The Notebook Not that The Notebook, but The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, a book about notebooks, how they evolved, and how they are used today. I found the concept... https://johnbeales.com/books/the-notebook/

Making the Impossible Possible I find myself waiting on the blinking square cursor of the Claude Code TUI thinking "go faster," even though I know it's already going so much faster than I would... https://johnbeales.com/2026/making-the-impossible-possible/

Working with CSS Container Queries for the first time today, and they don’t quite work how I expected them to work. It’s leading to me having to declare selectors in ways that are not natural to me, although the selectors are working as expected. In short, it’s making me think, harder than most...

The Apollo Murders With a title like The Apollo Murders I expected something a lot closer to a classic whodunnit. This wasn't that, and I'm glad it wasn't - it was better! https://johnbeales.com/books/the-apollo-murders/

Web Cartography I've been meaning to read this for years. I finally picked up a copy for a decent price last year, and read it as a refresher before embarking on some... https://johnbeales.com/books/web-cartography/

Yesterday’s Fable ban caught me by surprise, I was planning on using Fable 5 until at least June 22, and hoping that it wouldn’t actually go token-only after June 22. Fable is good, even great! I’m back on Opus 4.8 with GPT 5.5 supervision earlier than expected. 😞

It’s time for the Jetbrains Developer Ecosystem Survey! Participate at my referral URL! https://surveys.jetbrains.com/s3/developer-ecosystem-survey-2026-sh?pcode=473387363801875378

Fixing Chrome’s “No usable sandbox!” During Web Requests with Browsershot and Puppeteer After getting Chrome up and running as the www-data user for Laravel workers, I tried to... https://johnbeales.com/2026/fixing-chromes-no-usable-sandbox-during-web-requests-with-browsershot-and-puppeteer/

Install Chrome as the www-data User After recently rebuilding the 4RoadService web server on Debian 13 Browsershot wasn't working right. It wasn't working at all. We run Laravel on a slightly old-school LAMP setup with PHP-FPM,... https://johnbeales.com/2026/install-chrome-as-the-www-data-user/

Asked Claude Code with Fable 5 to write some API docs based on the code, and it did, and also pointed out some bugs in the API, which it is now fixing, and updating the docs to match the fixes.

I’m migrating analytics to a new database structure for 4RoadService, it looks like this will take a few days. This should enable faster, better, and more accurate reporting for our customers.

Playing around with Anthropic’s Fable this afternoon to do some code review and write some documentation. So far it seems to be very thorough.

So far all my Claude Code work has been with Laravel. Today I’m starting a new project with WordPress, and will be interested to see how Claude does in a slightly different domain.

I am now a member of the “Claude code deleted something that it shouldn’t have from my database” club! Good thing it was a development database.

Developer headaches meet real-world applications.

That’s pretty cool that cruise ships are stopping there, it’s the type of useless, geeky “visit” that nobody needs to make, but I would love to be able to say I have done.

The Historian I received Elizabeth Kostova's vampire novel The Historian for my birthday earlier this spring, and finished it last night. It has been great fun to read. I read Dracula back... https://johnbeales.com/books/the-historian/

Switched to the new ATmosphere plugin for Bluesky/AT protocol integration from johnbeales.com, and it seems great. So far it does exactly what I want it to.

WordPress 7.0 upgrade completed, nothing seems broken.

Time to update to WordPress 7.0! It seems like a big release.... https://johnbeales.com/micro/2026-05-21t150613-0400/

I’m skeptical.

Did a lot of cleaning today while Claude & Codex were churning. I'm going to have to spin up a side project or something to handle the waiting.... https://johnbeales.com/micro/2026-05-12t180448-0400/

Working on a Wix site this afternoon. Has anyone figured out how to make agents do Wix development yet?... https://johnbeales.com/micro/2026-05-04t150536-0400/

Watching the Canadiens game now, and I 100% agree.

Andrew Kinsey@andrewkinsey.bsky.social · 3mo ago

We seriously should treat sports betting ads like cigarette ads: ban them.

This Reddit thread pointed me in the right direction to update my (very old) WordPress database to support emoji.... https://johnbeales.com/micro/2026-05-03t200721-0400/

Updated some database tables and now I think I have emoji working here. 🌻... https://johnbeales.com/micro/2026-05-03t200556-0400/

Dropping the Cloudflare "Managed Challenge" hammer on bots that are overwhelming a server. 😗... https://johnbeales.com/micro/2026-05-03t165652-0400/

Discovered today that URLs are supposed to be restricted to ASCII characters. Had to (have Claude) write a command to update some URLs.... https://johnbeales.com/micro/2026-05-03t131301-0400/

Cleaning up some unexpected fallout from updating to Laravel 13 yesterday, clearly I need to add a couple more tests to my test suite.... https://johnbeales.com/micro/2026-05-02t125337-0400/

WordPress.com's new microblogging interface makes me think I should release the system I'm using here for microblogging.... https://johnbeales.com/micro/2026-04-30t155124-0400/