Summoning Archimedes

After finishing work this evening a thought occurred to me. A little thought. A little thought that burrowed a hole straight through the firewall that’s supposed to stop damn fool escapades before they start.

“I wonder what it would take to bring the images across from the Substack blog, into the Blogger version, and make them look nice?”

The reason I’m telling you anything about this is because of course it’s already done. Sometimes - when you start something stupid - the only way around is through. I’m not sure you’ll be *that* interested in the colossal effort that was eventually required to port the images across, but the title of the post gives a clue.

Archimedes is famously reported as once saying “give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the earth”.

It turns out if you export an entire blog from Substack, then write a program to parse the export file and turn it into a CSV file of post titles, dates, and image URLs, you can then write a program to download all of the images, write another program to upload them to a Google storage container in the cloud, and then  finally write a program to re-attach them to your posts via the Blogger API.

Of course when I say “you can”, I really mean “you can ask Claude Code” - the trick is knowing what to ask it, and building guard-rails around it a mile high.

I guess this is the point where I shut down Visual Studio Code, and back away from the computer - fearful of what I might dream up next.

It turns out giving somebody with over thirty years of development experience access to AI is a bit like giving Lex Luthor access to the Fortress of Solitude’s archives.

“Tell me everything...”

(Cue the purple tentacle laugh from the “Day of the Tentacle” video game - not many people will get that one - if you do, you just found your people)

Back on planet earth, I just finished making spaghetti bolognese for everybody. I wasn’t going to help, but then saw my middle daughter chopping strips of pepper up bit by bit, grabbed the entire bunch and a knife, and shortened her workload by about a thousand percent. The penny-drop-moment on her face was priceless.

I carried on and made the rest of dinner - while cleaning as I went - which resulted in no washing up - which is why I am here right now writing this - because I got half an hour of my life back. It’s funny how that works.

It’s a continual source of wonderment to me - how the rest of the household can cause such devastation at almost every turn, and how it so rarely occurs to them to make anybody else’s life easier.

Just for the record - I’ve washed up four times so far today. If I wander into the kitchen to make a coffee, I can almost guarantee there will be a fifth load of washing in the sink (you know, next to the half-empty dishwasher).

Don’t even let me start about the downstairs bathroom that I scrubbed from top to bottom this morning after getting out of the shower.

Anyway.

I’m listening to Kacey Musgraves “Deeper Well” album. She’s become an unlikely soundtrack to the junk room in recent weeks and months. A calm voice amid the mayhem.