Apple recently added transcripts to their Podcasts app, quickly becoming one of my favorite new features. I wanted to copy a paragraph out of the transcript though, and ran into the 200 word cap on their selection screen. Luckily the MacOS Podcasts app locally caches the transcripts, and so I built a simple web app...

My brother has a website (https://spencerbeals.com, go buy some art!) which uses Wix. There's a product page view where you can see multiple images of a given piece and click to zoom in, but the gallery images are somehow lower resolution than the non-zoomed version, making for a pretty bad user experience. I...

Speedrunning is when you try to complete a video game as fast as possible. You can speedrun individual levels, you can speedrun specific categories like 100% where you try and collect all items and complete all quests, etc. but the main category is Any% — get to the end as fast as possible, anything goes. For many...

I subscribe to a lot of email newsletters (Vox, We're Here, Tom Scott, Money Stuff and Heatmap News among many others) all of which I enjoy...but maybe don't always read. I don't want to unsubscribe because I do read them, but I don't need Dropout.tv's episode announcement from three weeks ago floating around in my...

The iOS compass app is great for pointing north. But what about if you want to point somewhere else? This was a quick two-hour project to whip up a web app for pointing to a static location, much like Jack Sparrow's compass from the Pirates of the Caribbean.

The average American spends 4h30m on their phone each day. 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I have 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...

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...