What are the grey bars in Screen Time?

I try not to be on my iPhone (hence my guides for automatically making it grayscale and not knowing your Screen Time code). The main tool for keeping tabs on this is Apple's Screen Time feature which, while limited in granularity, is better than nothing—until it's wrong. Recently Screen Time started showing large, undetailed grey bars, none of which matched up to the Most Used categories:

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Extracting sound effects from a Switch game

As part of my previous post reverse engineering the Denon XML API I talked about my love for the Golf sound effects in Nintendo Switch Sports, complete with a way to build an ambient soundscape. But where did I get those sound files? There are in-game ambience recordings on YouTube but the sounds are all muddled together, and separating them out is a bit of a nightmare. So where and how do I get them? Let's go exploring!

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Switch Sports Golf and automating my Denon AVR

My home audio system goes through a Denon AVR-X1700H as the primary receiver. My house has three pairs of ceiling speakers: one in the living room, one in the dining room, and one in the kitchen. When listening to music I want them all streaming from the same Spotify source, but if I'm playing video games I occasionally want Spotify from just the kitchen/dining room. Let's reverse engineer how the app controls the receicver so I can swap from my watch.

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Making rigged word searches

While Elon's purchase of Twitter knocked me off the platform for a bit, I returned for bad political takes, mediocre housing takes, good energy takes, and a surfeit of memes. A tweet recently caught my eye showing off a rigged word search. I wanted to make my own, so I built a generator.

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May 24, 2026
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