Vox Silva
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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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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: