Small Hive Beetles are pest to bee hives. This shows how effective using diatomaceous earth can be in beetle traps.
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.
Using IKEA PÄRKLA storage cases to hold bee hive boxes
I saw this on the internet and decided to give it a try.
Inexpensive storage cases that just happen to fit deep and medium bee boxes.
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.
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.
Creating things on a whim feels a little magical.
The code is up at Github: https://github.com/cruftbox/phosphor
Refining Beeswax
How I refine beeswax from old honeycomb and cappings.
I built a steam wax melter from a wallpaper steamer and some old bee boxes.
Works great for getting the wax out of nasty old comb.
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.
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.
| Title | Date | Words | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | My Years as a Metaverse Warlord | 2023-04-19 | 3,319 |
| 2 | The Long, Long Arm of Google | 2007-10-09 | 2,546 |
| 3 | A year in the empty offices | 2021-03-10 | 2,000 |
| 4 | Year Two in the empty offices | 2022-02-17 | 1,898 |
| 5 | Notes from SXSW 2003 | 2003-03-13 | 1,761 |
| 6 | Two months with a Chevy Bolt | 2017-06-30 | 1,714 |
| 7 | Pulp Fiction | 2004-10-20 | 1,614 |
| 8 | The sad state of smart homes | 2026-04-08 | 1,595 |
| 9 | A hard summer | 2025-12-30 | 1,583 |
| 10 | Two months with a Tesla Model Y | 2020-08-12 | 1,549 |
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.
Releasing the queens
A brief hive inspection to release the new queens into their colonies.
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.
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.