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.
Turning off my noisy hard drive enclosure requires unmounting multiple volumes and then reaching below the desk to hold down a power button for several seconds. Wouldn’t it be cool if this could happen automatically as soon as I’m done using it?
We adopted a dog named Tucker. He’s adorable, but downloading his photos from our dog walker’s website was a little too difficult.
Who wouldn’t want to be responsible for dealing with hundreds of applications, planning an induction ceremony, and overseeing countless hours of service projects? It didn’t take long to discover that I had inherited an administrative nightmare.
After the school district replaced all the desktop computers in the journalism lab with laptops, I needed to find a way to reproduce the ergonomics and efficiency of our old setup using more modern hardware.