Year in Books – Goodreads Tool

I like reading and use Goodreads to help me keep track of books I’ve read. Goodreads gives you a year-end summary, which is great, but it only shows up in December. I wanted something I could generate any time that looked at the last twelve months, regardless of time of year.

So I built Year in Books, a new feature in my goodreads-tools project. It pulls your Goodreads read shelf via RSS, windows the last 12 months on a rolling basis, looks up genres through the Google Books API, and renders everything into nice graphics.

The output comes in four flavors: straight HTML, a PDF, a full-width web PNG, and a 9:16 social media PNG sized for Instagram, Bluesky, or Mastodon. HTML is generated and rendered into the PDF and PNGs. There’s a simple web UI to download the various versions.

For my kind of brain, these kinds of stats are interesting. I can see how my reading lines up with other events in my life.

This layout is what I like, but the code is here to modify as you might see fit:

https://github.com/cruftbox/goodreads-tools

The Yellow Hive got robbed out

The weak Yellow Hive got robbed out by another bee colony.

Robbing is when another colony comes and steals/eats the honey in a weak hive. I noticed the sign of chewed up wax cappings and did an inspection.

During the robbing here is some fighting, where bees die, but usually the remaining bees and queen abscond.  Absconding is when bees leave a hive because it’s unsuitable due to damage, moisture, mites, pests, or being robbed.  They fly off to find a new home. A low success rate for an already weak colony.

Yellow Hive Robbed Out – May 5th, 2026

The weak Yellow Hive got robbed out, meaning another bee colony came in and stole all their honey.

Phosphor – Matrix-style digital rain

While walking the dog I wondered how hard it would be to recreate the Matrix digital rain, a visual that’s lived rent-free in my head since 1999.

1999 seems like both yesterday and a million years ago.

A person sits at a complex workstation surrounded by multiple computer monitors displaying green Matrix-style code and various digital interfaces, with cables and equipment scattered throughout the dimly lit space.

Turns out it was pretty easy for Claude. With a brief description prompt of what I wanted, it got to work. I added the idea of occasional RGB ‘threads’ falling through for a little flourish.

I think using the superpowers agent harness was a bit of overkill, but it helped me learn the process.

My desktop computer runs Windows, so Claude decided to make a .Net executable that runs inside terminal. I don’t even have to run an app. It’s just a pulldown inside of terminal.

Windows Terminal dropdown menu showing various shell options including PowerShell, Command Prompt, Azure Cloud Shell, Phosphor, and Developer tools, along with settings and utility options at the bottom.

An idea while walking the dog turned into a working app before lunch.

Creating things on a whim feels a little magical.

The code is up at Github: https://github.com/cruftbox/phosphor

Cruftbox Archive Analysis

My friend Matt did an analysis of his longtime blog. Looks amazing.

I’ve been blogging since 2000. That’s an effing long time.

I exported the entire archive and asked Claude to help me build a tool to generate something similar.

Like Matt and others the arrival of Twitter and other microblogging made for a quiet era. The blog was rebuilt in 2024 thanks to Greg.

Clearly I’ve been posting more since then.

Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

Archive analysis — 2000–2026

Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft has been publishing since 2000. Over 27 years, 1,762 posts have accumulated 365,517 words. The typical post runs just 119 words. At its most prolific, March 2003 brought 48 posts in a single month; recent years are quieter, but the archive has never gone fully dark.

1,762
Posts Published
27
Years Active
365,517
Words Written
207
Avg Words / Post
119
Typical Post Length
122
Posts w/ Video

Posts Per Year

Publishing peaked in 2002 with 335 posts and has settled to 23 in 2026. The early years dominate — see the golden era note below.

0 70 140 210 280 350 75 2000 79 2001 335 2002 330 2003 237 2004 140 2005 122 2006 110 2007 68 2008 39 2009 24 2010 24 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 54 2025 23 2026
The Golden Era. March 2003 was the single busiest month — 48 posts in one month. The top 9 busiest calendar months are all from 2002–2003, which together account for 38% of the entire archive.

Average Post Length Per Year

Post length has never grown consistently — average post length has ranged from 18 words (2025) and 904 words (2016). Most years cluster between 60 and 150 words, reflecting an archive that has always leaned toward short-form writing.

0 190 380 570 760 950 2000 2003 2006 2009 2012 2015 2018 2021 2024 2026

Posts by Day of Week

Mon is the most active publishing day (303 posts); Sat the quietest (194). Weekdays average 258 posts each; weekends 234 — the gap is smaller than you might expect.

0 70 140 210 280 350 303 Mon 261 Tue 264 Wed 253 Thu 212 Fri 194 Sat 275 Sun

Time of Day

Two peaks dominate: 9pm (147 posts) and 9am (139 posts). The pattern points to writing before the workday or after it — the midday hours are notably quiet by comparison.

0 30 60 90 120 150 71 12am 25 3am 13 51 6am 132 111 139 9am 99 69 55 12pm 66 85 68 3pm 57 73 59 6pm 71 101 147 9pm 127 122

Most Prolific Weeks

The single busiest week was 2002-W19, with 17 posts in seven days. All 20 of the top 20 most prolific weeks fall before 2010 — that pace has never been matched since.

0 4 8 12 16 20 17 2002-W19 16 2003-W10 13 2003-W11 12 2002-W17 12 2002-W33 12 2003-W09 11 2002-W25 11 2002-W44 11 2002-W50 11 2003-W01 11 2003-W07 11 2003-W24 10 2002-W13 10 2002-W18 10 2002-W28 10 2002-W34 10 2002-W47 10 2003-W18 10 2003-W48 9 2002-W20

The Halloween Anchor

7 of the 10 longest posting silences ended in October or November. The blog may go quiet for months at a stretch, but Halloween reliably brings it back. The longest gap: 287 days from January 2019 to October 2019.

Days silentGap fromResumed
287Jan 2019Oct 2019← near Halloween
279Jan 2014Nov 2014← near Halloween
256Feb 2022Oct 2022← near Halloween
249Jan 2015Oct 2015← near Halloween
232Mar 2021Oct 2021← near Halloween
224Nov 2019Jun 2020
211Jan 2024Aug 2024
208Aug 2020Mar 2021
194Apr 2023Oct 2023← near Halloween
179May 2018Oct 2018← near Halloween

Embedded Videos

Vimeo leads with 80 videos across 122 posts, followed by YouTube (66). 2008 was the peak year for video embeds; TikTok shows up almost entirely in the most recent posts.

66
YouTube Videos
80
Vimeo Videos
12
TikTok Videos
158
Total Videos

Videos per year by platform

YouTube Vimeo TikTok 0 4 8 12 16 20 2000 2003 2006 2009 2012 2015 2018 2021 2024 2026

Stacked total per year

YouTube Vimeo TikTok 0 5 10 15 20 25 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 8 2006 13 2007 24 2008 20 2009 16 2010 14 2011 3 2012 3 2013 3 2014 3 2015 2 2016 3 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 5 2023 7 2024 24 2025 6 2026

Top 10 Longest Posts

The longest post — “My Years as a Metaverse Warlord” (3,319 words, 2023) — stands well apart from the rest: the typical post here is just 119 words. Most long-form entries are annual reference posts or personal essays.

TitleDateWords
1My Years as a Metaverse Warlord2023-04-193,319
2The Long, Long Arm of Google2007-10-092,546
3A year in the empty offices2021-03-102,000
4Year Two in the empty offices2022-02-171,898
5Notes from SXSW 20032003-03-131,761
6Two months with a Chevy Bolt2017-06-301,714
7Pulp Fiction2004-10-201,614
8The sad state of smart homes2026-04-081,595
9A hard summer2025-12-301,583
10Two months with a Tesla Model Y2020-08-121,549
Generated 2026-05-01 from WordPress XML export.

It’s a bit humbling to realize that twenty-seven years of my life can be distilled into a few hundred tokens and a series of vector embeddings. Claude managed to find ‘consistent themes of technical curiosity,’ which is a very polite way of saying I’ve been complaining about broken APIs and proprietary cables since the Clinton administration.

Twenty-seven years of blogging and my most consistent behavior is apparently disappearing every January and crawling back for Halloween like a vampire who forgot what month it was. At least I’m reliable about something.

With video now the dominant form on social media, a lot of my recent posts are just embeds of videos I’ve made. I do enjoy making videos. It’s powerful storytelling, which is a strange thing to say about a clip of me opening a beehive.

Looking ahead to the next quarter-century of Cruftbox, I’ll keep writing posts, even if they are basically just long tweets.

I regret nothing.

Making pastrami

I first tried making pastrami almost 20 years ago.

I saw the cheap corned beef at the supermarket and decided it was time to try again.

I keep my expectations low and it turned out better than I hoped. I think an actual meat slicer would help as I can’t really slice deli thin to get the right texture.

How to make pastrami #smoking #pastrami

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

Paying with a magic wand

I saw someone on the internet using a magic wand to pay and wanted to try it myself.

The 3D printed wand is a holder for a credit or debit card with the NFC chip for “contactless” payment.

The print was fairly simple and it worked well at the various stores.

Paying with a magic wand #3dprinting #magicwand #contactless #nfc

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

Splitting bee hives

I was going to make a video of this, but the SD in the camera filled up five minutes in.

The Green Hive needed to be split. It was my last hive using two deep boxes and the frames inside were old and deep brown in color.

The hive had swarmed several weeks ago and there was a new feral queen inside. Lots of bees, but I didn’t want that feral queen to get started.

I picked up a couple of new VSH Pol-line 2.2 queens. They breed them up in San Luis Obispo.

A white cardboard box labeled "LIVE QUEEN BEES" and "RUSH" sits secured with a gray seatbelt on a car seat.


Took me a while going through the boxes, frame by frame, until I finally found the feral queen in the bottom box, trying to hide.

A clear plastic queen clip sits on a white box with "QUEEN BEES" visible in green text, containing a captured queen bee.


Once I had her in a clip, I was able to split up the frames and bees quickly.

I installed the two new queens and am hoping for the best. I might add a brood frame from the Pink & Green hives, but going to let the ladies settle a bit before I do that.

Colorful wooden beehive boxes in green, yellow, and blue are stacked on concrete blocks and 4x4 lumber.