Vox Silva
Latest Posts
As part of my previous post reverse engineering the Denon XML API I talked about my love for the Golf sound effects in Nintendo Switch Sports, complete with a way to build an ambient soundscape. But where did I get those sound files?...
My home audio system goes through a Denon AVR-X1700H as the primary receiver. My house has three pairs of ceiling speakers: one in the living room, one in the dining room, and one in the kitchen. When listening to music I want them all...
For my 400 Divisadero series and to help track down some stolen property from my girlfriend I needed to figure out who owned a given building in SF. Here's the process I followed, using 740 Valencia Street as a random example (because...
I wrote up a dump of all Venmo deeplinks back in 2017. I was recently looking through backlinks to the blog and saw this StackOverflow post trying to open a user's account based on their username. Figured I'd do a quick update and point...
Reverse engineering apps is made a lot easier with the source code, but apps distributed through the App store are encrypted with FairPlay encryption, making decompilation much harder. Our salvation lies in jailbreaking, because in order...
Fleurons, and other printer's ornaments are decorative elements used in typography. Many of these have made it into fonts in the digital age, with Unicode supporting classic fleurons like ❦ and ❧, but also additional...
While Elon's purchase of Twitter did knock me off the platform for a bit, I returned for bad political takes, mediocre housing takes, good energy takes, and a surfeit of memes. A post recently caught my eye showing off a rigged word...
I will be the first to admit that I'm sometimes bad at responding to texts — but I'm not 113-unread-messages bad, as the notification badge on my Mac makes me out to be. It sits there mocking me, over a hundred messages that despite my...
If there's one thing that I've internalized from years of work, it's that if you do something twice, write it down. I reference stuff I wrote 6 years ago daily. I'm now hitting a lot of the same questions and patterns for answering in my...
My brother Spencer works as an artist in Asheville. He's also into nature conservation, leading a nature journaling class and regularly weaving ecology and local wildlife into his work. When UNC Asheville announced plans to turn a local...
I have Captcha set up for comments on this blog but stuff can still get through. While Anchor became defunct in 2020 maybe there's someone else out there still using it who would benefit from this (and I know my future self certainly will).
I am doing a series of blog posts diving into 400 Divisadero Street, a defunct car wash and gas station in San Francisco that they're trying to turn into apartments — and have been for over a decade without breaking ground. The reasons...
All of my websites and projects run off a single 18G EC2 instance. This is cheap, but does mean I occasionally run into "No space left on device" errors when rendering the blog if I've done something stupid without realizing. This...
I have a penchant for having way too many tabs of Chrome open, and even though I keep buying more RAM I occasionally am still forced to interact with this screen, informing me that I have run out of memory. But if you hit Cmd+Shift+Esc...
I am unfortunately spending more and more of my time interacting with LLMs through terminal interfaces. While the sentient silicon churns through thousands of tokens I find myself scrolling short-form videos contemplating next steps,...