I decided to revamp all of my WordPress websites. My main goals were to go as minimal as possible. The steps I wanted to take were:

• Migrate to a basic theme
• Create a design using AI and implement it
• Remove or reduce as many plugins as possible

I started with krynsky.com and for the re-design I used the newly released ChatGPT Image 2 model to analyze my current site and create a new design based on prompts I provided. I iterated for a while and once happy with the home page image it created, I took it to Claude Design. I provided the image and asked it to create a new design system based on the provided image and had it create preview html designs with color accent options to decide which path to take. When ready I had Claude Design create a handoff markdown file and provided that along with the preview html files and the ChatGPT design image to Claude Code to get started.

I researched themes to switch to for the new design and landed on the Blocksy theme based on my needs. This replaced the current Astra Pro theme paired with the Spectra website builder. Once I provided all the design elements to Claude Code I had it use WordPress to apply the design to the Blocksy theme as much as possible and create any custom code necessary to implement things not supported. Most of this was done directly by Claude with the admin account access I provided. In some cases it instructed me to use the admin UI for some settings.

I used Claude Code to do an analysis of my current WordPress stack as well. I decided to remove quite a few plugins. I feel that most of the plugins removed added too much overhead and complicated UI elements in the admin and I wanted to reduce that. I also wanted to bring functionality locally where possible instead of using third party web services.

Beyond the design we reviewed every plugin and removed several and migrated others. The biggest changes came from removing Jetpack which I was using for several functions. I ended up using Koko analytics, contact form 7, and Mailpoet to replace its features. Yes, it increased plugin count in this case but I feel the value gained was worth it.

For the new Projects section of the site Claude installed and configured Advanced Custom Fields along with Code Snippets plugins to add this new content type and provide the custom designs the cards used. Code Snippets was also used for any other functionality needed by the design not supported directly in the theme. Beyond that the only other plugins are a few site optimization ones for my host Siteground, a login attempts blocker, Rank Math SEO, and Akismet.

That final list of plugins wasn’t decided until after I finished the site and deployed. Once I was live I decided to check Google Page Speed to see what the results were. The numbers were good but I asked Claude to analyze the results and provide feedback on where we could gain better performance. The biggest impact was by optimizing images to use WebP. This provided the most substantial gains. The next change was removing a plugin I had installed to generate text files for LLMs to read which also included some javascript to identify AI bots that visited the site. I removed the plugin and had Claude replace the functionality natively on its own. It then found a large Google Fonts file being called by the Mailpoet plugin which I use for newsletter subscriptions and removed it. Last thing was realizing how much Google Analytics was bloating my site with scripts and cookies so I decided to remove it and just stick with the local Koko analytics.

This took about 8 hours to complete all the work but I think the design and performance of the site has been well worth it. I will continue to migrate all my other sites based on these learnings with the goal of keeping the stack as small and tight as possible. I will also keep an eye on other CMS out there as my needs may shift. I’ve been taking a look at EmDash, Drupal CMS and Ghost and may play with those soon.

I was recently intrigued with a competition launched to create a game using AI called Vibe Jam. I continue to successfully use AI to create apps and thought this would be a slight departure from the things I’ve created so far and it sounded like fun. My favorite arcade game as a kid was Missile Command. I continue to play it to this day on my Atgames Legends Ultimate arcade.

I’ve had ideas about creating a modified version that was 360 degrees in the past and figured this would be a good time to see if I could create that. So I fired up Claude Code and pointed it to the rules page along with some of the required widgets and functionality to generate the game. I then provided reference materials to get things started which included the wikipedia page and was even able to find the game’s source code which proved to be incredibly valuable when trying to match some of the original game’s features and gameplay.

I iterated the gameplay quite a bit to my liking and spent time fine tuning lots of the gameplay details. Then I decided to incorporate Asteroids to really add a new mashup dimension to the game. I then uploaded the game to Vercel and added a persistent high score leader board. In the end I think it came out pretty good.

You can play the game now at: https://earthcommand.krynsky.com/

Summary: I’ve launched a new digital autobiography app called LifeScribe which I’d love for you to try.

I’ve been writing about creating and preserving our digital data for over 20 years, first on my Lifestream Blog site and subsequently on my Digital Legacy Management resource site. I thought early on about how our previous generation only had letters, stories, photographs and maybe some home movies. Nowadays we have all of those in digital form along with a ton more data we create either actively or passively with tools on our phones and elsewhere. This includes ancestry information, career details, location data in our photos and elsewhere and so much more. I thought about how we could create a rich visual and interactive autobiography by collecting this data and publishing it in a compelling way to tell our life story for friends and family. I built a prototype for myself cobbled together using WordPress and a few other tools. It was clunky to build and use, so the friction never let me take it too far. But I always felt that such an app would be a great and useful way to allow anyone to create a similar experience and had dreams of building a tool to create something for this in the future.

Then when my Father passed away a few years ago I found myself scrambling to gather photos, videos and other assets to prepare digitally for his memorial. I created a shared Google drive folder for friends and family to contribute to and I also scanned photos, digitzed videos and more. I spent time with friends and family reminiscing about shared stories and experiences. Then I tried to find a web service to share some of these items with friends and family ahead of the service. I struggled to find a website that met some of the basic criteria wanted. This combination of having to scramble and do all this work while in a state of grief was pretty overwhelming. It really struck me as a problem I’d like to help fix in the future if I could.

I then came to the realization that if a biography was created while our loved ones were still alive and then gracefully transitioned to a memorial site when they died, I could greatly reduce the issues I encountered. This would tackle two things I care greatly about at the same time. I even thought of the mechanics for this process which require co-ordination with family members.

I’ve recently had amazing success building apps and have gained confidence in the ability for newer AI models to code stuff. that I finally decided to try something much grander than what I’ve built so far. Yes, the plan was to try and build the autobiography and memorial tool I’ve been dreaming of. I began by creating a plan file for Claude which has become my favorite coding model so far. The plan file basically contained some pretty detailed requirements about what I wanted to build. I had Claude review that and then interview me with questions to flesh out the plan file much more before we started working on anything.

Claude did so much more than just coding the app. It provided guidance on third party tools and costs, provided Dev Ops support with step by step instructions for moving my app from my computer to a hosted server, with all the necessary configurations and tools needed. I went from app concept (granted I’ve been thinking about this project for years) to launched app in beta in less than seven days. I feel it would have taken a small team a few months to achieve what Claude did in this timeframe and I don’t think I’m exagerating. Besides the app it helped write all the website copy, created a multi-step email onboarding plan, generated some basic SEO and did image edits for several of the assets. A true one stop shop for dev, design, marketing, ops and more. I still can’t fathom what it helped me accomplish. It just doesn’t seem real.

So this week I’m launching what has now become LifeScribe in beta for everyone to try for free. You can visit the site and join the waitlist and I will be inviting folks to test things out and give me feedback during this early phase. The sites are private by default but I’ve shared mine publicly to give you an idea of what my envisioned autobiography looks like. I plan to continue working on some of the core features with hopes to release publicly very soon. I really hope you give it a try and let me know what you think.

In March of last year I finally decided to try several “Vibe Coding” tools that allowed non-developers the ability to create fully functional apps just by using natural language prompting. In summary I ran into several roadblocks for ideas I had. I did get one simple app concept to work but it still took a ton of effort to correct problems along the way, still had issues when completed and in the end I felt these tools (or models to be more specific) were not ready to execute our ideas effectively. Fast forward to the last few weeks and everything has changed.

For my next evaluation I decided that instead of using dedicated services like Lovable, Replit and Bolt I’d work locally with models directly. My first test was to create a script for Pinokio for an app I could run on my local machine and share it with others. I had an idea to create an app that could review all the posts for a specific list of users on X and generate a daily summary without having to read all the posts from the feed. I used the newly released Google Antigravity IDE and a combination of Gemini and Claude models to create the app successfully. This process went much better and smoother than previously and I was pretty amazed by how much better the models had gotten since I last attempted this.

I then decided to revisit the same app idea I previously had during my experiment last March to analyze an X user based on the lists they appeared on. I decided to just add this as a new feature within the X List Summarizer app for Pinokio that I had already created. This too was created very easily with minimal effort and debugging and at this point I was shocked at how much better things had gotten. But I didn’t want to stop there. Creating an app to run locally was one thing, now I wanted to see if I can create an app that was publicly accessible over the web.

I decided to isolate the new X profile analyzer feature and generate a standalone app called X Persona for it that I could publish to a website. I had been using Google’s Antigravity IDE but they’ve suddenly put heavy limits on the Claude models. I ended up getting an Anthropic pro subscription and started using Claude Code to develop the app. I used the Opus 4.6 for the planning and then Sonnet 4.6 for the execution. It worked amazingly well. The dev was easily jumpstarted by referencing the previous codebase. Then I refactored the settings functionality to only be accessible by an admin and built a site dedicated to the this functionality and extended it with many new features.

When it came time to deploy it to production I asked both Claude and Gemini to review my tech stack and recommend cost effective hosting providers that would also be reasonably simple for me to deploy to. They both highly recommended to use Railway with other options including Render and Fly.io. Claude then walked me through the whole process of deploying my project to Github which was a pre-requisite for deployment to Railway. Once complete it took me step by step on setting up the account and configuring it. I ran into several hiccups setting up the environment but Claude helped me debug all the issues until they were resolved and I was up and running in less than 2 hours. Both Claude and Railway blew me away at the simplicity of getting setup. Even configuring the sub-domain by connecting directly to my Cloudflare account was trivial. You can view the app I created now at X Persona.

Granted I have experience with hosting providers and running several WordPress and Drupal sites I did not think this process would be as simple as it turned out. Now I continue to work on new features locally, commit them to Github and then they get re-deployed to my app in Railway automatically. This seems like magic to me.

Now, I understand my limitations and realize this process is great for creating apps as a hobby. I have no delusions knowing there is required knowledge and experience for proper security configurations and architecture details needed for building larger scalable apps. These would be new challenges if I were creating something more significant. But I’m still pinching myself at what I’ve already been able to achieve. I’m extremely excited about several other new projects that are brewing in my mind and look forward to creating many more apps in the near future.

Back in March true developers were mocking and pointing out the major issues when creating vibe coded apps. However, I’ve seen the tide turn over the last few months. I continue to see long-time experienced devs confirming the power and advancements in these models with many of them stating they’re not manually coding much any more. Adrej Karpathy who coined “Vibe Coding” has now shifted the narrative to “Agentic Engineering”. Many devs are now reviewing, tweaking, and auditing the code but confirming that the models are now extremely capable.

I think we’re going to see an exponential explosiong of seasoned devs becoming more efficient and shipping much faster and a new generation of hobbyists like myself creating novel apps that could never have been possible due to knowledge and financial constraints. Extremely exiciting times are ahead.

I can’t remember the last time I was as excited about the prospects of a new year like I am about this one. It was already shaping up to be incredible with several major milestones including my Daugther’s wedding, my 60th birthday and 30th wedding anniversary. Along with those celebrations we have the World Cup coming to my backyard here in Southern California. So I wanted to outline several goals I’d like to achieve in addition to these exciting events.

Health

Last year I finally got my total knee replacement in May. The road to recovery has been great. I knew that as long as I was diligent about the physical therapy things should go well and they have. I was playing racquetball again within 3 months and have been able to resume hiking as well.

Then on December 1st I made the conscious decision to finally get serious about losing weight. I wanted to get a running start going into the new year and was motivated to look good for the wedding. I joined the Lindora wellness program supplemented with a tirzepatide regimen. While the GLP has been helpful in reducing hunger and food noise its only one factor. I’ve maintained a very strict diet trying to maintain ~60 grams of carbs and ~140 grams of protein daily. I’m also at the gym 5 times a week lifting and playing racquetball. So far, so good. I’ve already dropped over 15 pounds with a goal of 5-10 more. I’m planning to carry the momentum after the wedding to keep me going until my Birthday in May.

Travel

I had high hopes to cheer on my beloved Argentina team as it defends its title ahead of the World Cup with plans to see a game in each of the 3 host countries. But after the debacle so far with ticket sales with prices being astronomical and only purchaseable through lotteries, I’ve tempered my expectations. Now I’m just hoping to at least see a game or two at SoFi. Of course this may change once the full tickets are released and we see what the secondary markets do.

Then I’m planning destination celebrations for my 60th birthday somewhere in Mexico and our 30 year anniversary with an epic location TBD. I’m sure I’ll also sneak in several more trips here and there to try and make up for the lack of traveling last year as I focused on the knee recovery and the wedding.

Personal Projects

This year I saw the innovations in AI transform how I thought about so many things both for work and personally. Sure I played around with the image and video generation tools and had lots of fun. But there were so many other uses that surprised me. In March I decided to try out vibe coding and while the results weren’t great, they showed me what was coming. Just a short time later in December I shifted to use Google’s AntiGravity IDE using the Claude coding models and the improvement was astounding. I was able to build several apps already with very little debugging. I’m just blown away with what is possible. I plan on creating 2 app ideas based around digital legacy that I’ve always wanted to but never had the skills or resources for. Speaking of Digital Legacy I plan on spending much more time working on my resource website. I also hope to continue writing and sharing more on this site and beef up my Autobigraphical experiment site.

I’ve also been amazed by what the AI agents can do by giving it commands and having it take over my browser. I’ve had AI write complex Excel forumulas and power queries I could never do on my own. I’ve had AI do deep research on products and services that would take me hours to do manually. AI will continue to get better, and the people that learn to embrace and harness the tools will be much better off. I will continue to share as many of my use cases and tools to try and help others.

Content Creation vs. Consumption

This has always been an inner struggle for me. There’s that window of time between dinner and sleep when I have to make the conscious decision on whether I want to work on personal projects or just decompress and watch TV or play a video game. The struggle is real but I’ve been pretty motivated to shift quite a bit towards the create side of the equation lately. My goal is to try and get these to a 50/50 split but if new games like Battlefield 6 and shows like Pluribus continue to be released I might be in trouble. Luckily I don’t spend much time on social media except for X which I visit daily because that’s the best place to keep up with AI news and creators.

Minimalism and Optimization

I started my minimalism journey a few years ago and its actually been going well. I’ve been able to purge so many physical objects and make conscious efforts to analyze whenever considering new products or services being added to my life. I always try to make sure it aligns with making my life better and optimizes for time efficiency which is a major deciding factor. This will continue to be my mantra moving forward trying to reduce complexity and embrace simplicity.

I continue to experiment daily to find unique ways to use AI. Lately I’ve been using the built in Gemini integration in Chrome. I recently listened to the latest episode of the Tim Ferriss Show Podcast, “The Random Show” with Kevin Rose. This is a regular series between them where they often mention great resources that can be found in the show notes on the podcast page with links to visit everything mentioned. However, this recent episode didn’t have that, so I took it upon myself to try and use AI to generate the list I’m accustomed to normally seeing.

I visited the page in my browser and only saw a transcript without the show notes and usual links. So I invoked the Gemini button in Chrome and gave it a prompt to analyze the page and generate the link list for me.

Gemini combed the transcript to research everything mentioned and then provided me a categorized lists with links to each of them. I think this is a great use case that could be applied to most podcasts. Here’s the link to my prompt and response page which you can review.

Generate a Spotify Playlist from Song Mentions on a Post

The second thing I tried was to visit a Reddit page where someone asked people to drop in songs that every Cure fan should know. As I started reading all the comments and all the songs people were recommending, I thought it would be a great idea to be able to create a Spotify playlist from the recommendations. I’ve actually done this manually in the past, but thought Gemini could probably automate this for me.

So again, I invoked the Gemini button and gave it a prompt to create the list for me. It wasn’t able to create the playlist directly in Spotify for me yet because it can’t access my account. But then it offered to generate a plain text list, which I could then use in a third-party service called TuneMyMusic to generate the playlist. This was pretty easy to accomplish and it worked flawlessly.

I went ahead and shared the playlist on Reddit which was much appreciated by OP. You can find the details for my prompt and results here. And if you’re interested you can find the Spotify playlist here.

Note: I tried doing the same thing, using the same prompts in both of these scenarios in Comet and it didn’t do very well. It only got a few links for the podcast and missed 80% of what Gemini found. And for the songs it only identifed about half the ones Gemini did.

Summary

• Vibe coding can be magical when it works.
• All services will vary based on use case. Experiment by trying them all.
• Understand API functionality and limits before using them in your app
• Learn about different stacks and libraries used for your app.
• You can take learnings from one service to another
• Debugging can be frustrating. Fixes can require many iterations and often fail.

Over the last few months I’ve seen several people share experiences creating apps using AI. I’ve known of these services for a while and have been waiting for ones geared towards novices before diving in myself. I was skeptical of how easy it would be to create something so quickly and easily. I was hoping to find a roundup of services available and came across a few roundups from John Rush who tests all the AI coding services. Here’s one he created of 19 services specific for non coders.

I read through the comments of a previous roundup of 24 tools where he stated that the top ones for him were Bolt, Replit, Cursor and Lovable. He then narrowed those down to Bolt and Lovable being the best for non-coders. After reading that I started testing with Bolt, Replit and Lovable as well as trying Bolt locally for free using Pinokio. Here’s what I’ve found so far after a few days of testing.

Depending on what you want to build it’s not as easy as it looks. I think even as a non coder you still have to have some technical knowledge of development and dependencies. Ben has provided a primer for folks to familiarize themselves with that. I found that each service behaved differently depending on that types of apps I threw at them.

My first attempt was to create an app for X I’ve wanted to create for a long time. Here was the prompt:

Create an app that allows you to provide a link to an x.com profile page and then identify all the lists the user has been added to. Then analyze the words used for the lists names and create a word cloud with words appearing larger depending on how often they are used.

I decided to try each service blindly without watching any tutorials to see how intuitive their process would be. I threw the prompt at Replit, Bolt and Lovable. Watching Replit create a working prototype simply based on the prompt as quickly as it did was magical for me. I ran into issues with Bolt before even creating the environment and Lovable got pretty far but wasn’t quite as good so I decided to continue building the Replit version. After my initial amazement I kept running into errors and that’s when the magic faded.

So this app required the use of the X.com API. I created an account along with the API key as instructed and provided it, but kept getting API errors. The response errors led me to believe it was an authentication problem so I tried to re-paste the credentials a few times but the error persisted. Eventually I told Replit to try and do a test with the API outside of the app and it was then that I saw an error that prompted me to learn about the limitations of access to the free version of the API which was the reason my app wasn’t working. I wasted quite a bit of time during this debugging process which to be fair was my own fault but the AI didn’t communicate the issue clearly to me.

So I went to Grok to see if I could find an alternative way to create this app without using the X.com API. It recommended a service called Apify with a custom script. I then went through the same process of creating a free API with that service and connected my app on Replit with it but alas ran into similar issues. Turns out the free version of their API combined with the script wouldn’t work. At this point I was a bit frustrated and ended up just trying to create a proof of concept manually for my personal profile using Grok which I was able to do. I decided I needed to find a way to create the app without an API and perhaps use a web scraper, so I put this app on the shelf for now. The lesson learned was to really understand and test an API you plan on using is crucial before starting a project.

I felt a bit defeated after my initial foray into vibe coding. I felt the hype around using AI to create apps may have been overblown a bit. I did see some pretty amazing potential regardless of my first outcome. I wasn’t ready to give up. I had another idea for an app and this time I made sure I could build it without the complications of an external API.

It was time to move on to my next app with the following prompt:

Create an app that is called “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere” that has a button labeled “Have a drink” when pressed it will take your local time and then find a random location in the world where it’s between 5:00 – 5:59pm and then display the location on a map and then show a photo of people from that location having a drink. It will also show what the local term is for toasting or saying cheers.

I did the same thing with this prompt and threw it in Replit, Lovable and Bolt. Replit again did a pretty good job to get up and running but struggled with displaying a map and created a pretty basic design. I spent some time trying to fix the map issue. Each time Replit confidently telling me they fixed the issue when in fact it had not. So eventually I gave up. Bolt created a very similar version of the app as Replit. It was a little more basic and didn’t include all the elements described in the prompt. It also failed with the map display and location.

Then I moved on to create the same app with Lovable and it once again amazed me at how AI can create an app. So I want to take a minute to explain that each of these services will take the prompt and determine their own solution. In this case there was a map and location aspect and each had their own approach. Replit used SVG paths to draw a simplified world map outline and placing a beer icon marker at specific coordinates and Bolt used a flat world map positioning a pushpin using co-ordinates. Both of these methods didn’t work. I tried to tinker with them but ran into issues. Lovable solved the map display and location issue by utilizing the globe.gl library which worked great without any changes. I was curious and went back to both Replit and Bolt and told them to utilize globe.gl for the mapping functionality and both implemented the functionality perfectly just like Lovable.

It got me thinking that these services may need to evolve to help guide users on the right development stack, libraries or utilities for their given project. In this case I could have been provided different mapping approaches that could include both free and paid services. I just think these services should help guide new users with pre-development recommendations before immediately trying to code a solution. New developers could use hand-holding before diving right and hitting a wall fast and give up. This is not a good experience when clearly there was a way all of these services could have been successful out the gate. Here’s a tip, ask the service to tell you about the technology it’s using to develop your app. Learn about the technologies. All of this may help you better shape prompts for them.

Another topic I don’t see discussed much are some of the intangibles that vibe coding brings. These services will improvise and fill in gaps not covered by the original prompt. Replit decided to add an extra feature by adding a local drinking customs blurb in addition to the local toasting term. Lovable added a tagline, some app usage details and a line about drinking responsibly which was a nice touch. The app designs were all pretty basic and this seems like an area where services can begin to distinguish themselves better with improvement.

So I decided to finish working on the app using Lovable because I felt it did the best job and only required minor tweaks. I iterated things a bit and then deployed my first app publicly to share with the world. I also put the code on Github which is the only way you can currently edit the code which then syncs with Lovable. Both Replit and Bolt let you edit the code directly within their service and let you deploy publicly as well.

Some takeaways for me is that there’s no clear winner between the services I’ve tested so far. I think each use case for an app will provide varying results from each service. I think people should experiment with all of them for an identical app the same way I did to get a feel for how they work and determine which service is best for them. Many coders consider this wave of newbies joining the ranks as creaters of slop. However there’s value in allowing people to experiment creating something that they never thought would be possible. It also allows them to create something of personal utility that may never come to market. It may also be a gateway for many to get more serious. There’s a ton more I can share regarding nuances between each of these services but I wanted to quickly share some current observations. I plan on playing with them some more along with Cursor and Windsurf and do a follow up post in the future.

Some additional resources on Vibe Coding

• What is Vibe Coding?
• The rise of vibe coding
• Vibe coding, some thoughts and predictions
• Clips from a podcast on Vibe Coding
• A new service to help debug code (shows how AI can create new opportunities)

Huge buzz for a new tool called Manus which sounds like an OS for AI

Several thoughts and examples on an innovative update to the Windsurf AI coding tool.

A new AI acronym MCP (Model Context Protocols) spread like fire.

And to counter MCP I learned about SLOP (Simple Language Open Protocol)

An AI artist joining a movie studio showing his impressive work

Statistics showing the impact AI is having on coding for startups

One of my favorite AI movie creators, the Dor Brothers had a new release

Matt Wolfe does a masterclass on Perplexity which is one of the best AI tools I use every day.

One VC firm’s list of the top 100 AI tools

Discovered the best voice chat I’ve ever tried. A feeling shared by many others as well.

Discussion with Kevin Kelly on the future and AI

If you enjoyed this post be sure to check out my AI Resource Guide for News, Tools, Tutorials and more.

Summary: I’m about to take you on a nostalgic retro computing tour de force. This is a summarized memoir of different historic computing events in my life with tons of links you can take to never ending rabbit holes if you want. Now lets continue.

The exhibit floor had most of the computers from my adolescent years including the first computer I ever experienced, the Radio Shack TRS-80 which a friend owned when I lived in Chicago. I’ll never forget the moment of watching him type words on the screen until typing the word “Run” and hitting the enter key. My eyes opened wide as I saw a video game appear on the screen. That machine created magic right in front of me and I was hooked. As I continued walking the floor I saw the first computer I ever owned, the Commodore Vic-20. This computer only displayed 22 columns and I remember the first software I ever bought for it was a terminal program that boasted a full 40 columns at a store called Future Tronics in Westwood California.

It wasn’t long after my initial foray into computing on the Vic that I decided to move on to the Atari 400 and shortly after the Atari 800 due to the 400’s difficult to use membrane keyboard. It was the Atari that really captured me and made my love of computers flourish. Games and telecommunications were my primary uses that ended up serving each other. In these early days finding other Atari enthusiasts to share ideas and software with was a primary goal. This was done both by finding local user groups and discoverying BBSes to connect to other users. It was during this time I became friends with one of the people that went to the festival with me. The other friend I went with I met working at a computer store which I discuss later.

Eventually our small group of friends met regularly to trade software. Our pirate group needed a name, so I chose “The Software Syndicate” to identify us as we communicated online and began trading warez with other groups primarily through BBSes. I eventually ran my own BBS and our group became somewhat notorious. We were listed in Antic (an Atari magazine) telecommunications issue list of BBSes where they used our group’s name as the “Sponsor” of the BBSes we ran. It was an amazing time as we continued to meet new folks and expanded our group. I remember one talented member who converted the Atari 5200 Moon Patrol game to run on the Atari computer and modified it to hit a key combination that would display that the game was brought to you by The Software Syndicate. Eventually BBSes began to take a backseat to major online services like CompuServe. I’d used their service for live chat to meet people from all over the country as well as using their forums. CompuServerve was eventually replaced by services like Genie and eventually the hugely popular AOL.

It was around the end of the 80s when I got a sales job at a computer store called ComSoft in Reseda California. During my time there Atari and Commodore continued to evolve their computers and I was selling hardware and software for them. I ended up owning both sytems, getting a Commodore 64 to go along with my Atari 800. Later I upgraded to my first 16-bit computer the Atari 520ST and eventually also got an Amiga 500. I left ComSoft and got another job at a computer store called Logical Choice for Computing in North Hollywood California. I managed that store for a few years during the rise of Atari and Commodore 16 bit computing. I got back to running a BBS on my Atari ST with the purchase of my first hard drive. An Atari SH-204 20Mb hard drive.

By the early 90s my time at Logical Choice ended and I had to make a key life decision. I was offered a job to manage an Egghead Software but a friend of mine wanted to open a new computer store and wanted me to manage it. I ended up becoming a part owner of our store called The Computer Network in Glendale California and accepted the offer. At this point the Atari ST became a very popular computer among musicians with its built in Midi ports and related software. It also excelled for Desktop Publishing. We had many famous musicians come to our store. One memory I’ll never forget was Philip Bailey from Earth Wind and Fire singing along to a song that was playing on the radio in our store. I got starstruck when Stan Ridgway from Wall of Voodoo who I saw at the US Festival first came to my store. He came several times and was nice enough to invite me to several of his shows.

During my time at The Computer Network breakthroughs in graphic cards was made for PC clones that added 3D and increased the number of simultaneous colors displayed from 256 to 32k and shortly after 16 Million! These breakthroughs were huge as the Atari or Commodore never exceeded 4k. This technical leap was so significant that we began to sell PC clones at our store. I finally decided to ditch my Atari and Commodore computers and made the switch to a PC clone around this time and never looked back. My first computer was a system I built using an AMD 386-DX40 with what I believe was an ATI graphics card and continued from there. Interestingly enough I just don’t feel the same level of nostalgia for any of the PC’s I had back then because my progression was upgrading or building computers based on a collection of individual parts. The only thing I’d cling to nostagically from those systems would be the graphics cards. I still remember owning the 3D Voodoo Graphics cards by 3DFX (eventually purchased by NVIDIA) being another significant milestone for gaming on PC’s. Looks like others feel the same way sharing their graphics card history.

It was the end of 1994 and on our annual trip to ComDex (the largest computer convention in the US) we saw several booths that were utilizing the Internet. We had learned about it from a friend a few months prior but now we were seeing it start to proliferate at Comdex with many booths connected to ineternet using the Mosaic browser. My parnter and I saw the future that the Internet could bring and realized we needed to seize the opportunity. We returned from ComDex and learned everything we could about the Internet. I recall having to install a patch for Windows 3.1 to add support for the TCP/IP protocol to get on the Internet. We then bought Internet in a Box and became some of Earthlink’s first customers. I remember getting a Fax from Earthlink that provided all the TCP/IP settings we needed to configure to access the internet. It was pretty difficult back then to get up and running so you had to be somewhat technical and have a strong desire to do it. At this point we submerged ourselves learning about all things internet. My partner was more on the hardware and networking side and I was more on the software side. After 4 years of running The Computer Network successfully my partner and I decided shut it down to take on a new computer consulting venture focused on Internet technonlogies. Alternative Computing in Burbank California was then born.

My partner and I quickly became consumed by a client which was a magazine publisher. We were spending so much time working for them, that they made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. They wanted us to come on-board as employees to run a new Internet division. My partner focused on setting up the IT side, configuring all the networking including bringing in a 10Mbit fiber connection to our building. I setup the mail server and created our initial websites. We were fortunate engough to be on the ground floor during the Internet boom. We got to learn and deploy new technology for several years while worked there. Through the years I focused my career on managing e-commerce and content management systems. It was truly an amazing time I’ll never forget.

Taking this story back to the festival. My favorite booth at the show was run by Rob Sherman who brought a ton of 8-bit Atari computers with his focus being on BBSes. Rob has shared his origin story which is eerily similar to mine and so many others. He’s managed to honor his Atari history by finding ways to leverage new technology. He showed us how he uses a WiFi modem called Fujinet that connects directly to the port on an Atari 8-bit computer. He also told us how he is hosting. The other amazing thing he’s accomplished is getting his Atari BBS Southernamis.ddns.net:23 running in the AWS cloud 24/7 using an Atari 130XE with an 850 interface at a lightning speed of 9600 baud. It turns out there’s a whole community Rob shares that are maintaining Atari BBS’s on the internet! Here’s a bunch of folks discussing Atari BBSes on Reddit if you want to dive down the rabbit hole further.

Then I saw a booth with racks of vintage music gear that included a Yamaha DX-7, Casio CZ-101, and way more stuff that gave me flashbacks. I was surprised to see that my friend Nick Dynice who I hadn’t seen in years was manning the booth. His gear took me back to my Midi and DAW days at The Computer Network when I sold turnkey Atari systems with Cubase and Notator sequencing software. This was an unexpected but great surprise that added to the whole nostalgic experience. You can check out more of Nick’s vintage gear on his Deep Signal Studios site.

I ponedred quite a bit after the show thinking about how I wanted to continue enjoying the retro vibes. I visited Rob’s BBS, read several old articles from magazines, watched old videos, and plan to spend time again with emulators for the systems I used to have. I’m also planning to watch Halt and Catch Fire again. I really enjoy reminiscing about the early years and how this hobby I loved turned into a career intertwining the two for my whole life.

I find the incredibly fast evolution to where we are today to be amazing. Today I own an Alienware R16 with an NVIDIA 4070 Ti Super graphics card. I also satisfy retro vibes with my Atgames Legends Ultimate running OneSauce. I’ve recently begun a new journey into the world of AI with much of the same wide-eyed excitement I had during the early days of the Internet. I could go on and on with tons of other stories I have about my computer history and plan on writing more about it in the future. I hope you enjoyed this and if you’re an old school computer nerd like myself I encourage you to tell your origin story.

Relevant links related to this article:

• Visit the Vintage Computer Federation site for future festivals in other areas.
• Fujinet – a multi-peripheral emulator and WiFi network device for vintage computers.
• A list of all the software used to run Atari 8-bit BBSes
• Story from an Atari software pirate
• How Pirate BBSs impacted the Atari community
• Here’s an Atari 8-bit emulator and you can get software for it here
• Video of Comdex show in 1986 with a video thumbnail that shows an Atari ST
• Atari-Forum – A forum about Atari 16/32 computers and their clones.
• The GameFan magazine website we created a content management system for
• The eCommerce site for Gamecave.com we created

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the abundance of AI tools being released. One of the biggest challenges is to have a specific use case for using AI and then finding the right tool to help you. Sometimes even if you find the right tool it can be hard to know how to configure or use it properly as well.

Nowadays, there are certain AI chat services that are better at some tasks (coding, reasoning, etc.) than others. Then when you choose a service you still need to select which model you want to use to complete your task. This puts the decision on the user to select the appropriate model for your specific needs. Choosing the right one can be challenging if you don’t know which one is best for your task at hand. I mean, you would think that AI could analyze the prompt and determine which model is best suited for the task requested. Well sure enough this is a realization that Sam Altman (CEO of Open AI) made this week. He discussed the confusion between product selection fatigue and stated that he wants to simplify his product offerings.

It appears that GPT 5 will take us there by automatically selecting the best model and tools for a specific task. So perhaps this issue will be going away soon. But until then we will need to continue knowing how to pick the right AI tools for the job.

I came across a job for AI when I began researching tile to use for a kitchen backsplash. I already had 2 vendor websites that I used to find a color, pattern and style I wanted. Once I decided on a specific tile I wanted to research other vendors near me that had a similar style so I could compare more designs and prices. For this I decided to use Gemini. I created a prompt and first used the Flash 2.0 model which provided limited feedback only giving me a list of nearby locations. I then used the same prompt with Flash 2.0 thinking experimental. This provided analysis of the prompt that generated extra steps that included nearby locations, matching products, prices and more. The added benefit is that it shows the steps in its analysis to provide the answers. This allows you to verify the work for accuracy or issues.

Here’s screenshots showing both models respond to the same prompt. Note: only a small portion of the thinking model shown.

The same issue of applies to services for creating images or videos. You need to identify what your specific task is and then find a tool that offers that specific feature. I’ve recently started several home improvement projects and looked to use AI for help with some aspects. I painted the exterior of my home but had several sections of bricks that did not match my new color pattern. I was having a hard time deciding what colors (if any) I should paint the bricks to better adhere to the new style. I knew there had to be an AI tool I could use to help me visualize this.

I used several search methods to try and find a tool with the specific feature but including Perplexity but this turned out to be more difficult than I would have imagined. In the end I found AI Ease >> AI Replace which worked ok but then came across Krea which did a much better job.

Here are the resulting images of the bricks in different colors created that helped me decide on what to choose.

Another example I’ve come across was trying to find an AI tool that codes to create an app. I came across this person who did an exhaustive test of 24 different tools. I was specifically looking for something geared towards novices and through his list and additional research found 3 tools that I’ve started testing which include Bolt, Replit and Lovable. I even was able to test Bolt locally for free using Pinokio.

Hugging Face recently released their AI App Directory which could be very helpful for finding utilities in their eco-system to help you with AI tasks. I used it to try and help me find a good way to restore an old photo from the 80’s that is a little blurry and grainy. You can simply use it’s AI search feature which I did using the term “restore blurry photos” and it will return all matching apps. In my case there were probably over a hundred that matched but they do list them based on the community voting to help surface the better ones. I then tried several of the apps against the same photo with varying results to ultimately find the app that I liked best for my use case.

Below you can see the original photo and the version after running through the Hugging Face App here. The quality of the face improvement was pretty amazing however the other objects have some artifacting that changes their original appearance.

These examples have shown me that each of us will be developing our own AI tech stack that maps specific tasks we want help with to the appropriate tools to use. This article by Ben Congdon does a fantastic job of explaining the different AI tools he uses along with his reasoning and use cases. Here’s a thread on Reddit with a user sharing their AI stack and eliciting others to share theirs as well.

These have inspired me create my AI tech stack both as a reference for myself and a way to share with others. For now this takes quite a bit of research and testing during this wild west phase of AI. Things move so quickly that switching tools will be common for quite a while. I’m guessing as time goes on we will start to see very comprehensive super apps that will reduce the number of different tools used. However, for now continous research and testing will be the norm to find the right tools for each of us until things start to settle down.