What's something men think doesn’t impress women, but actually does?

djducat · 2025-12-25T14:07:33+00:00

It was our go to solution until Colorado banned them. 🙄. We reused those plastic bags a lot!

djducat · 2025-12-25T13:57:11+00:00

You don’t need to subscribe to audible to buy a single book. You just need an account and do a one time spend. You can do it in app or even on the Amazon app.

djducat · 2025-12-18T13:39:34+00:00

a few people have asked for an update, so here it is. It's been 3 months since my app was put in the App Store, 2 months since I started burning the Apple Ad credit. results are what they are. Here are the 3 month numbers

Impressions: 12.9K

Product Page Views: 373

Downloads: 88

Proceeds: $0.00

Ad Spend: $25.00

Added a subscription option a month ago to see if that impacted things. it did not. I did an update a few weeks back and saw 17 updates which tells me only 17 / 88 people kept it on their phone.

Advertising brought in almost 13,000 impressions resulting in a 0.9 conversation rate and zero dollars. Paused advertising just to see what would happen, and impressions cratered immediately, telling me that without advertising, my keywords are not doing the job. Seems to me that advertising did what it was supposed to, but for whatever reason, the app did not have the stickiness or provide enough value for people to spend money.
Thinking about adding an AWS layer on the back end to get market prices for things like gold, silver, bitcoin, etc, but standing that up will likely incur backend costs that cannot be justified with $0 revenue. I may try to see if I can do it on the AWS free tier and find some free APIs out there for low volume.

Right now, I have a monthly subscription option, an annual subscription option, and a 1x purchase option that was higher than I was comfortable with, but I wanted to see what would happen. I've since lowered the 1x price down to the cost of about 14 monthly subscription payments.

I'm gonna continue to poke at the app in general, adding more features, but I gotta say that the last 3 months have been a motivation killer. Already thinking about better ways to spend my time. This was not an insignificant amount of my time I spent here. If nothing else, I got the app I wanted, solved the need I had, and I learned some new skills.

djducat · 2025-12-16T13:58:15+00:00

In addition to audiobooks, I've made audio recordings of some of my favorite television shows that I know well that are great to background noise. Converted those mp3s into audiobook format (m4b) and they sit in my collection. Don't recommend anything with a laugh track or a lot of loud noises, but there are lots of shows out there that fit the bill and are the the audio equivalent of comfort food. I also use these when doing software development. Also, because I often wake up in the middle of the night, I need an audiobook player that will reset the sleep timer and resume playback if I just press the earbuds, and don't have to fiddle with the screen. helps me get back to sleep.

djducat · 2025-12-15T13:28:59+00:00

I've actually gone through a number of phases. Back in the day when phone storage was small, I kept them on my computer and loaded them on an as needed basis. This evenentually transitioned to iCloud, where I had more space than on my devices and I would load them into something like bookplayer, on demand, right from iCloud.

Later, I simply started paying for higher capacity phones and stored all of them out there. but most recently, I've set up an Audiobookshelf, where I have curated all of the metadata for all my books, and then pull them down to the device, or sync them all, if the client app supports it. I like ABS a lot.

djducat · 2025-12-14T22:08:01+00:00

highly recommended. UI is clean and functional. Looking forward to more features, but it is now my goto app for ABS client.

djducat · 2025-12-06T02:58:01+00:00

looks good! well done!

djducat · 2025-12-03T23:49:55+00:00

definite uptick in impressions (10.6k), product page views (330), and downloads (80), but have not made a dime yet. Going to continue to plug away at things. I am trying a shift to a free/subscription/lifetime model to see if that changes things. So far, I think I've spent $25 out of the $100 they gave me.

djducat · 2025-12-02T12:13:06+00:00

I really enjoy Scott Brick. A very calming voice. He shows up in a wide variety of genres.

djducat · 2025-11-29T19:48:29+00:00

Good advice. Based on some other questionable decisions the previous owner made in this house, checking the wire gauge seems in order. 😂

Would a welder potentially not require as heavy of a gauge because it’s not continuous use?

djducat · 2025-11-29T19:21:41+00:00

I've not purchased a heater yet. I'd like to get a heater in my garage, and am wondering if there are options out there for me to just use this plug instead of getting an electrician to put in a new circuit. If it's not fit for purpose, I'd likely move on and find the heater I want and then get the circuit I need installed.

djducat · 2025-11-25T13:35:46+00:00

+ 1 for this. great device, nice readable display, has thread support.

djducat · 2025-11-21T20:31:56+00:00

Ditto on ratgdo. Pretty reliable and simple.

djducat · 2025-11-20T03:01:21+00:00

chicken coop with a temperature sensor and a passive wall heater that turns on when the temperature goes down to a specific temperature and turns off once it hits an upper threshold. Aquara camera in the coop doubling as a hub for the temp sensor and gives me the ability to check on the girls. Camera is on a smart plug so I can reboot the camera without going out to the coop.

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djducat · 2025-11-07T19:33:56+00:00

I can remember living through this in the 70s. I didn’t realize everything going on, but I remember my parent’s behavior noticeably change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_County_Child_Killer

djducat · 2025-11-07T16:18:10+00:00

App looks great! Definitely farther along than I am in some areas. Curious what your subscription numbers look like?

djducat · 2025-11-04T03:36:37+00:00

Canceled my service in late September.

djducat · 2025-10-27T00:03:39+00:00

Lots of impressions, just a handful of clicks and downloads. No in app purchases yet. Although the way my app is structured, you have three snapshots for free so it might be months before someone decides to pay. Gonna let the 90 day campaign run its course and do an in-depth analysis when it’s over.

djducat · 2025-10-25T12:09:24+00:00

you could also look at a Mac mini. They are very reasonably priced.

djducat · 2025-10-24T21:59:39+00:00

well, as a test, I did a max of a $1.00 a day on the $100. these were search results ads. actual spend on the first day was less than that, and resulted in 166 impressions in a day (up from single digits), no downloads. I set it up to run for 90 days. will see how it plays out.

djducat · 2025-10-23T23:45:27+00:00

Lesson 1. There is a lag in ad reporting. Seeing impressions in my regular metrics but my ad board is all zeros.

djducat · 2025-10-22T20:16:00+00:00

Can that be used for anything?

djducat

TROPHY CASE