Variations
on a "String"

The hard problem: YouTube caps search at 100 calls a day

Almost every evening the room fills up faster than Google's search quota allows. Instead of letting the app go dark at dinner time, I built a degradation ladder so singers almost never notice:

1. Normalize & share. Unicode-folded queries hit one global cache served fresh for 14 days, so "Shallow karaoke" is bought once for every room on Earth.
2. Coalesce. Identical searches in flight share a single API call.
3. Buy songs at 1% of the price. A nightly cron walks 37 verified karaoke channels at 1 quota unit per 50 videos and pre-stocks the songs rooms actually asked for.
4. Fail soft. When search does run out: aged cache → curated corpus → paste-a-link (a separate quota) → a friendly countdown to reset, plus a push alert to me.

Built for a living room, a bar, or a smart TV

Hosts run the night from a phone or laptop; a separate display mode turns any TV browser into the stage with a big QR code, up-next sidebar and three themes. Fair mode rotates singers round-robin, duets split credit, and wait-time estimates keep the room honest. Co-hosts get their own remote, and a printable QR poster goes on the wall.

A dashboard a volunteer can learn in one sitting

The volunteer portal is the heart of the project. Board members sign in with a magic link, see a plain-language dashboard ("25 upcoming events are on the community calendar"), and add an event with a numbered form that previews the public card as they type. Sports & classes, YouTube videos and the volunteer allow-list are managed the same way. Nothing requires a developer, a password, or a Squarespace login.

Designed to be gentle — and to actually reach you

Most break reminders are a nagging popup you learn to ignore. Intermezzo picks one to three stretches that suit the time of day, walks you through them with hand-drawn illustrations and per-side timers, then closes with a short mind moment. Because Chrome may be in the background when the timer fires, the reminder arrives as a system notification with a soft cello chime — from any app you happen to be in.

1. Manifest V3 done properly. Alarms survive service-worker sleep; an offscreen document plays audio while Chrome is hidden; sleep and lock reset the interval so you're never greeted by six stale reminders.
2. Nothing leaves your machine. No accounts, no analytics, no network calls. Streaks, history and preferences live in extension storage.
3. Respectful defaults. Active-hours window, snooze, mute-for-a-meeting, eye-rest breaks, and release notes that appear once after an update — never on install.
4. Hand-made, not scraped. 60 stretches and 40 mind moments written for the app, with 1,500 lines of hand-authored SVG figures.

Small on purpose — and sticky

Intermezzo is the quiet one in this list: a side project I use every day rather than a growth play. What I like about its numbers is the shape, not the size. The Chrome Web Store shows a flat line of about 16 weekly users every week since launch in mid-June — the people who installed it kept it, roughly nine in ten leave it enabled, and each of the six releases was picked up within days. Users are mostly in the United States on macOS, with a few in Brazil and India, and the store listing's only outside referrer so far is ChatGPT. Worth saying plainly: I have never spent a minute marketing it. No ads, no launch post, no outreach — everyone who uses Intermezzo found it on their own.