I used to use [Mint](https://mint.intuit.com/) as my budgeting software until [it shut down in March 2024](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/business/mint-app-closing-intuit.html). As a replacement I swapped over to [Monarch](https://www.monarch.com/), which I've loved and would recommend if you're looking to do...

I was watching The Killing the other day, Kubrick's third feature film from 1956. Coming in at just 85 minutes, it’s a lean well-told story of a racetrack heist. But for all of the nonlinear storytelling, and noir aesthetics, and tangled snares of character desires, above all I was just taken with how good it looked.

Because the default Apple Podcasts on macOS only allows you to copy 200 words of transcript at a time, I built a quick website back in January that allows you to view and copy the full thing. It mostly works great, but some users (including those on older versions of macOS) have flagged that their transcript files...

I was hitting a problem where some VSCode plugins I use were erroring out when running commands. After slowly paring away at their source code, I realized that they were failing for the same reason: they were calling scripts that were supposed to return JSON, but instead were having strings injected into them,...

The QR codes for Fitness SF started changing. I had previously created an Apple Wallet pass that would automatically open the code up when you arrived. This stopped scanning at the end of May, and although updating my member ID temporarily fixed it, it broke again two weeks later. This lined up with the update of...

Like I said in my last post, I'm a big fan of my phone being in grayscale, which helps reduce screentime. This is a quick guide on how to set that up using Shortcuts in a way that automatically disables it for certain apps like Photos and Camera.

I am a big fan of my phone being in grayscale, which reduces screentime and cuts into into how attention-grabbing the bright red app badges are. The problem is that I don't want all apps to be in grayscale: some because they're effectively broken (Photos, Camera) and others because I'm okay spending time on them...

Letterboxd has an API but it's available by request only. This is why in the past my projects have either relied on their export functionality (like Letterboxd Gaps) or simple webscraping. This works well when you only need your own activity data, but struggles when it comes to querying multiple users and...

Reddit has been recently ramping up their "Popular post in" and other community notifications. I find these all incredibly low value, and want to turn them off. There's no UI for turning everywhere—just individually per subreddit. But we can do it for all of them with a quick script!

There was a recent tweet I saw saying "I’m willing to bet my entire net worth on neither the median nor the average American reading 11 books a year." There's a lot of people pushing back on it, but all citing different reasons why the data could be wrong. Rather than do that, we can just dig into the underlying data.

Kirsten Dunst had a great moment in a 2016 Hollywood Reporter roundtable in response to actresses lamenting that they don't work with female directors, saying that "[she's] worked with so many female directors" and that "it's up to us as actresses to give the opportunity to first time directors". While actors have a...

I recently watched the 1981 movie Possession by Andrzej Żuławski. It's a weird movie, ostensibly horror, but primarily used as a lens for the dissolution of the director's marriage (and political commentary). However the default poster on Letterboxd is explicitly horror focused (claws gripping into a woman’s back,...