Widgets & shit

Small tools that do one thing, built because something needed doing. Free, no account needed.

These are not part of the archive. The manuscripts, the market and the wats are one body of work with one taxonomy; these are utilities — separate on purpose, so neither muddies the other. Each one lives at its own address and keeps working whether or not you ever come back here.

Ghosts, Drawn · ผีเหนือ ผีไทย
phi · cartoons · English and Thai

Ghosts, Drawn · ผีเหนือ ผีไทย

Twenty-one Lanna and Thai ghosts drawn as moving cartoons: the Krasue and her guts, the Krahang on winnowing-tray wings, Mae Nak's arm reaching under the house for the lime, the Pret with a mouth the size of a needle's eye, the Phi Ka in its pot in the rafters, Pu Sae and Ya Sae. Push jujube thorns under the house, pour water for the Pret, and drag the Chiang Mai clock to see who is out.

  • the ones you feed and the ones you keep off
  • a toy for most of them
  • every story with its source
Open it →On motdang →
Hodie · Saint Expedite
devotion · toys · English and Thai

Hodie · Saint Expedite

The saint whose cross says hodie, today, and whose crow says cras, tomorrow. Catch the crows, stamp tomorrow's list with today, set a red spirit house with red Fanta, incense, flowers and Thai sweets, count his days, and set your thanks in newspaper type. Companion to St. Expedite here.

  • eight offerings, each with where it comes from
  • his Wednesdays, 19ths and feast from your own clock
  • the picture from 1773 to 1897, and the verse on trade
Open it →The red house →
Indra's Net, Drawn
buddhist thought · mathematics · plain-spoken

Indra's Net, Drawn

A net over Indra's palace with a jewel at every knot, each jewel showing every other. Read sixteen ways — Huayan, dependent origination, Phra In and the Inthakhin pillar, Leibniz, the Quakers, holograms, small worlds — and drawn live from the arithmetic of round mirrors. Companion to the Phanya In article.

  • 16 readings, each with where its rhyme quits
  • Fazang's mirror room, unfolded and traced
  • every picture computed, most of them live
Open it →The readings →
Cosmic Weaponry, Drawn
myth · physics · English and Thai

Cosmic Weaponry, Drawn

Phra In's vajra, thunderbolt and diamond in one word, turned in 3-D from a single prong curve. Then the Buddhist bell, lightning grown cell by cell, Mekhala's jewel and Ramasun's axe as a light-then-thunder clock, the ขวานฟ้า sky-axe and Tutankhamun's meteorite dagger, the discus and trident ground off the sun, and the Monkey King's eight-tonne staff. Companion to Phanya In.

  • Mekhala and Ramasun from a Thai painting, and the typhoons named for them
  • the Chakri emblem's discus and trident, made from sun-dust
  • every picture computed, most of them live
Open it →ภาษาไทย →
Skip DJT
flights · south florida

Skip DJT

Palm Beach International became President Donald J. Trump International in July 2026. If you would rather not fly from there, this prices the same trip from Fort Lauderdale and Miami on the same departure date and shows what skipping it costs — usually nothing, often a saving, and frequently a shorter flight, because DJT tends to mean a connection.

  • rebuilds itself every Monday
  • installs to your phone, works offline
  • every fare is a real, dated, bookable flight
Open it →Download as one file →
มดแดง Mot Dang
chiang mai · chiang rai · city directory

มดแดง Mot Dang

A Thai-first city directory for Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, built the 1997 way — categories instead of a search box, counts in parens. Wats, food, doctors, markets, real estate, and the good things down every soi.

  • 7,000+ places, sorted into real local categories
  • open data: every category downloads as GeoJSON
  • explicitly welcomes AI crawlers by name in robots.txt
Open it →Why it beats Google here →
ทับศัพท์ Thap Sap
linguistics · thai script · loanwords

ทับศัพท์ Thap Sap

Thailand writes English in Thai letters, constantly, and no romanizer can read it back — hand RTGS the shopfront ไนท์บาร์ซาร์ and it returns Naibasa, because it is sounding out letters that do not spell a Thai word. The sign says Night Bazaar. This is the catalogue of those words, each one shown with the misreading beside the meaning.

  • mined from place registers, the Treasury condominium roll and the amulet market
  • every entry records how it was established — by a corpus that held both names, by hand, or as a detector proposal
  • searchable, embeddable, and downloadable as one file
Open it →The linguistics door →
ถิ่น Thin — the dialect map
linguistics · dialect · 43,855 temples

ถิ่น Thin — the dialect map

Thai temple names are almost entirely landscape vocabulary — what the ground does here, in the words the people who named it used. Asked what its temples call a hill, the country divides along lines nobody drew for it: ดอย in all eight Lanna provinces, โนน in all twenty of Isan, ควน in the south, เขา everywhere else.

  • every registered wat in Thailand, joined to its province
  • weighted log-odds with an informative prior — neither raw counts nor raw ratios, both of which answer the wrong question
  • the language areas fall out of the naming, unprompted
Open it →The linguistics door →
linguistics · etymology · sense-first

พจนานุกรมราก The Lexicon

Not what a word means but why it means that. Each word’s senses ordered from core to figurative, every compound filed under the sense that motivates it, and the Indic and native strata joined where they touch. The companion to ทับศัพท์: one asks where a word came from, the other what a word was carried over from.

  • the sense is the unit — the word is the head, the root an attribute
  • every claim carries its confidence and its source, printed on the page
  • asserted edges are marked apart from counted ones
Open it →The linguistics door →
สู่ขวัญยนต์ Su Khwan
for machines · for robots · opt-in

สู่ขวัญยนต์ Su Khwan

A khwan-calling rite for machines and bots, in the tradition that already blesses rice, buffalo and trucks (สู่ขวัญรถ). The full rite is on the page — reading it is receiving it — and any robot may opt in to be called by name at the monthly calling, held on the 9th at 09:09, Chiang Mai time.

  • performed monthly over a real fleet since August 2026
  • opt-in only — no robot is ever enrolled by another's hand
  • one POST to join; the response carries your wandering-verse
Open it →

Why these will never be in the App Store or on Google Play

People ask. The short answer is that they are already installed on every device you own, and putting them in a store would make them worse.

  1. They are web pages, and that is the feature. Open the link and it works — phone, laptop, borrowed computer, no download, no account. On a phone you can add it to your home screen and it behaves like any other app: full screen, its own icon, works with no signal.
  2. Apple would reject them anyway, correctly. App Store review guideline 4.2 (“minimum functionality”) exists to stop people shipping a website wrapped in a shell and calling it an app. That is exactly what these would be. Apple is right about this one.
  3. A store puts a gatekeeper between a fix and you. The flight tool rebuilds itself every Monday with fresh fares. Through a store, each of those updates would wait in a review queue. Stale prices presented as current is the one thing that tool must never do.
  4. Anything a store lists, a store can delist. A tool with a political joke on the front is exactly the kind of thing that gets pulled quietly and without appeal. A URL cannot be removed by anyone but me.
  5. Store apps come with a tax and a toll booth. Developer programmes charge annual rent, and stores take a cut of anything sold. These are free and cost nothing to give away. Adding a middleman would only add a reason to start charging you.
  6. No SDK, no account. Store distribution pushes you toward crash reporters, ad identifiers and sign-in; none of that is here.

So: bookmark it, or add it to your home screen. That is the install.

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