Baby Steps

08:58 Tuesday, 28 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 56.05°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 59% Wind: 18.57mph
Words: 438

Interesting afternoon yesterday. I tried to install Jacob Evans' Tinderbox MCP Server (experimental). I was finally able to get everything wired up this morning, but I think I learned a few things along the way.

The first thing was that I had to install the latest version of Ruby. MacOS 26 ships with version 2.6, and the MCP requires 3.1 or greater with Bundler. My Terminal-fu is weak, but Claude kind of walked me through it.

Once that was installed, Claude walked me through the GIT commands to install the server. The instructions are all in the ReadMe, but I kept a running commentary with Claude verify I was on the right path. (More about paths in a minute.)

Finally, I had to edit the Claude Desktop Configuration file. Again, instructions are in the ReadMe.

It didn't work.

I'd share the chat, but it's very long. Here's what was ultimately the main problem. The ReadMe says this is how your config file should read:

{

"mcpServers": {

"tinderbox": {

"command": "ruby",

"args": ["/full/path/to/tbx-mcp/server.rb"]

}

}

}

We had a bit of trouble finding the full path to the server, but that was pretty easy to sort out. It still didn't work.

The real problem was in the "command": line. There I had to add the full path to Ruby. There may be a reason for that, I don't know. I'll investigate some more later. To find the full path to Ruby I had to enter "which ruby", and that gave me the full path.

So now the config file looks like this:

{

"preferences": {

"coworkWebSearchEnabled": true,

"ccdScheduledTasksEnabled": true,

"coworkScheduledTasksEnabled": true

},

"mcpServers": {

"tinderbox": {

"command": "/opt/homebrew/opt/ruby/bin/ruby",

"args": ["/Users/daverogers/tbx-mcp/server.rb"]

}

}

}

That works.

There was one other thing. Tinderbox has a built-in MCP server that works with Claude. Jacob's is more robust. But you have to disable Tinderbox's built-in server by disabling AI integration from the app menu. Also, with the built in MCP server, Claude would launch Tinderbox in order to link up with the server. If Tinderbox was already running when you launched Claude, they couldn't talk to each other.

With Jacob's MCP, it seems to be the reverse. You launch Tinderbox, then launch Claude and Claude checks to see what apps it can talk to, and if Tinderbox isn't running, it won't see it and won't launch it. If it is running, all is well.

My project now is to see what I can do with it, and then to see if I can configure Gemma 4 to talk to Tinderbox, and what it can do.

Making progress.

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