Venmo Deeplinking
I tried to deeplink into the Venmo app, but couldn't find a lot of public documentation on it. So I cracked the main app, and found all of the deeplinking strings, which are listed below:
Dock Spacers
Just a small thing that I found out about today and wanted to write down somewhere. Using Terminal, you can create blank spacers for the macOS dock. Simply run defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}' for as many spaces as you want, and then restart the Dock with killall Dock. You can rearrange the spaces wherever you want, and can remove them just like any normal dock item.
Message Indicator
I find that I commonly open chats in Messages on my computer to make the 'unread' indicator go away. However, if there's any delay in answering them back, it's quite common that I'll simply forget to respond to the text for a while. I've already addressed this on my iPhone using a Cydia tweak (post coming eventually) that adds a gray indicator to chats if I wasn't the last person to respond. So I figured out how to port it to macOS.
Markov Messages
I was talking to a friend from college about automatically generating flavortext and death messages for a game, to keep it unique. We were talking through markov chains (here's a great resource to read up on them), and he mentioned the possibility of using your iMessage chat database from your phone.
Reading WSJ Articles
The Wall Street Journal has a bunch of super insightful articles. However, nearly all of the articles are behind a paywall. You used to be able to just google the URL, and click the top link but that’s since stopped working. This worked based on the custom referer: Google was an approved referer to bypass the paywall. There are, however, other approved referers even though Google is no longer. I know the 'Drudge Report' works, though there may be others. The easiest way I’ve found to automatically do this is to add the ‘Referer Control’ extension for Chrome, or similar solutions for other browsers.
Automatically Changing Wallpaper
A few days ago, I stumbled upon some Firewatch wallpapers for the different times of day, and wanted to have the wallpaper on my mac automatically switch through them. However, all of the solutions I found for this were overly complex, or just plain didn't work on macOS Sierra. So, here's my solution that doesn't require installing anything and is pretty easy to set up.
OnceMore
OnceMore is another Cydia tweak that I developed, and probably the one that I use and benefit from the most. It's incredibly simple: it just adds a 'Restart' button when a timer goes off. While this is a pretty minor quality of life improvement, I do a ton of things that I try and do in a set time. Whether it be workout reps, a constrained nap, or a timer for doing laundry, there are countless times when I wish I could just easily click a button and the timer would reset without having to go in, turn off the current one, and set up a new one. Additionally, if the time isn't a set minute, I would have to retrigger it with Siri.
AlphabetSources
Every so often I go through the [Request] posts on /r/jailbreak over on Reddit to see if there are any that either are interesting, or could be easily done as a minor quality of life tweak. 'AlphabetSources' falls under the second one. Someone made a post asking for an alphabetical view to the repo sources in Cydia.
Classy
I have a love/hate relationship with Dartmouth. While I love the school, most of the tech infrastructure is horribly outdated, and mainly serves as something to be worked around, rather than a useful tool. Finding classes is just like this. You can search by department, and by time period, though you'll have to continuously go back and start a new search from scratch. The results are also poorly formatted, and miss out on providing valuable information, like median, a class description, and prereqs (all things you'd have to search separately for).
SurfShield
In September, me and a few friends entered HackDartmouth III, a Dartmouth-based hackathon. I'd signed up for the one the year before, but me and my roommate slept through it, so this was the first one that I'd be doing at Dartmouth (I did one junior year of high school). We were undecided as to which project to pursue: a game similar to Sardines, a project that I worked on previously (that you can read about here), or something that more closely suited the APIs that were offered by sponsors, and the possible prizes associated with them.