Circuit & Soul
Seth Polsley's Blog of Largely Tech-Related Meanderings
Apple Intelligence and Industry Standards: A Microcosmic Perspective
06 Jun 2025
As much as I’ve appreciated Apple’s tiered architecture for their Apple Intelligence (on-device, then private cloud, and finally third party), it’s no secret that the rollout has been disappointing for many, with repeated delays and even a class action lawsuit over advertising claims. However, my thoughts are less about trying to grapple with the entire system and more to understand it in parts, in this case by looking at a feature like Siri’s pending On-Screen Awareness and growing industry standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Upscaling from BluRay to 4K but What of DVD?
18 Sep 2020
As an avid Star Trek fan, I was recently re-watching some of the TNG, DS9, and VOY series. Comparing the BluRay release of TNG to something like the DVD version of VOY, I felt a bit sad that the latter has so much lower quality and is unlikely to ever get a proper HD release.
Announcing Cordical and AccessiRep 1.1!
22 Apr 2020
For the past couple of years, I’ve been working with my sister on the tech startup Cordical, which is centered around promoting fitness that is accessible to everyone. We’ve been exploring mobile app solutions and have just released the first major update to our app AccessiRep!
FrameFixer - Reducing Dropped Frames when Downsampling Video
11 Oct 2019
I was recording an emulated game the other day, and I noticed that Quicktime captures at 60fps, even though the game only ran at 30fps. Half of the frames were duplicates! I thought it would be easy to downsample to 30fps, keeping just the original content, but I couldn't find any tool that did exactly what I wanted. Ultimately, I wrote a small OpenCV-based program for the task.
C++ Code Analysis with Python
05 Mar 2019
I was using Mimir in C++ labs last semester, and it was a great tool to check code correctness. I still found myself spending a lot of time reviewing code, so in an attempt to automate some of the grading, I looked into cpplint and other style checkers. They didn’t do quite what I wanted, so I decided to write a few simple Python scripts to do static code analysis.
TicTacToe AI to Illustrate Min-Max Algorithm
12 Feb 2019
An old github project I decided to update recently is a web-based TicTacToe AI. I’d originally written it to learn about the min-max (more commonly called minimax) algorithm for game AI, but I thought it’d be fun to add visualizations of all the possible games the AI evaluates at different depths. It is now available online.
Wheel of Fortune Solver
01 Sep 2018
This is a hobby project I wrote a few years ago as a fun means of getting help playing *Wheel of Fortune*. There weren't any online solvers I could find at the time and even the few available now are pretty limited, so I made my own. I hope it proves a fun, interesting, or informative tool for someone! Read on for a lot more detail about it...
Auto-Segmenting Images From PDFs To Create Box Art Spreads
18 Aug 2018
Recently, I've been looking at preserving some old CD and VHS box art. There's a lot of great VHS cover art out there at risk of disappearing along with the medium itself. I wanted a simple workflow for scanning all sides of a box at once, auto-segmenting the individual images, and then combining them all into a single boxart spread. Unfortunately, while I found various bits of programs and pieces of code that could do part of the processing, I was unable to find a simple, ready-to-go solution...