Vox Silva
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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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...