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I didn’t take many photos in January. The world around me felt dark — often a little unworthy of memories. But it passed, and there were some bright moments. Hannah filled a life long dream and met the Hobbits. I filled my head with a lot of music. And now February is here. I hope for better, for all of us.
January 2026
Blog: Emotrix: A Matrix Inspired macOS Screen Saver
I’ve been (slowly, oh so slowly) trying to teach myself Swift (the programming language, not the pop star).
The main reason, besides being a distraction to the everyday hellscape news cycle, is that I’ve been working on a small Mac app for over a year that runs as a menu bar app and connects to Last.fm to scrobble songs and do a few other things. I wrote almost all of it in Python because I know Python really well. But, I want to end up converting it to be a fully native Mac/Swift app.
Problem is … I don’t know Swift very well at all.
So, I’ve been trying to get better at it. To start the year I challenged myself with a new project: make something in Swift. The first idea that came to mind was a Matrix-inspired screen saver. The goal was to make something that was written entirely in Swift, could run natively on a Mac, was as resource friendly as possible, and I could only use Chat-GPT for help in troubleshooting, debugging, or looking up functions. I wanted to try and write the code myself as much as possible since I’m trying to learn something. I got stuck a few times, but, that’s programming for you.
The result is Emotrix. A screen saver that is inspired by the Matrix digital rain effect but every so often will throw in some chunks of pop-punk song lyrics down the screen as well. It’s silly. But it makes me happy.
I wrote and tweaked it to display the characters in a way that I like the look of more than to be “movie perfect.” (The best movie version of the effect I’ve seen is this one. I did a lot of inspo-browsing over the past few weeks.) The finished and compiled version should be downloadable here. It should be installable on the latest version of macOS, but I’ve only tested it up to Sequoia (15.7.3).
I never thought I’d see this pressed to vinyl. An absolute staple of my high-school life and adding this to the collection brings immense joy.
Blog: Getting Last.fm Counts in Raycast
Look, I like Last.fm. It’s fun. I like seeing my stats. I’ve written about it a lot.
I include my weekly stats on all of my Top 9 posts and during the week I often like to see where I’m at. So, I wrote a simple script for Raycast to quickly calculate the stats and output them in the app:
The script’s on Github.
Blog: Adam Grundy’s Top Albums of 2025
Another year has come and gone, but the tunes will remain. And what a year it was! 2025 thrilled with key reunions of bands like The Starting Line, Yellowcard, and Motion City Soundtrack, while some solo albums from Hayley Williams, Luke Spiller, and Taylor Acorn all made their way onto top spots in my personal list. In this blog, I’ve hyperlinked to my past work on this site in ’25, and added in some new blurbs if I didn’t get around to writing about the record during the year. I hope everyone had a peaceful and relaxing holiday season, and 2026 seems poised to be just as strong in the music front.
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