For good reasons, the New York Times does not openly publish the total possible points for its daily Spelling Bee puzzle. But when my partner and I play the game, we like to figure it out anyway and then see how close we can get. This is a well-defined task with well-defined inputs, so I decided to find a way to calculate and display the “Queen Bee” threshold automatically.
I recently detailed a technique for auto-generating a slideshow in Adobe InDesign using data from a spreadsheet. (This is great for awards ceremonies!) But wouldn’t it be cool if there were a way to do this completely within the “free” Google ecosystem? By using a tool called Google Apps Script, I determined that you can, in fact, accomplish the same thing with Google Sheets and Google Slides.
After successfully booting MS-DOS inside an emulator on my M1-powered MacBook Pro, I decided to try out another ancient operating system: MacOS 9.
In this post, I explore what it takes to get it running and what it’s like to browse today’s World Wide Web using a 20-year-old operating system.
My very first blog post when I set up this website in July of 2019 was about buying a brand…
Because we’re nerds, my fiancée and I like to keep track of our score every time we play Spirit Island, a fun but complicated cooperative strategy game. Calculating the score requires looking up a difficulty rating in a table, a fair bit of counting, and some math.
While none of that is especially hard to do, the process could go a bit quicker if most of the work (aside from the counting) could be done automatically.
As it turns out, this is a great job for Apple’s Shortcuts app!
After the pandemic canceled our Winter Break travel plans for the second year in a row, this meant that my fiancée and I would have a lot more time on our hands than expected.
That, combined with some exceptionally dry knuckles, was just the excuse I needed to try my hand at a new electronics project. My goal was to answer the following question: How dry, actually, was the air in our apartment?
While I have had a definite fondness for (and occasional obsession with) computer programming since at least 6th grade, I’ve mostly gravitated more recently towards web development.
So for my final project of the summer, I decided to give actual app development one more chance by exploring the world of Swift and SwiftUI, two of Apple’s latest programming technologies.
The goal: build a watch app to help me track how much time is left in class!
Someone on Facebook was giving away a “late 2009” iMac with a busted graphics card. Getting that thing back into working condition sounded like a great way to kick off summer vacation!
As the ill-fated 2020 school year faded into memory, somehow I got it in my head that what I REALLY needed to do this summer was learn how to create a full-stack, single-page web application.
When I switched to all-digital rubrics a couple years ago, I wanted to reproduce the feel of writing on paper without actually using any paper.