Ancient Chinese poetry exists in a handful of books — a small number of landmark English translations that have defined how the Western world reads Eastern verse. Whereas classical Chinese paintings are scattered around the world: in the collections of private owners, but also museums like the Met, the Smithsonian, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Chinese Era brings them together into the same space, just to see what happens.
Each pairing is a poem and a painting from the past, two treasures in conversation. The random engine produces combinations that no curator would make, creating associations that couldn’t be planned. You can inspect the full artwork, or turn on a live stream of traditional Chinese music — providing a third randomized vector for a truly unrepeatable experience. When you’re ready, hit the ‘next’ arrow for a fresh pairing. If you find one worth sharing, a custom URL can be produced to lock them in.
The poems draw from four translated volumes — by Waley, Giles, Ayscough/Lowell, and Bynner — 631 in total, each translator bringing their own instincts about what Chinese poetry should sound like in English. The number of artworks on display currently runs into the thousands, for over two million possible combinations. It’s a novel way to enjoy these classic poems. If you’re new to these works, congratulations, this just might be the start of your Chinese era.
Shelf Expression is the system I use for bookshelf.sangsara.net. It produces a responsive microsite displaying a shelf of up to twenty books, with cover art and synopses automatically pulled from online sources. It supports linking out to Goodreads for more information. It offers a choice of two themes: Minimal, with a simple grid and subtle animations; and Vitsoe, with a skeuomorphic shelf and playful “pick up” animations.
You can use it to add a curated page to your personal site — recommendations for visitors (like I’ve done), a personal bibliography, or maybe a book club’s seasonal reading list. It is ready to fork from GitHub; if you use an agentic coding tool, point it at the repo and have it adapt the header and navigation for your own site. There is also a built-in tool (Shift-Ctrl-U) for updating the book selection without having to write any code.
You may optionally supply Google Books and Gemini API keys to prevent rate limiting and summarize retrieved synopses.
Shelf Expression is free for non-commercial use. Credit is appreciated but not necessary, though I’d love to hear from anyone who uses it.
Two themes: Minimal and a Vitsoe-inspired shelving systemYou can navigate books with buttons, arrow keys, and swipes.The hidden editor screen lets you easily update the shelf.
Some apps demand your attention, but Window Box just sits in a corner, keeping you company.
It simulates a flower planter box on a high-rise window sill, with a blurred city view behind it — the way your eyes naturally see when focusing on something close. The plants are procedurally generated, so no two are exactly alike. The weather is real. When it rains in Singapore, rain runs down the glass. As the sun sets in Honolulu, the light moves westward and the city outside drops into shadow while the flowers stay lit from the inside of your apartment.
It is designed to live in your browser across a long work day, maybe on a second screen — something to glance at between tasks. Because most people like to work to a little music on the radio, a tuner with curated stations including Apple Music Radio and Monocle Radio is built in. For fuller immersion, turn up the audio generator for wind and rain sounds that match what’s happening on screen. It’s inadvertently a fantastic rainy mood machine.
Two locations are available: Singapore and Honolulu. Each brings its own botanical palette and skyline. If you live in one of these cities, it functions as a virtual window. If you don’t, it’s a portal into a part of the world where it’s always warm.
New! Added Tokyo, with winter effects and botanical changes (13/05/26)
New! Added a Custom mode where you can supply your own YouTube URL and city name, so you can be anywhere on Earth a live cam is. (26/05/26)
Almost every orchid you’ve ever seen was intentionally bred — a slow accumulation of crossings, selections, and genetic accidents that produced something new. This is the same process, just digital. Every visit generates a unique specimen: structure, colors, and proportions assembled from code the way a real orchid is assembled from DNA. No two are ever alike.
As it turns in the light, you’ll hear music shaped by the flower’s appearance — the soundtrack itself is a one-time miracle, as unique as the visuals on your screen. It completes the meditation.
When you close the window, the orchid dies. There is no save state, no gallery, no record of what you saw. Each plant lives only as long as you stay. If you weren’t there, it wouldn’t exist at all.
There is always another one waiting to grow — but not that one. That one’s gone.
Disclaimer: I made Orchids, Once. with the help of Gemini and Claude LLMs, and take no responsibility for any allergies or other harms.
Every day, a new maze appears. Everyone in the world gets the same one.
There’s something cozy and comforting about knowing that right now, somewhere, another person is navigating the same corridors, hitting the same dead ends, and having the same moment of doubt about whether they just walked in a complete circle. Some days the maze is generous and you are out in twenty seconds. Other days it will make you work for it, and you will feel the exit before you see it.
Each maze has a target time based on the shortest possible path. Finish close to it and you’ll earn an S-rank celebration and a shareable stats message. Go slower and you’ll land somewhere between a laudable A and a sad D.
Three modes: Standard comes with breadcrumbs showing where you have been; Hard Mode removes them and trusts you to hold the map entirely in your head; Chill Mode turns the timer off for people who just want to wander. Themes range from an outdoor garden maze to a retro game dungeon, so you can get lost in a way that feels right for you.
A new one tomorrow. And the day after. A maze, a maze, a maze.
Disclaimer: I made a maze, a maze, a maze… with the help of Google’s Gemini 3 Pro LLM. No responsibility taken for wrong turns or damaged self-esteem.
Most map apps are for navigation, not remembering. You know those sequences in old films like Indiana Jones where a dotted line traces across a map from city to city? That is what Crumbs does, except it is your life and the dots are places you actually went.
Effortless location logging
The idea is simple: press a button to log where you are, write a note if you feel like it, and watch your trail build across the map. No passive background tracking, no accounts, no selling your movements for ad targeting. Just the places you chose to remember, connected by a line, yours to keep.
Most travel apps get this wrong in one direction or another. Google Maps’ Timeline tracks you constantly whether you want to remember or not. Swarm needs a business listing to exist before you can check in. Neither lets you draw a line across a whole week, or a custom trip length, and export it cleanly. Crumbs does all of that, and stores everything locally on your device.
Do things with your data
There is a list view that lays out your stops like a journal with timestamps, weather, and location metadata, exportable as a PDF keepsake. You can also save a clean image of your map at any point, ready for sharing or scrapbooking.
Crumbs is a PWA (Progressive Web App) which means mobile operating systems may occasionally purge its local data if not used in awhile. However, connect your Dropbox account and we’ll sync with the cloud automatically, so you won’t lose a crumb. If Dropbox isn’t your thing, manual JSON export and import are available for backups. Either way, your data is yours to keep and use freely. Vibe code an app to generate custom posters, for example.
If you want native background tracking that runs without you thinking about it, I recommend Where Now? — a free indie app by Scott Boms that also logs your location privately. Crumbs can import Where Now’s data exports so you get the map trails and other features. Best of both worlds.
Other details:
Pins capture location, date/time, city/country, and current weather conditions from Open-Meteo.
Works offline: Pin your location while off the grid, and Crumbs will show it on the map when you’re back online.
Filter map and list views by Today, This Week, This Month, All Time, or a custom date range to see only specific trips.
Uses standard Plus Codes as a shorthand for geolocation, so PDF exports retain all relevant information in a human-friendly form.
Open any pin location in Google Maps for more detail on nearby places of interest that were involved in your moment.
Minimal, glassy UI that “puts the focus on your content™”.
Bread mode: replaces all red pushpins with baked goods.
Red string trails can be disabled in settings.
Pins can be moved via drag and drop if necessary.
Disclaimer: I made Crumbs with the help of Google’s Antigravity and Gemini 3.1 Pro. Your location data stays on your device. I have no idea where you’ve been.
Singapore generates (and publishes) an extraordinary amount of data about itself — temperatures, taxi coordinates, dengue clusters, carpark availability, ticket sales at major attractions. Numbers that civil servants read in spreadsheets and the rest of us ignore entirely. The DataDeck asks, “but what does it sound like?”
Each Data Cassette draws live government feeds from data.gov.sg and renders them as distinct genres. There are ten cassettes in all, each with their own acoustic logic and ways of interpreting the city.
The Climate cassette pulls real-time NEA temperature and humidity readings across 12 geographic sectors and converts them into lo-fi hip-hop — with chords deepening as humidity climbs. The Transport cassette tracks unoccupied taxis plying the streets and generates a relentless 303-style midnight techno. HDB carparks become polyrhythmic Afrobeat, and the movements of the stock exchange drive a satisfying hip-hop groove. Get money y’all! Check out the sound of visitor arrivals during the COVID years: like musical crickets.
TEN beautiful themes inspired by vintage hardware and er… mechs
The controls? Three knobs shape density, tempo, and atmosphere. A mix fader redistributes the instrument balance. AUTO mode hands navigation back to the machine. There’s a user manual built in, should you get lost.
It’s a music player with no music files. It’s a data dashboard you can close your eyes to. It’s Singapore, rendered in sound. Put your headphones on, and press play.
An adaptive display panel for different data types
Pro tip: If you really love DataDeck, you can save it to your phone’s Home Screen, which gets you a nice icon and a full-screen mode that shows the whole device at once without distractions.
Disclaimer: I made this with the help of Gemini 3.1 Pro because I’m just an old designer who hasn’t coded stuff since GeoCities. I take no responsibility for any damage you cause yourself or others with this. Thank you.
Every morning, everyone on the planet wakes up to the same handful of words. Drag them around the canvas. Arrange them into something — a poem, a phrase, a punchline, a prayer. Save it to show your friends, then come back tomorrow.
No scores. No wrong answers. Just you, today’s words, and whatever you make of them.
How it works
New words drop at midnight in your timezone. They’re a mix of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, enough to build something with. There’s a bin in the corner where you can drag unwanted words to, freeing up some space. You’ll also find a few connector words stashed in the bin every day to help you create your masterpiece. Tap words once to make them bigger. When you’re done composing, click the Share icon to save an image with the day’s date.
Three themes
CommonVerse comes dressed for the occasion.
Fridge Magnets puts you in front of a stainless steel door covered in letter magnets and a few decorative surprises.
Notebook gives you dot-grid ivory paper, a bookmark ribbon, and a handwriting font.
Typewriter goes analogue all the way — classic typeface, paper bail, wire mesh bin.
Everyone gets the same words each day. What will you do with them?
01/04/26: Added two new themes: Label Maker and Zine. Improved UX with swipe-to-dismiss and made the “trash can” into a pop-over tray. Removed tile collision so creative players can make up new words.
Disclaimer: I made CommonVerse with the help of Google’s Gemini 3/3.1 Pro LLM and take no responsibility for any damage or disappointment.
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