J.D. Hodges | Every man has a story, this is my story.

MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

Saturday, 2026.03.07 J.D. H. Leave a comment

Preface: I’m not really a Mac guy. But I have deep respect for what Apple has done with their silicon, and I’ve been following their CPU journey since the Motorola 68k days through PowerPC, the Intel transition, and now their in-house Apple Silicon. What they’ve accomplished in the last five years is genuinely remarkable. Apple is one of the few original tech companies that has survived and thrived over the decades while still staying in the consumer tech space. As

How 25,000 Junk Folders Were Breaking My AI Doc Organizer (Garbage In, Garbage Out)

Thursday, 2026.03.05 J.D. H. Leave a comment

How 25,000 Junk Folders Were Silently Breaking My AI Document Organizer (Garbage In, Garbage Out) Thousands of (somewhat) zombie Quicken folders taken care of via compressing them into one 7z archive: Details: My AI File Organizer Was Fighting 25,000 Phantom Folders (And Losing 😜) For a while, my automated document filer was misbehaving. Scan an insurance card — it suggests filing it in a folder called Q-Final. Scan a bank statement — it wants to put it in Attach. The

The IRS Is Phasing Out Paper Checks: What You Need to Know

Tuesday, 2026.02.17 J.D. H. Leave a comment

February 17, 2026 Disclaimer: This blog post is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or financial advice. The author is not acting as your attorney, CPA, or tax advisor. Tax law and IRS policy are subject to change without notice, and the information presented here may be incomplete or outdated by the time you read it. You should consult a qualified tax professional or attorney regarding your specific situation before making any decisions based on

Windows 10 printing to old/offline printer instead of new one [SOLVED]

Tuesday, 2026.02.17 J.D. H. Leave a comment

TL;DR: Replaced a printer but Windows 10 keeps sending jobs to the old one? Cancel the stuck jobs in the old printer’s queue, then set your new printer as the default. Two minutes and you’re back in business. 👍 So I got a message from a client’s office today. “The printer won’t print.” Classic. We had just set up a brand new Brother DCP-L5510DN to replace their old DCP-L5500DN. The new printer was confirmed working via USB the day before.

Could Not Update Post in the Database [SOLVED]

Monday, 2026.02.16 J.D. H. Leave a comment

WordPress Gutenberg “Could Not Update Post in the Database” Fix (IONOS, utf8mb3, and Emoji Issues) I ran into a fun one tonight while trying to publish a post to an older WordPress site hosted on IONOS. Figured I’d document it since it took me a few minutes to figure this out and hopefully this saves someone else the trouble. The Problem I wrote a post in the Gutenberg block editor, hit Publish, and got this: “Publishing failed. Could not update

Claude AI Custom Instructions: A Real Example That Actually Works

Monday, 2026.02.16 J.D. H. Leave a comment

Disclaimer: I used Claude to help me write this post. I’ve been using Claude pretty heavily for a while now – coding (notice that dash, lol), project planning, research, general “help me figure this out” and perhaps most surprisingly as an evaluator of ideas and for grading performance on various tasks. I’ve tested it with friends in a variety of industries and it is almost always of some value. Despite that, “out of the box” it has a few issues. Primarily not

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The Ultimate Claude Code Workstation

Friday, 2026.02.06 J.D. H. 2 comments

A Hardware Guide for People Who Actually Work With AI With regards to AI and Claude, here’s what most people are not writing about yet: the hardware side of working with Claude, and more importantly, the human side. A lot of AI blog and Reddit posts out there fall into one of two camps. Camp A is obsessing over local LLM rigs, how many NVIDIA H100s you can cram into a tower, how much VRAM you need to run a

What Oil Should You Run in a Willys CJ-2A? (The Go-Devil Guide)

Friday, 2026.02.06 J.D. H. Leave a comment

My son recently picked up a 1946 Willys CJ-2A, and naturally one of the first questions out of the gate was: What oil should I use? Simple question, right? Not so fast. The internet will give you 47 different opinions, two forum arguments, and a guy who swears by bacon grease. So I did the research, dug through the forums, checked the original Willys service manual specs, and put together the definitive guide so you don’t have to. ⚠️ Disclaimer: