Extra Credit: Displaying the top score in a popular word game

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.

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On the Merge of Something Awesome

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.

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Rough Surf: Emulating MacOS 9 – in 2022!

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.

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Getting into the Spirit of Shortcuts

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!

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It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity!

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?

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Building a Course Pacing Guide – For My Watch!

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!

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