mastodon 4.7.2Empty Nester
Cycling/Beekeeping/Gaming
Smoking Meats/Reading/Tinkering
More at cruftbox.com
Advice for someone in their 20s from someone in their 50s
Take care of your body - Your teeth and joints need to last a lifetime. Find exercise you actually enjoy so it doesn’t become a chore.
Have at least one hobby - Something creative or physical, just for you. Work and family don't count.
Be of service to others - It doesn’t have to be big. Small acts matter more than you think.
Nostalgia is a trap - Keep learning. Keep trying new things. Participate in the future, not the past.
Fresh beeswax
I wanted to attract birds to my new birdhouse, so I 3D printed a bird feeder and put some dried mealworms in it. Fingers crossed.
Made babyback ribs today
This is a gentle reminder that you should probably change the air filters in your home.
It's probably been a while.
Did a last little bit of beeswax refining in the mini melter I use to make candles.
Adventures in beekeeping:
Turned old honeycomb and cappings into clean refined beeswax.
Here's how I do it. 🐝
Timelapse video of me replacing the CMOS battery and doing the "100Ω fix" on a QNAP TS-451+
First birdsign in the bird house!
This Is Just To Say
I am visiting
Beijing
while the war
keeps burning
and which
probably
doesn’t make
any sense
forgive me
I needed
everyone
looking elsewhere
My current theory is that crows are the creatures running the simulation we live in.
I've had Blackwing pencils since they restarted and have been subscribed to Volumes since the very first one.
I'm also a television engineer who has dealt with color bars my entire career.
The latest volume is about color bars, which is amazing. I would have chosen 525 as the number. IYKYK
Tired of morning doomscrolling?
I built Firstlight, a self-hosted app that prints a one-page morning briefing before you wake up.
Just weather, calendar, sports scores, news, and to-dos.
A calmer default than reaching for my phone at 6AM.
https://cruftbox.com/2026/05/18/firstlight-you-cant-doomscroll-a-piece-of-paper/
Stop doomscrolling
Monday Recommendations: Tech Podcasts
404Media is a small team of investigative journalists doing great work.
Everyone should be reading and listening to them.
Many people don't realize that drying laundry or streaming media consumes orders of magnitude more electricity than using an LLM.
We all have different ideas about 'acceptable' energy use.
Usually, it's 'waste' if you don't like it and 'necessity' if you do.
I'll take the GPU cycles. Most of us aren't Amish.
My friend @mathowie@xoxo.zone analyzed 26 years of his blog.
I gave it a shot on the old and venerable Cruftbox.
Turns out 27 years of my blogging can be distilled into a few charts and some uncomfortable truths about my posting habits.
Making a batch of antifa super-soldier serum
Why you are buying into the SpaceX IPO whether you like it or not
How to make babyback ribs
Adventures in beekeeping:
Trapping Small Hive Beetles in Diatomaceous Earth
My brother Matt wrote a good post about "The Curious George Effect"
https://mattpusateri.substack.com/p/donald-trump-and-the-curious-george
An idea while walking the dog turned into a working app before lunch.
I used Claude to recreate the Matrix digital rain in my Windows Terminal.
Creating on a whim still feels like magic.
https://cruftbox.com/2026/05/03/phosphor-matrix-style-digital-rain/
Sunday morning
A good article and graphics about the Artemis II mission. [Gift Link]
Great work by Marco Hernandez and Kenneth Chang.
Great article and graphics on the NBA draft and teams tanking [Gift Link]
Technology rarely disappears once discovered.
Truthfully, AI & LLMs aren't going away.
You can't 'wish it away to the cornfields'.
Unlike leaded gas, DDT, or CFCs, there's no replacement waiting.
What we can do is shape how they’re used with standards, laws, and norms.
This Is Just To Say
We have raised
our voice
in the streets
of town
and which
you were probably
hoping would
stay quiet
forgive us
we stayed
so defiant
and so many
Current Status
We have a few ceiling fans that are Bluetooth controlled, but not smart home aware.
Leaping into the void, I got Alexa to control it via an elaborate path that involved spinning up Home Assistant and using a Bluetooth proxy.
Not for the faint of heart. I deserve a merit badge for this.
The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
- Winston Churchill
My friend Matt turned me on to Mealie, a self-hosted app where you can keep and manage your recipes. It can scrape the web for most recipes. It doesn't directly import text or word files. Most of my family recipes are these kind of files.
Made a small Python script that converts those files to the proper JSON format for mealie to consume. It uses Claude for the conversion.
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
There's a game out there, and the stakes are high.
And the guy who runs it figures the averages all day long and all night long.
Once in a while he lets you steal a pot.
But if you stay in the game long enough, you've got to lose.
And once you've lost there's no way back, no way at all.
- Dalton Trumbo
TIL:
Ultra vires = Latin for "beyond one's legal power or authority"
I got tired of waiting for Goodreads' year-end recap, so I built my own.
Year in Books pulls your last 12 months of reading any time you want and spits out a stats in various formats.
https://cruftbox.com/2026/05/11/year-in-books-goodreads-tool/
Cynicism, to me, is trying to make people as unhappy as you are.
- Ricky Gervais
I may need to pick up a Dodgers Lunch Box Burger when I go to the game on Monday. [Gift Link]
Adventures in beekeeping:
I tried using IKEA PÄRKLA storage cases to hold bee hive boxes.
