I recently watched the 1981 movie Possession by Andrzej Żuławski. It's a weird movie, ostensibly horror, but primarily used as a lens for the dissolution of the director's marriage (and political commentary). However the default poster on Letterboxd is explicitly horror focused (claws gripping into her back, blood trickling down, and bright blue spikes like something out of The Thing poster). I was curious about why they went with this and tried to look up some details on the poster — thus began the rabbit hole. Come along with me on a two day hyperfixation through the history of Possession and its artwork!
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Apple recently added transcripts to their Podcasts app, quickly becoming one of my favorite new features. I wanted to copy a paragraph out of the transcript though, and ran into the 200 word cap on their selection screen. Luckily the MacOS Podcasts app locally caches the transcripts, and so I built a simple web app that allows you to browse the transcripts and easily select parts of them.
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My brother has a website (https://spencerbeals.com, go buy some art!) which uses Wix. There's a product page view where you can see multiple images of a given piece and click to zoom in, but the gallery images are somehow lower resolution than the non-zoomed version, making for a pretty bad user experience. I couldn't find anyway to change this in the tool (or even any forums with people asking about this) but luckily we can fix it with Javascript.
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Speedrunning is when you try to complete a video game as fast as possible. You can speedrun individual levels, you can speedrun specific categories like 100% where you try and collect all items and complete all quests, etc. but the main category is Any% — get to the end as fast as possible, anything goes. For many games an Any% speedrun looks similar to someone playing the game normally, albeit with a lot of skill. But for some games the Any% run looks completely different, like Super Mario World's current 41-second World Record. How do people come up with these? Using Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone for the GameBoy Advance, I'm going to do a technical deep dive into the Any% speedrun and how you could discover it starting from scratch.
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I subscribe to a lot of email newsletters (Vox, We're Here, Tom Scott, Money Stuff and Heatmap News among many others) all of which I enjoy...but maybe don't always read. I don't want to unsubscribe because I do read them, but I don't need Dropout.tv's episode announcement from three weeks ago floating around in my inbox. Ideally if I don't get to them they could quietly be purged in the background, but the default Gmail and Apple mail filters don't support delayed filtering. But Google Scripts does!
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The iOS compass app is great for pointing north. But what about if you want to point somewhere else? This was a quick two-hour project to whip up a web app for pointing to a static location, much like Jack Sparrow's compass from the Pirates of the Caribbean.
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The average American spends 4h30m on their phone each day. I've done some things to curb this in the past (see my post on Grayscale Lock which you can now do on stock iOS with Shortcuts!) but the number one thing I've found to work is using the built-in Screen Time tools. You may have tried this and found yourself just typing in the code to bypass the limit, but here's the twist — I don't know my code.
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Fitness SF has a number of great gyms around the Bay Area, but their app can be slow to load, and having to open it every time to scan in was annoying. Apple Wallet passes solve this problem by allowing you to set locations where it will auto-prompt showing a QR code if you're in the radius. The app doesn't let you create an Apple Wallet pass (or even screenshot the QR code), so let's make our own!
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I have the Roborock S7 MaxV, and it's fantastic. It automates vacuuming and mopping, keeping my allergies under control at the touch of a button. I have a number of routines that I use, and wanted to schedule some of them to run. This is built into the app, but only allows you to do this for set times and days. I instead wanted to automatically suggest a full clean when I left the house (max once/day) where I could approve/disapprove, but was blocked by the poor integration between the iOS app and the normal way to do this kind of customized triggering, Shortcuts.
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The Books app on iPhone (previously named iBooks) allows you to highlight text and leave notes. Unfortunately there's no good way to export these, as the information isn't stored in the ePubs themselves. The information is saved in the Media folder though, which is accessible from iPhones over USB. I built an app to read this into a searchable UI without having to install a bunch of software or pore through full backups.
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