Here's a picture of me!
Everyone knows me by my GitHub icon, as it's the one I use practically everywhere. To change it is tantamount to heresy at this point. Otherwise I'd use this image.
I'm a computer science and foreign languages student halfway through my fourth year of college.
Right now, I'm studying Japanese language and culture in Osaka.
I feel at home in C languages, particularly Objective-C and its runtime. I reverse-engineer Apple platforms as a hobby and know iOS like the back of my own hand. I can write a moderate amount of Swift and just a little bit of everything else. I am particularly skilled at reverse engineering, though this does not extend to writing machine code :-)
I haven't updated my website in forever. It's edgy, rough, bloated, and not worth your time, read this page instead ;)
Some of my projects listed on this account
- No Man's Sky Retro Shader Fix, a patch to fix the shader code in the older "classic" No Man's Sky versions
- touchBarFun, a proof-of-concept (with horrific memory management) for putting a working macOS Menu Bar on the Touch Bar by traversing and recreating it via Accessibility APIs
- Brooklyn, a bridge between iMessage and Matrix Chat - less functional and more research in nature, it implements various experiments from the process of figuring out how iMessage works
- KBPulse, a fun little experiment to figure out how to control the keyboard backlight on M1 MacBooks... it adds a pulse animation! No promises regarding the health of the LEDs... :)
- Dawn, an iOS jailbreak tweak to selectively override the iOS 13 light/dark mode appearances of various system components
- Truecuts, a widely-used jailbreak tweak that removes the arbitrary limits on Automations in Shortcuts, and that may have been the reason Apple finally removed those limits...
- homebridge-sengled-ethanr, a desperate yet successful attempt to make my dad's crappy smart bulbs have full-featured functionality in Homebridge, by forking an existing implementation
Anything older than that, you can ignore... I was really young when I made those :-)
Projects not uploaded here
- BatteryPercentage, a tweak enabling the unused battery percentage indicator Apple made for iPhones with notches, along with a degree of customizability I wrote
- Arise, a tweak with some fun Lock Screen changes, like making notifications appear with an animation or automatically playing Live Photo wallpapers (this was before iOS 16)
- Numberfications, a tweak to replace the (X) on the notification clear button with a count of the notifications in that section
- Mammoth, an unreleased work-in-progress iOS client for Mastodon that was decently far along. Auth and some limited interactivity were in place. It was written in Swift and SwiftUI, which is astounding because I do not like SwiftUI-driven apps
My aim is to work on things that objectively make the world a better place to be alive in. I never want to make anything that takes us a step back, no matter how small, just for the sake of profit. My personal belief is that technology and language share a lot in common -- they are powerful weapons, yes, but carefully used, they can save lives and change the path we walk.
short bio
I've always been interested in making things on a computer, and in 2017 I stepped over the threshold into programming. I was self-taught and I made very little progress until early 2020. (Click on the Dawn repository to see that progress! It was localized into 17 different languages, by the way.)
I have a bit of a raw talent for reverse engineering that I've been turning into a skillset over the years. In early 2021 Beeper commissioned me to research and build an iMessage client/Matrix bridge, which I called Brooklyn. It's not what they use today, but it provided a lot of the foundational research. (That's quite the accomplishment for someone who learned what a return type was a year prior!)
In late 2021, a bit overwhelmed with depression and attending a college I couldn't really afford nor wanted to attend, I resorted to hobbyist development to keep myself afloat. KBPulse and TouchBarFun are the result -- pure reverse engineering of the MacBook keyboard backlight, and an implementation of the macOS menu bar in the Touch Bar! Disclaimer: it's not very... ahh... efficient.
I am now attending a state university. It's a lot cheaper and I'm a lot happier with the program and the university. As a result I've had less time for completely original, massive projects -- because I am actually doing my schoolwork now lol -- but I keep myself involved in whatever interests me. For that, see any repos committed to since August 2022.
the fun stuff
- the music: alternative, indie/math/post rock, electronic, world
- 65daysofstatic, ODESZA, Solar Fields
- afterhours, Tom's Story, maybeshewill
- keali'i reichel, pure heart, KODΕ
- the rig
- ryzen 5 2600, rx 580, 2 ssds, 1 hdd, 4 fans
- windows 11, macos 11
- the phones
- iphone: 3g, (3x) 4, (3x) 4S, (2x) 5s, 5c, (2x) 6, (2x) SE, 7, and my daily driver 13 pro max