B r i a n   V e r k l e y

https://github.com/bverkley/btemp

I have a new computer, and I wanted to see how the temperature of things like the CPU and NVMe was affected over time.  I've used btop for a long time love  it. (https://github.com/aristocratos/btop)  btop gives me the current temp, and nice little console graphs for utilization of things like cpu, network, memory, etc.  

So I asked cursor to create me an app, inspired by btop, for console graphs of my temp readouts.  In rust, because I don't know the rust programming language at all, and Cursor listed it as a top 3 choice for languages to use for this project.

The app works.  I can visually see how long compiles drives up my temp, and how quickly it recovers.  I pushed the code up to github, and released it to the public.  

So far, no one has cared, but that's ok.  It worked for me, and I'm happy.

I wrote some blog software a long long time ago.  All in perl, which is the language I used for everything at the time.  I did it mostly because I could, and blogging was "cool" then.  Through some iteration of the code I added Leanne as an author, and September 12th, 2006, that version of the blog went live.

I ran that for years, but sometime around when we moved from Ajax to Pickering, I stopped hosting it on the internet.   I barely blogged and during some computer upgrade, it just didn't seem important enough to update.  Always at the bottom of my todo list.  

The problem was, everything was out dated.  The blog was in perl, which almost no one uses anymore, on apache as the web server, which is mostly unnecessary for this kind of web app, and backed by mysql for the database, which is way overkill for a few bits of text.  It really needed to be modernized, because patching and dragging it along was way too much work.  But re-writing it all was also too much work.  

Fast forward a few years, and along comes Cursor (https://cursor.com/).  Cursor is an application that helps you write code.  You describe the application you want, and then it uses backend API calls to AI models like Claude Opus, OpenAI Codex, or their own coding model, to generate your code.  As a kind of test I said, here is my old website, I want you to rewrite this whole thing in a modern language.  I even want you to copy over the old posts and comments.  But I need updated everything, including proper Google authentication, rather than my fairly insecure home grown version.  

And it did. Here it is.  Written in Go, a language I don’t understand, which has its own built in web serving ability, and backed by sqlite, a database I can never remember the commands for, but is much better suited to this task.   I asked for the app.  The AI wrote the app.  

So I’m back online.  And the whole archive of blogs is back online.   You can read about a random Saturday from 2005 (https://ajax.verkley.com/story/4) or what I thought about the iPhone when it came out (https://ajax.verkley.com/story/143) or even way back when I thought mobile computing would be a thing. (https://ajax.verkley.com/story/22).  ChatGPT tells me that if you bought $1000 worth of Apple shares back when I wrote that, they’d be worth about $175,000 now.   So, I bet you don’t want to miss a post now, do you!   (sadly, I also did not buy Apple shares then.)

So I was putting Easton to sleep and I started to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when he said, "Stop." and put his hand over my mouth.
"B's" he says.  
I look at him puzzled.
"Daddy!" he shouts. "B's!"
Then he starts to sing on his own, "a blah blah blah" to the tune of ABC's.
Ah, I get it, so I start to sing ABC's and he says "Ya!" and puts his head down and goes to sleep.

That's right, Easton (1 year old still) just requested his own night time song by name.

We bought a tractor.  OK a lawn tractor technically but it has a three point hitch, hydraulics, and a 62" cutting deck.  It looks like a tractor.  It feels like a tractor.

Paul delivered it while I was out of town, so tonight was my first chance to use it.  Ohhh ya.  It has crazy power.  I cut over small trees on half throttle and it didn't even blink a headlight.  I drove it up hill while cutting and pulling a wagon and it asked for more work.  It is a tractor.

We were looking for a while and we couldn't find a used John Deere X500 series tractor anywhere in Ontario for a reasonable price.  The X500 is the smallest "ground engaging" tractor, meaning you can run a tiller, or a cultivator, or a box blade, or whatever.  It also has the frame to pull a load and the power to drive a larger than 48" deck.  Then we came across a used X700 in Listowel for a little more than we were thinking of paying for the X500.  The X700 is the big brother.  Not only can you do ground engaging but you can add an optional front loader, or hydraulic front mounted snow blower, or run a 10KW generator off the rear PTO.  Yes, it has a PTO.  We took it.  More than we need but who is complaining about extra power.

The plan for now is to cut the weeds down, pick some rocks, and hopefully plant some seedlings.  We'll need the tractor and wagon for all of that.

Seems like this machine will work and it was sure fun to drive.