I grew up 45 minutes south of where Napoleon Dynamite was filmed. My wife and daughters went to the first Napoleon Dynamite festival in 2005. They even got their picture taken with Lyle.
Obviously I haven’t been chatting on line all day with babes, but since I threw my back out on Tuesday - I have been chatting all day with for different instances of Claude. And I thought I’d share the various ways in which I use Claude. These are all different instances of Claude Code - that is I interact with Claude in a terminal / command line.
As I said I currently have four instances of Claude running - 2 on my laptop and 2 on my Mac Studio that runs in my office acts as an always on server. One of them is a new project as you can see above where I am going to do my best to help my son Miles Griffith find job in software when he graduates in Dec of 2026. This mostly involves me reaching out to all of my contacts to ask them if they know anyone is hiring - to refer Miles or to fwd his resume on to someone that is hiring. (If you know anyone please let me know!)
One is a long running Claude project where I rebuilt my personal website - https://www.niffgurd.com - it had been woefully out of date for years and Claude helped me fix it up - rebuild all the pages, build consistent navigation, archive and save locally all my old blogs going back to 2003! Probably most importantly to me - it has integrated all my photos and videos into areas of my website and each night builds and pulls dynamically as I add new content to Flickr and Youtube. And I continually make tweaks - like when I added some the School section in lieu of the just past 40 year High School reunion. Claude is my webmaster and software engineer on my website, nothing too complicated but with Claude’s help I was able to get it completely rebuilt and functioning again.
Another Claude project was building a “Classmates.com” for my High School 1986 class. I haven’t fully launched it live yet - still testing but it has registration, photo sharing, message board, tracks contact details for each classmate, allows classmates to get in touch with each other etc etc. There is also an admin section to approve photos and descriptions and review registrations. (It is really had to track down people after 40 years!) That was a pretty extensive project and was the first time I ended up actually buying extra tokens when I burnt through my weekly allotment. Claude set up Firebase in Google for storage, hosting and authentication and we use AWS Simple Email Service to send emails and SNS to track bounce emails notifications to the system. All of this syncs to a Google sheet for the class president to be more easily able to read the data.
The last Claude project is called Photo Clean Up. I have always had a camera around - I bought a digital camera in 1999 when Sofi was born (Sony Mavica FD83), and a DSLR in 2005 (Nikon D70) when I started at Amazon (used my signing bonus). I joined Flickr at the same time in Feb 2005, and I have posted 57,000 photos there. I have 250,000 photos in my Lightroom Master catalogs and in my photomaster directory I have around 125,000 photos and in the last 6 months I have scanned about 1500 film photos (I bought a Fast Foto scanner which can scan a stack of photos at the rate of about 1 per second). My archives were a mess - disorganized -all over the place. I have used Claude as my digital assistant to help organize, move files around, locate holes, find duplicates, clean up naming standards and storage locations. And I use it to process my scans - read the backs of the photo and OCR the text, read the embeded date on the front of the photo, and then name the photo by year and identify the person when it can. It knows when Stac and I were married, when Kiah, Sofi and Miles were born and then use that data to guess the dates and even match location (Oh that was the 2008 Disneyland trip). And then Claude can find duplicate matches.
In the early days of digital photos - it was common to upload them to Shutterfly and to order prints - because we were still really used to putting photos in albums and phsyically looking at them. So some of my scans are prints of digital photos - they are scans of digital duplicates. And then sometimes I have multiple photos of the same thing - reprinted from Stac’s copy or her Mom’s copy etc. Claude can help manage all fo this labeling and duplicate identification. I asked Claude to explain how it wa doing this :
Perceptual hash (dHash), the fast first pass
Shrink the photo to a 17×16 grayscale thumbnail. This throws away resolution, file size, JPEG quality and color.
For each pixel, record whether it’s brighter than its right-hand neighbor. That gives 256 yes/no bits, a coarse fingerprint of the photo’s light and dark layout.
Compare two fingerprints by counting how many bits differ. That count is the “distance” (the d26, d38 labels). 0 means essentially the same picture, around 128 means unrelated, and under ~30 usually means the same shot.
I fingerprint each print four times (0°, 90°, 180°, 270°), because scans often come out sideways or upside down.
It’s fast: fingerprinting the 47,691 archive photos took a while once, but comparing all 397 against them takes seconds.
Crop-tolerant correlation, the re-score
For each print, I took the 25 closest archive candidates from the fingerprint pass.
I shrank both images to 40×40 grayscale and normalized brightness and contrast, which cancels out print fading and color shift.
Then I measured how closely the two patterns line up, on a scale from 0 to 1. I tried each rotation, plus trimming 0%, 4% or 8% off the edges of either image, and kept the best score.
About 0.95+ is the same photo. Around 0.8 is the same scene from a different frame or angle. Under 0.7 is unrelated.
What it can’t tell
It looks at overall composition, not fine detail. Two frames shot a second apart from the same spot can still score 0.90+, which is why I’d put the dups in a review folder rather than trash them.
Nearly blank shots (sky or ocean) can match each other falsely, like the landscapes that matched the beach photo earlier.
The Claude AI / cloud aspects of this are just figuring out the right code / python to use and then all of it runs locally analyzing my photos and providing me results to review. I have also had Claude archive all of my Flickr data and build a local JSON based HTML browser to be able to access my photo master photos without requiring a server or Flickr to be around. I’d like my family to be able to acesss all my digital photos years into the future.
And you’ll notice - none of this is using AI to write for me, or creating images or video - its all practical tools that help me and enable me in my creative endeavors. Very useful tools but all tools that I am using vs. outsourcing some part of my creativity (though obviously creating software is a creative endeavor - here I guide and request rather than write the code directly - and to me that is ok :) )
Cheers
mbg