The average American spends 4h30m on their phone each day.[1] 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.
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!
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.
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.
I noticed a while back that a lot of new romantic comedies (especially those pumped out by streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime) have optimized their formulas to the point that you can predict basically the whole plot from just the title and movie poster. To bring a little more spice into them, I started playing bingo with common tropes. To make it easier, I built a website that allows you to build a bingo board out of your own tropes and some defaults, and then compete to get bingo first (or in many cases, as many bingos as possible)!
I've been getting into crossword constructing, but found the initial process of staring at a blank 15x15 grid to be one of my least favorite parts. Just like themes and seed entries can be good ways to get a foothold, I ended up building this tool to allow you to explore interesting constructions through an interactive heatmap of previous NYTimes puzzles. As you place black squares into the grid it will update the heatmap to only show grids that include those black squares (though ideally you should diverge from history: 70% of published puzzle grids are novel).
Back in 2016 I wrote some code to automatically transcribe 'Pearls Before Swine' comic strips to make them searchable. At the time, this transcription relied on Tesseract, the "state of the art" OSS OCR program. As part of that I used a segmentation algorithm based on linear whitespace to separate the original strip into boxes, and then attempted to do something similar for the bounding boxes of the text. This had a lot of problems, in part because the OCR program was not that good on the handdrawn font, in part because the dialogue boxes were inconsistent (which you can see in the image below), and in part because my code wasn't very good.
I often forget how to do this, but I find it incredibly useful so here's a quick image-rich tutorial on how to set up a Screenshots folder in your dock on MacOS that's visually accessible:
My brother is an artist (check out his stuff at https://www.instagram.com/beals.art/ or at https://spencerbeals.com). He had created some art pieces that he wanted to talk about in depth, by panning over the image. Unfortunately while there are a lot of tools online for a Ken Burns-esque single pan-zoom combination, there wasn't one that that worked with multiple, and not one that smoothed out the camera, or allowed for looping.
I was up on campus again for my 5 year reunion, and it felt wrong to not be doing something slightly sketch around the Dartmouth ID, just for old time's sake. Luckily, I'd recently acquired a Flipper Zero for some exploration around the old Gamebody Link Cables which allowed me to put some of my historical information to the test.