls the supporting details from that material, and I get a factual, bulleted post that I can actually finish.

The Problem

It's November and I'm still posting about our January trip to Hawaii.
My plan is to spend an hour a day on writing and the blog, but that hour keeps getting eaten. Something always seems to get in the way.
Part of the problem is that I think real posts deserve depth and research, and that takes time I don't have right now.

The Obvious Choices

Wait until I have free time. From what I can tell, that's never going to happen. Even when the current busy stretch ends, something else will probably come up.
Have AI pick up the slack. At a minimum I'd lose my voice, and at worst I'd be publishing AI slop.
- Voice: AI writing can sound great, but it won't sound like me, and its word choices can make it generic. When I do use AI for writing, I spend a lot of time making sure the result sounds like me.
- Facts: AI fills in gaps, and it can present a set of facts in a way that isn't quite true.

The Middle Ground

Combine three things:
- Verbose raw content: voice memos, notes AI generated during work sessions, code, and resources worth pointing to.
- A short, hand-written outline that lists the specific facts I want the post to cover.
- An AI prompt that asks for a fact-heavy post built around the outline, using only the raw content.
The outline is the key piece. Summarizing my memos on their own wasn't enough. I tested this with a book review: four memos about one novel came to about 200 lines of notes, when I wanted about ten bullet points. Asking AI to merge them got it down to 69 lines, which was still long and repetitive and full of spoilers. When I added a short four-point outline, the same memos produced a 44-line review that said what I meant.
The hope is a Just the Facts post: one that covers the key information I want to publish, gets the facts right, and doesn't read like AI slop.

What Makes This Work

Raw content is easy to come by. I already have plenty, and making more is simple.
- Voice memos: I hit record on my phone and talk. FolderSync pushes the recording to S3, a script transcribes it, and Claude summarizes it into an org file.
- Coding sessions: I end the session with "write this session up as detailed notes."
- The Claude summaries of my memos are surprisingly good. They turn long, rambling recordings into something much more coherent than I remember saying.
I take the key decisions away from the AI.
- Don't guess at facts: use the raw content.
- Don't guess at the key points: use the outline.
- Don't guess at the tone: keep it informational and bulleted.
Each step is bite-sized. Recording the raw content, drafting the outline, generating the post, and editing it are all small jobs. The creative decisions should take minutes, not hours.

What May Make This Fail

The posts could end up incoherent. Will they make good reading? Maybe not, which is why this is an experiment. Still, a post that's factual and gets the information across has value.
Even with all the guidance, I'm still asking AI to produce something automatically, so it could go off the rails.

This Is About Me, but It's Also About You

Publishing just feels good. Hitting the publish button is a free dopamine rush, and it feels like I'm getting something done. Not publishing feels just as icky.
So yes, JTFs help me feel unstuck.
But this isn't just about pushing out content.
A main goal of my blog is to give back to the system that has helped me. Many of the software tools I use every day are open source, and a lot of the advice I follow comes from things people published on the web.
The blog is my way of giving back. That might be a short elisp function that makes life in Emacs a little better, or some hard-won advice we learned visiting a water park.
JTFs are meant to be light on style but heavy on what matters: bits of wisdom other people can use.

Resources

Behind This Post

The outline I wrote

1. I have a problem posting - I've been trying to finish posting about our trip to Hawaii in Januaray, and it's November!
2. The obvious choices:
   1. wait until I have free time - which by all indications will never happen
   2. have AI pick up the slack, but if I do that, I risk at a minimum
      losing my voice and at a maximum producing AI slop
3. Middle Ground: what if I combine three things:
   1. Verbose raw content: memos, AI generated notes from sessions, code, notable resources
   2. A short, hand written specific outline calling out the facts I'd like post
   3. An AI prompt asking to write a facts-heavy, outlined focused 'post' from these items
   4. The hope: I arrive at 'Just the Facts' post: a post that conveys
      key information that I want to publish, that's factually
      accurate and doesn't end up reading like AI slop
4. What makes this work:
   1. I have both existing raw content, and new raw content is easy to
      make. It's a simple as hitting record on my phone's voice app
      and talking, or ending a coding session with 'write this session
      up as detailed notes'
   2. I'm taking key decisions away from the AI: don't guess at facts
      (use the content),  don't guess the key points of the post (use
      the outline), don'rt geuss at the tone (keep it informational
      and bulletted)
   3. Each of these steps is designed to be bite sized: creating the
      raw content, drafting the outline, generating the post and
      editing. The creative decisions should take minutes, not hours
5. What may cause this experiment to fail:
   1. The posts may end up being incoherent
   2. As much as I'm guing the AI, I'm still asking it to create
      something automatically, so it may go off the rails
6. This is about me, but it's also about you
   1. Publishing literally feels good: hitting that publish button is
      a free dopamine rush, and I feel like I'm accompishing
      somemthing. Not publishing feels just as icky.
   2. So yes, JTFs help me feel unstuck
   3. But, this isn't just about pushing out content.
   4. A primary goal of my blog is to give back to the system that's
      helped me: many of the software tools I use every day are Open
      Source, much advice I follow comes from content published on the
      web.
   5. The blog gives me a platform for doing this. Whether it's short
      `elisp` function that makes life in emacs a little better, or
      some hard one advice we learned while visitng a water park,
      publishing let's me give back.
   6. JTFs are intended to be light on style, but heavy on what
      matters: bits of wisdom others can use.

Tuesday, August 04, 2026

Maui Adventure - Day 6: The Road to Hāna, Mile by Mile

[Composed 1/6/2026]

The Road to Hāna is Maui's most famous drive — cliffs, one-lane bridges, a waterfall around every bend — and from our base out on West Maui, we set off to see what all the fuss was about. Let's drive!

6:06 am · Mile 0 · 📍 map

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines! Still in the hotel parking garage, and our roles are already set: Shira at the wheel, making forward progress, and me riding shotgun with our guidebook — Frommer's Hawaiʻi — open on my lap, hunting for reasons to stop.

6:29 am · Mile 17 · 📍 map

Rolling before sunup. That's not us being heroic — it's the guidebook's recipe for doing Hāna in a day: leave just before sunrise so you cover the easy opening miles in the dark and hit the real road as the light comes up. The price is missing the hotel's gourmet breakfast; peanut butter on a tortilla by headlight it is.

6:45 am · Mile 26 · 📍 map

The first official Hāna Highway sign — we're pointed the right way! Don't be fooled, though: it's another 15 miles before this ordinary road becomes the Road to Hāna everyone means.

7:08 am · Mile 41 · 📍 map

A preview of coming attractions. I've been nervous about this adventure since long before we got in the car. The Road to Hāna has a reputation — cliffs, hairpin turns, one-lane bridges — and I don't love heights. From the first time I heard of it, some part of me was shopping for reasons to skip it. Now here we are, and I'm eyeing the GPS, waiting to find out how much of that reputation is earned.

7:09 am · Mile 41 · 📍 map

Mile Marker 0 — we've arrived! Only took 41 miles to get to mile zero. From here the markers count the historic road: the stretch that, as the guidebook tells it, was cut in 1926 by "pickax-wielding convicts" carving a shelf out of the cliff's edge.

7:29 am · Mile 44 · 📍 map

Twin Falls — the guidebook's first stop, and somehow both the least and most rewarding stop of our day. Least rewarding because it was a letdown: pay-to-park, the rain turned it into a muddy mess, and it broke our momentum. In the moment, it felt like a tourist trap. Most rewarding because of who we ran into: a couple from Texas, comparing notes as to how we'd arrived here. They'd driven the entire loop the day before, skipped Twin Falls, and doubled back to see what they'd missed. Wait — the whole loop? I was intrigued. I quizzed them about the details, and as we left Twin Falls a seed had been planted.

8:01 am · Mile 46 · 📍 map

One of our first single-lane bridges. And if this is what I'd been dreading, I figured, we've got this. Slow down, respect the yield sign, then slow down some more — a couple of bridges in, I'd relaxed. Of course, the bridges were only one piece of the reputation.

8:12 am · Mile 49 · 📍 map

TRUCK! OK, maybe I relaxed too soon. A car coming the other way is a polite negotiation; a full-size truck is a different math problem. The same strategy holds — slow way down and wait your turn.

8:17 am · Mile 50 · 📍 map

Check out these views! With the bridges conquered, my other worry was the hairpin turns and sheer drop-offs. Fifty miles in there had been plenty of wild turns, but thankfully no sheer drop-offs. It should be noted that Shira, not once in planning or executing this adventure, had any concerns about the drive. After years at the wheel for sketchy drives, it takes a lot more than a few one-lane bridges to faze her.

8:39 am · Mile 54 · 📍 map

The overlook at Kaumahina State Wayside. Nice views. Nice bathroom. Nice bird. Just nice.

9:03 am · Mile 56 · 📍 map

The black-sand beach at Honomanu Bay. Nothing to pay and hardly a soul around — a few local surfers doing their thing, one other set of visitors, and otherwise the cove was ours. Just black sand and surf. There's also a small shrine tucked in here — a living one, it turns out — but that's a story of its own, coming soon.

9:49 am · Mile 63 · 📍 map

A pretty typical view from a one-lane bridge: lush green and a picture-perfect jungle stream. And "typical" is the marvel of this road — it's just what's out the window the whole way. You don't have to hunt for the beauty here; it finds you.

10:10 am · Mile 65 · 📍 map

The perfect waterfall at Puaʻa Kaʻa. It had been raining in bursts all morning — one of the little things nagging at an otherwise glorious day. Then it clicked: the rain wasn't marring anything. It was powering some of the best parts. These falls don't run this full and this gorgeous without it.

10:21 am · Mile 66 · 📍 map

A mile on, another beauty: Hanawī Falls. Proof it would have been safe to skip Twin Falls: this is the very thing they were charging for, running free and gorgeous a few feet from the car.

10:29 am · Mile 67 · 📍 map

You'd think a truck like this filling the frame would be a high-pressure moment. Shira played it cool the whole time — never once rattled. She just waited her turn and kept on truck'n.

10:33 am · Mile 69 · 📍 map

Coconut Glen's! Genuinely tasty coconut ice cream. My one gripe: the eco-friendly coconut-shell bowl actually cost more than the throwaway cup. C'mon, man — your whole brand is coconuts. How are the shells the upsell?

11:23 am · Mile 71 · 📍 map

Our first major stop of the day: Kahanu Garden — "the garden with no flowers." That one earned a post all its own. Read it

12:42 pm · Mile 74 · 📍 map

Our second major stop of the day, on a timed reservation: Waiʻānapanapa State Park — the black-sand beach, a coastal hike, a gecko, a mongoose. Also its own post. Read it

3:16 pm · Mile 77 · 📍 map

And we're in Hāna! And to my own surprise, I have almost no pictures of the town. Is it because Hāna really is that tiny? Because I was so drained from the amazing journey so far? Because we still had one essential — and possibly stressful — question ahead: do the entire loop, or turn back? I honestly can't say. What I can say is this: the guidebook warns about the visitors who blow into Hāna and wonder what all the fuss is about — and with barely a photo, I feared that might be us.

3:34 pm · Mile 77 · 📍 map

A fantastic Thai dinner from a food truck in Hāna — and the answer to that fear: proof we'd made at least one real connection with the place. Vietnamese in a food court, now Thai from a food truck — Hawaii keeps serving up excellent meals in the most unexpected places.

4:11 pm · Mile 83 · 📍 map

Maybe it was the small gamble on the Thai food truck telling me to go all in — or maybe it was the seed that Texas couple planted back at Twin Falls, finally sprouting. Either way, I was now fully convinced: we should do the full loop. My yes was my completist nature cheering the decision on; Shira's was more the yes of someone planning to prove it a bad idea.

4:17 pm · Mile 84 · 📍 map

Wailua Falls — right off the road, and oh so pretty. And there's that crew of young folks again, goofing off — we'd leapfrogged this same friendly bunch a couple of times on the back half. Oh, it must be magical to do this road in your twenties, without a care in the world.

4:39 pm · Mile 88 · 📍 map

The small churchyard where Charles Lindbergh is buried. There's a lot more to this quiet spot than one grave — that's a post of its own, coming soon.

4:54 pm · Mile 90 · 📍 map

The guidebook flatly notes that rental-car companies warn you off this road — and right here, we got our first glimpse of why. What got to me was the not-knowing: does the road get rougher from here? And if it does — then what? With maybe an hour of daylight left, the odds of clearing the sketchy stretch before dark were slipping, and getting stranded out here after nightfall — exactly what everyone warns against — had gone from unlikely to uncomfortably plausible. The lone upside if it came to that: Shira would get to be right.

5:17 pm · Mile 96 · 📍 map

The road serves up a run of surprises. One: the dirt gives way to pristine, freshly-laid pavement — honestly the nicest we'd driven all day. Two: there's a catch — it's a single lane threaded with blind crests, and you come over each one with no idea what's barreling the other way. Three: this, it turns out — not the cliffs or the bridges I'd braced for all day — is the scariest driving of the whole trip. Four: look around — the jungle is falling away, and a whole new landscape is opening up.

5:24 pm · Mile 99 · 📍 map

It's like we've crossed onto a whole new side of Maui — and, actually, we had. Wide-open hills, sweeping golden vistas: I hadn't expected any of it, and it turned out to be one of the trip's real gems. We'd rounded the back of the island, out of the wet, windward jungle and onto Haleakalā's dry, leeward flank.

5:55 pm · Mile 106 · 📍 map

As the sun set, the road opened back up to two full lanes — right on schedule. Out before sunrise, home after sunset: exactly the plan, and amazingly, we'd hit it almost to the minute.

6:50 pm · Mile 137 · 📍 map

The back half of the loop is complete, and near Kahului we rejoin the Hāna Highway — the same sign we flagged this morning back at Mile 26 — for the final stretch home. We can't help but reflect on how much went right today: the "bumper-to-bumper rental-car parade" the guidebook warned of never showed, the rain turned out to be a gift, and our timing fell right into place.

7:32 pm · Mile 164 · 📍 map

Made it! Amazing driving, Babe!

Doing Hāna in a day can go wrong in a dozen ways, but between our planning, my insatiable curiosity, Shira's driving and her careful watch on the clock, and a healthy dose of good luck, we'd nailed it.

Two more stories from this drive are still to come — stay tuned.

The route

The full loop — about 164 driving miles, from West Maui out to Hāna and back around the dry south side of the island.