Blog
Blog posts and ramblings to chronicle my adventures in life. This may contain technology, family, business or products that I enjoy.
About
Hi, I’m Jim. A father, husband, business owner, entrepreneur, and a person who loves technology. I semi-often update this blog.
Contact
Feel free to reach out to me with questions, contact, business ideas, projects or just a random Hello. Located in the Mitten state.
Recent Posts
AI Costs – Tokens and Credits
AI Costs: Tokens, Credits, and What They Mean for you and your team AI is everywhere these days, but how much does it actually cost to use? If you’ve played with ChatGPT, Claude, or similar tools, you’ve probably seen terms like tokens and credits. Here’s a quick guide to what…
Why I Still Self-Host After 20 Years
Over the past few months, I’ve been having some energizing conversations with colleagues and friends about technology trends, personal infrastructure, and the explosion of AI tools. One recent chat with my teammate stuck with me—we got into a discussion about self-hosting, and it made me pause and reflect. It turns…
Building a Weather App with 4 AI Dev Tools: A Hands-On Comparison
AI-powered development tools are helping change and shape the software development ecosystem. From writing code to designing interfaces, these tools make software creation faster, more accessible, and often more fun. To explore this shift, I decided to build the same simple application—a weather app—using four emerging AI development platforms: Replit…
How I Use n8n for Business and Personal Automation
I’ve been using n8n for over three years, and it has become an essential tool for both my work and personal life. Whether it’s automating business workflows or managing my daily tasks, n8n has been my go-to solution for seamless automation. I am always amazed at what can be done…
Why I’m All In on Cloudflare (And You Should Be Too)
I know firsthand the importance of security, speed, and reliability when managing online services—whether it’s websites, applications, or home and business security. That’s why Cloudflare is an essential part of my toolkit. From domain registration to security and performance optimization, Cloudflare provides everything I need to keep my projects running…
Running an AI LLM locally – Testing out DeepSeek
I have been working and experimenting with AI in all diffrerent aspects of my life. I have changed the way I work with AI around stratagey and busienss. However one of the benefits of being in technology is both using the technology and teaching others about the technology. Many people…
Macbook Upgrade and challenges
I recently updated my main computer, a MacBook Pro, to a more current version. I appreciate how easy Apple makes the migration process. You reset the Mac, and then you migrate from one Mac to another. The entire process of migrating from my old Mac to the new one…
Long Overdue Update – 2025
I won’t even check the date of my last blog post because, honestly, I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life. Let’s just say it’s been a while. But instead of dwelling on that, let me jump right into what I’ve been up to and where I’m headed….
Python 3 on MacOS
Python 3 on MacOS
I recently had the need to create a small python script to run a process. I quickly looked up a process I could utilize to read a Rest API then do some work based on that content.
I fired up Visual Studio code and wrote out the framework of the program I needed in about 10 min. (NOTE: I have not used Python in a long time and it was fun to quickly put something together).
Once I was done writing the code I jumped into a term terminal and ran the program “python GetAPIData.py”. It worked well – opened a file of records added to an array and displayed the line items and did a count.
I then added some code that referenced how to call an API and it used the “requests”, knowing I needed to run “pip install requests” before I ran the program, I was rewarded with an error.
zsh: command not found: pip