I built a minimal Pomodoro timer that lives in the macOS menu bar. There are many of these little Pomodoro apps on the internet, but most of them are scammy adware or charge a fee for bloated premium features I don’t need. So I made my own that’s free and designed exactly for my minimalist needs. Features The app does exactly what I need and nothing more: 25-minute work timer, 5-minute break Start / Pause / Reset controls Circular progress ring with countdown in the menu bar Log what you’re working on before each session Add notes during a session Reflect on what you accomplished after each session macOS notification when timer completes Plain text log file for easy querying Configurable log file location No dock icon — lives entirely in the menu bar Install Requires macOS 14+

AI is awesome. I had some terraform code to create a proxy vm on AWS so out of curiosity I asked openAI to do the same thing for Google Cloud. I just pasted the AWS terraform code into the openAI chat interface and it magically gave me fully functional Google terraform code. The code wasn’t rocket science and I probably could have done the same thing using my brain in under 20 minutes.

I’ve been living in Korea since August. The experience has been fascinating on many levels, though not without its frustrations. One unexpected frustration is the way some websites don’t work here. Website owners block access to users from Asian countries. This is usually to filter out bots and scammers, as well as licensing rights that are geographically bounded. I was not able to log into starbucks.com to purchase a gift card because of this.