Greg.Randall

January 28th 2026

I hit my Claude Code limit and needed to keep working my project using another LLM. If you use plan mode, Claude saves those plans and you can grab them and pass them into another LLM. Claude Code saves plan markdown files in two places:

• ./.claude/plans/
• ~/.claude/plans/

The files have random names like gentle-gliding-bear.md, sort by timestamp or grep for words related to your current project!

January 26th 2026

I’ve had this little vacuum since 2019 (~7 years at the time I’m writing this).

I replaced the batteries a couple of years ago and more than doubled the runtime when it was new. I had to take the battery apart and weld new cells in, it’d be nice if they sold replacement batteries.

In the last few months, it’s started making a terrible squealing noise with no suction. The squeal will go away if I bump the vacuum really hard or turn it on and off several times in a row, but it’s been getting worse requiring more bumps or on/off cycles.

I finally got around to taking the vacuum apart again, and the brass bushings on the motor are shot. I suspect you could extend the life of the vacuum by putting some oil on the bushings once a year but mine are too far gone for that.

The motor is labeled:
Leshi Motor
LS-545PC-63483
14.4V
180120/C

I was not able to find that part number for sale anywhere.

Here are the dimensions of the motor:

• Motor diameter: 35.5mm
• Motor body length (not including shaft): 59mm
• Motor length overall (including shaft): 90mm
• Shaft length: 30mm
• Shaft diameter: 3.17mm (1/8″?)
• Mounting screw spacing at front near shaft: 25mm

The motor is apparently a standard size overall “rs-545”, but this motor has a very long shaft. It looks like most of the motors sold in this size have a ~8mm long shaft. I think you could JUST get away with using a motor that has a 15mm shaft, but 20-30mm would be better. This motor from eBay for ~$12 including shipping (vmotor v060268), has been working fine for a week in the vacuum.

I did drill a hole in the motor shroud so I could get to the end bearing without complete disassembly, I think the front bearings are JUST reachable with the shroud on. Hope this motor lasts at least as long as the first one did!

December 15th 2025

Some years ago, I had a thought about abridged and unabridged books. I wondered what would happen if we took the abridged version and subtracted it from the unabridged one.

What would be left is a new thing. The “bridged” edition. All the words nobody wants.

I wrote some code and tried this with several books – but abridging involves too much rewriting, the diffs were nonsense.

I had read the British and American version of Harry Potter and wondered if there might be difference beyond the normal loo becoming toilet, jumper becoming sweater, and motorbike becoming motorcycle.

I wondered if the bridged book code would work here.

tldr; check out the US-UK comparisons.

Dean Thomas

I expected mostly small dialect changes. Then my script produced this:

That’s … strange.

This description of Dean Thomas appears only in the American version. Was it in the original manuscript and later cut in the UK? Did the US editors ask for it to be added? I do not know.

Update: I spent some more time searching and found this explanation:

The Code

I wrote a pipeline to compare the books. Ebooks are messy, so I had to clean them up before I could diff them.

Here is what I used:

• Calibre: I used ebook-convert to extract raw text from different ebook formats.
• Normalization: I used ftfy to fix Unicode problems. I also wrote regex rules for things like honorifics. The UK uses “Mr” while the US uses “Mr.”.
• Comparison and ignoring: The tool walks through the books word by word. It checks a list of known dialect swaps and ignores pairs like “color” and “colour”, so the output is not flooded with spelling noise. I also used Double Metaphone. If two words sound the same, the script ignores them.

What Else Changed?

Here are a few odd changes among many:

Chamber of Secrets: Apparition Explanation

The US version adds a whole world-building segment that’s not in the UK version.

Chamber of Secrets: Lucius Malfoy’s Entrance

The US version gives Lucius Malfoy a rougher entrance. It explains why he looks disheveled – Dobby was wiping his shoes. The UK version cuts this context.

Prisoner of Azkaban: Dementor Release

The US version is more explicit about the Dementor letting Harry go.

Deathly Hallows: The Ear Joke

There’s an ear-joke adjustment.

The Reports

I generated interactive reports for all seven books. I’ve left out all the Mom/Mum and Color/Colour changes but otherwise, you can use the filters to see the actual additions and removals.

• Book 1: The Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s Stone
• Book 2: The Chamber of Secrets
• Book 3: The Prisoner of Azkaban
• Book 4: The Goblet of Fire
• Book 5: The Order of the Phoenix
• Book 6: The Half-Blood Prince
• Book 7: The Deathly Hallows

I am working on generalizing the code so I can use it for other comparisons soon. If you find any other odd differences in the reports, let me know.

September 27th 2025

I replaced the battery in my Tile Slim! It uses a little tiny pouch cell (Ultralife CP114951 3.1v 380mAh).

Be careful, this is going into scary lithium battery territory. I shaved the plastic from the edges of the Tile Slim until I could peel the plastic shell apart; if I were to do it again, I think that I would sand the edges using some 80 or 120 grit sandpaper. The pouch cell inside is protected by a thin sheet 0.0015″ (0.0381mm) of stainless-steel top and bottom that’s glued in.

After you get into the package, you’ll need to trim off a bit of the rubber around the pouch cell terminals. Trim the terminals as close to the edge of the pouch cell as possible without cutting the pouch cell, while also not shorting your scissors across the terminals!

The pouch cell plus the stainless-steel plus the glue is about 0.0580″ (1.48mm). I wanted to stick close to that but figured going over a bit was ok. With a bit of measuring I figured out I could just fit five CR2016 0.787×0.0629″ (20×1.6mm) batteries in parallel in the case in a “X” configuration.

So, I got out the battery welder and cut some thin nickel strips and started welding. I applied some little strips of Kapton tape to make sure nothing shorted.

I had to add some little extensions to the tabs on the Tile board and then welded the batteries onto the tile board. Finally, a bit of packing tape closes the case back up! I could glue it back together but seems like a pain to undo in a couple years when the batteries need to be replaced again.

March 19th 2025

Instagram is never going to get better. The same goes for all the big social sites—Facebook, Xitter, Reddit, and the like. Sure, there’s some enshittification happening, but it’s mostly about them keeping your eyes glued to a feed full of low-quality ads and posts from strangers. A friend might send you a link, and before you know it, you’ve spent half an hour scrolling through junk.

So, I finally deleted my Instagram account. I didn’t want to be a product they could sell or deal with all their pandering politics. And with Instagram getting worse every day, the choice became easier.

But I wasn’t ready to lose my Instagram entirely. It’s a neat slice of my history, so I exported all my data. What I got was a mess—450 JSON files and 4500 other files that aren’t very easy to browse. On top of that, some image files had the wrong extensions.

I first thought about making one HTML file you could just drop your export into. But thanks to modern browsers and their CORS rules, that wasn’t possible because the JSON files couldn’t be read directly. So, I ended up writing a PHP script that processes all the JSON, video, and image files to build a single HTML file along with a folder of images.

The PHP script grew into a jumble of fallbacks and error checks just to handle all the quirks in the data. I’m convinced they made the export as unwieldy as possible on purpose. Many HEIC files are actually JPGs with the wrong extensions, many videos lack thumbnails, and so on. It’s a perfect example of how platforms make it hard to leave—even when they let you “take your data with you.”

My tool—named Memento Mori (a bit overdramatically)—takes all those files and builds a neat website you can host on your own server. It even shows a date span from your first post to your last post. It feels a bit odd to recreate Instagram’s look to get away from Instagram, but I wanted to make it easier for folks to break free.

Anyway, here’s my export.