Screenshot Folder in Dock
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:
Image Motion
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.
Dartmouth ID and Flipper
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.
Fiddler, Excel, and "Good Enough"
My family's dog of 10 years, Neko, unfortunately passed away a couple of months ago. My parents decided that now was a good time to start looking for another beautiful dog to bring into their life, but were having some trouble finding a dog that fit their requirements. Neko, and our dog before that, Macy, were both black British Labrador females. More than that, they actually came from the same breeder, some 14 odd years apart. Unfortunately the breeder didn't have any available, and so my dad went out to get a list of breeders that he could contact. So he shot me an email.
iTunes to Spotify Playlist Converter
For years, Spotify had a way to import playlists from iTunes into Spotify. Now, there are a variety of websites that claim to do it, but either can't accept large .xml files, or crash constantly. So I decided to write up my own. It just takes in the iTunes Media Library.xml file, extracts the playlists, and lets you choose which one you want to download. From there, it searches using the public Spotify API for the song name and artist, and combines them all into a long list of track IDs, that can be easily copy and pasted into Spotify.
Making a Dumb Smartwatch Smarter
I recently was in the market for a watch. I wanted a smartwatch, but I wanted something that looked more like a normal watch, as opposed to a slab of silicon and a screen mounted on my wrist. I still wanted sleep tracking, athletic tracking, and notifications, but not with the changed appearance. I settled on a hybrid smartwatch from the Fossil Q Commuter series. However, I got to thinking: given that it interacted with an iOS app on my phone, maybe there was a way to hijack the commands, and run my own! A way to make the "dumb" smartwatch a little bit smarter.
ScreenMazer
For one of my final CS classes, I was brainstorming a list of tech that I hadn't developed anything for or worked with, and screensavers on Mac were on the list as something that would probably lend itself to an easy short-term project. I had recently seen a series of animated gifs of automatic maze solving, and so I jotted a note to myself that it would make a cool idea for a macOS screensaver. And lo and behold, a few months later when I got around to it, it did! Without further ado, here it is in action.
Lock and Unlock Mac from iPhone
A few weeks ago, I was considering entering the Dartmouth hackathon, but decided not to because I woke up too late to give someone else a chance to win. However, when browsing around the Devpost site, I found a project called ezTouch. It caught my eye, as it allowed you to lock and unlock your computer from anywhere using your iPhone. Unfortunately, there was no GitHub repo, and the url that was linked in the Devpost article was no longer active. So I wondered how easy it would be to do!
Grayscale Lock - Combating Phone Addiction
Grayscale Lock is a Cydia tweak that allows you to set grayscale status on an app-by-app basis. This is mainly to curb phone addiction, while making it harder to turn off than just manually turning it on. It also allows the grayscale to not interfere with other apps that still need full color, such as the Camera and Photos app.
The Trinity Hall Prime and Other Pixel Primes
About 3 months ago I watched this video by Numberphile on the "Trinity Hall Prime". You can watch the video but here's a quick summary. As a graduation gift, a mathematician from Trinity Hall produced the following 1350-digit prime number, and printed it out to be framed. The top bit is the crest of the school composed out of 1's and 8's, followed by a (nearly) unmodified series of 0's, and finally ends with a single 1.