Pablart

Chinese Homework Helper for Clueless Parents

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0800

My kids attend a Mandarin immersion school. Every week they come home with homework I can barely read. I know a few basic characters, but not nearly enough to help them practice.

So I built a small tool:

Take a photo of any homework page
AI extracts vocabulary worth learning (characters, pinyin, English meaning)
Tap-to-flip flashcards that speak the words aloud

It’s not just for vocabulary lists—you can photograph a reading assignment or worksheet and it pulls out the words your kid should know to understand it. Learn the flashcards first, then tackle the actual homework.

App Store Slop is Coming

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0800

In 2025 I went off the deep end with AI-assisted programming, specifically Claude Code. I’m not looking back. My productivity has changed in ways I couldn’t have imagined two years ago, and I’ve shipped projects that would have taken months in a matter of days.

But I’m concerned about some aspects of where this is heading.

AI slop has already hit inboxes, search results, and social feeds. It hasn’t hit the App Store yet. I think that’s about to change.

Animating bugs with Python and Pillow

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 06:17:19 -0700

Last weekend I spent some more time tinkering with the bug rendering project. Bugs don’t really feel like bugs until they start crawling, and that’s what I did. Let’s talk about this a little bit. I also published the project at https://bugs.pablart.com for anyone to play around.

From static images to animations

An animation is nothing more than a sequence of consecutive images that give the illusion of movement. Did you ever stop to think why we call them motion pictures?

Drawing bugs with Python and Pillow

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 06:17:19 -0700

Last weekend I spent some time playing with a fun side project that I had been thinking about for a while. I remember as a kid, I think it was in a Scientific American issue that someone described a computer program to generate insect-looking drawings, which evolve over time into increasingly weird looking critters. The point was to demonstrate the ease with which evolution can produce vastly different living beings, thus explaining the immense diversity of life on Earth. But all I remember thinking is how interesting those little bugs looked.

Side Hustle Idea: Photographing Cyclists

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 15:32:39 -0700

A couple of weeks ago I was on a particularly beatiful ride around the Oakland/Berkeley hills when, reaching the top of a climb, I noticed someone taking pictures of a friend as he was reaching the summit. Then I had a flashback to events like the Death Ride and similar events where they contract a photographer to take snaps of all participants, with the option to sell some prints shortly after. So I had a small side-business idea for amateur or freelance photographers, now that so many weddings have been postponed or scaled down, and I bet many are hurting.

A new blog, using Hugo and AWS

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 14:17:19 -0700

So here we are, it’s 2020 and I’m starting a new blog. It’s not my first rodeo but I hope this one sticks. The initial goals to be are twofold:

Exercise my writing, making it a part of my daily routine
Learn some new technology in the process of deploying and maintaining it

If in the process I write something interesting, all the better, but I don’t aim for this to become too popular, but it won’t be a “dear diary” deal either. Today I won’t go into the various topics I intend to talk about. For that, you have my about page. Instead here I want to focus on the technology I’m using to build and deploy the blog: The Hugo static site generator, and AWS technologies, specifically (Route53, S3 and CloudFront).

About pablart.com

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 12:17:19 -0700

My name is Pablo, and I’m a father of two, husband of one who moonlights as a software enginer, company founder and jack of all trades. I enjoy good coffee, tasty beers, gardening and cycling. In a previous life I was a computer science researcher, working on the intersection of computer graphics, computational geometry and topology. I was born in Granada, Spain, although I’ve been in California for most of my adult life.