Hi, I'm Ari and I'm not agentic or any other buzzword

About Me

My love of making things started back in the early ‘90s when I taught myself pixel-art and animation because I couldn't program worth a damn. That led to SpriteLib – a free collection of 2D game art that ended up in many programming books, game demos, and tutorials.

Somewhere along the way, I wrote a couple of books about game artwork and website UI design, created artwork and animation for mobile games on feature phones, and never stopped tinkering.

In my spare time, I enjoy spending time with my family and obsessively curating my uber Spotify playlist of post-punk, punk, new wave, ska, and alt-rock anthems.

More recently, I've become interested in computer security, which is reflected in my trio of Mac apps:

• Watchtower: Uses macOS' FSEvent API and a rule-builder to enable users to monitor (in real-time) their files and folders for different system events such as file creations, modifications, deletions, and ownership changes.
• File Fingerprints: Computes hashes for large numbers of files and can detect some Malware by downloading the latest data from abuse.ch and comparing them with user-supplied files.
• Revok: Scans the metadata of user-installed apps to surface which are unsigned (and potentially insecure), create LauchAgents (done by some Malware), architecture, whether they're native or Electron, and even highlights which permissions they request, among other things. It also includes a CLI-based version that supports a myriad of options and could be used for SMB and mid-sized business uses.