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.
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.
An idea while walking the dog turned into a working app before lunch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 silent
Gap from
Resumed
287
Jan 2019
Oct 2019
← near Halloween
279
Jan 2014
Nov 2014
← near Halloween
256
Feb 2022
Oct 2022
← near Halloween
249
Jan 2015
Oct 2015
← near Halloween
232
Mar 2021
Oct 2021
← near Halloween
224
Nov 2019
Jun 2020
211
Jan 2024
Aug 2024
208
Aug 2020
Mar 2021
194
Apr 2023
Oct 2023
← near Halloween
179
May 2018
Oct 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
Stacked total per year
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
