2025 Quarter 3 Random Thoughts

[2025 Aug 13] Designing Your Life - by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

I guess I’m old enough now to be reading a book like this. (Sigh)

I’m not sure how to feel when I hear a design professor talk about using design thinking in everyday life to plan a satisfying life as a design student. Does that make me a bad one, since my own life right now is kind of a mess? If anyone can so easily pick up the most valuable parts of my design degree, what’s the point of me choosing design as my passion and major?

[2025 Aug 23] Funemployment - Weather Alarm

Since I basically have nothing to do (well, not really — but definitely no income), I have a lot of free time to just follow whatever sparks my interest. So first thing: I FINALLY set up a GUI for my Linux system (Ubuntu) on WSL2. I followed this tutorial if anyone's curious.

Lately I've been tired of the same boring alarm sound. And maybe because of all this extra time, I've started paying more attention to the weather and the little things around me. So I thought: why not spice up my mornings? What if my alarm could recommend me a random song every morning, tailored to the day's weather?

Of course, I'm vibe coding here (yes, I enjoy exploiting LLM labor!), but I still want to share what I ended up building.

At first, I wanted to make a physical alarm clock — run the code on a microcontroller, render particle animations on an LED screen, the whole thing. But I wasn't sure if it was worth the effort yet. So I decided to start small and just try it on my phone.

Shortcuts seemed like the obvious choice, and I'm already familiar with the Spotify API. But thanks to iOS's walled garden, automation can't really launch Spotify when the phone is locked or I'm asleep (even with Face ID). So instead, I pulled out my Amazon Alexa and decided to send the Spotify URI there. I briefly considered building a proper Alexa Skill, but since that apparently requires “registering a company” just to publish it, I went with a more hacky solution: using both.

Here's how it works: with an iOS Shortcut and automation, my iPhone sends a request with weather data to a Cloudflare Worker at a set time. The Worker calls an LLM API (I used DeepSeek) to generate parameters — mood, genres, energy, valence, danceability, and tempo — based on the day's weather. Those parameters feed into the Spotify Recommendations API, which picks a song. Finally, the Spotify Player API pushes it directly to my Alexa as the alarm sound.

If you're curious, here's the code. Of course — if I really end up making a physical alarm clock, I'll post an update.

Update: Well... It only worked once after the development...