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!
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.
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.
I will be the first to admit that I'm sometimes bad at responding to texts — but I'm not 112-unread-messages bad, as the notification badge on my Mac makes me out to be. It sits there mocking me, over a hundred messages that despite my best efforts I can never clear. No matter how many times I right-click to try and find them they remain tucked away somewhere, inactionable and yet unread, invisible yet demanding to be seen. "Look at me!" they shout. "You're missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime!"
I've ignored this in the past and tabled it for later: it must stand the test of time. But that time is now. Here's how I used lldb to reverse engineer Messages, found a bug in Apple's code, and fixed my badge.