Vox Silva
Alex Beals
The personal blog of Alex Beals
July 2026
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All posts (152)
Back in college I wrote The Mathematics Behind "Ride the Bus", detailing the mathematics behind expected drinking while playing a game of luck skill where someone deals a card off the top of a shuffled deck one at a time, and you have to answer four questions about the next card: get one wrong, and you go back to...
Nothing's more of a first world problem than the WiFi not working on your plane. Hell, it can even be a bit of a boon if you use your productivity right. But you're annoyed, you're stuck in a tin can miraculous invention, you've already come to grips with the fact that Starlink wasn't turned on for your flight yet,...
While I'm not lactose intolerant I have a lot of friends who are, and so as a generous host I like to keep Lactaid on hand. I noticed that the letters for the Tic Tac logo could be moved around to make Lactaid, so I figured rather than keep them in the normal packaging I could make a custom box!
I try not to be on my iPhone (hence my guides for automatically making it grayscale and not knowing your Screen Time code). The main tool for keeping tabs on this is Apple's Screen Time feature which, while limited in granularity, is better than nothing—until it's wrong. Recently Screen Time started showing large,...
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? There are in-game ambience recordings on YouTube but the sounds are all muddled...
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 streaming from the same Spotify source, but if I'm playing video games I...
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 it's the address for Dandelion Chocolate and I like their stuff).
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 to an answer. While I tried dumping from the Venmo app the app insta-crashes on...
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 to run the app the unencrypted version has to be loaded into memory. We can add...
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 symbols-turned-visual indicators ranging from the aptly named ❀ (White Florette) to the lesser known...
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