Vox Silva

Vox Silva

Alex Beals

The personal blog of Alex Beals

Latest Posts

I have the Roborock S7 MaxV, and it's fantastic. It automates vacuuming and mopping, keeping my allergies under control at the touch of a button. I have a number of routines that I use, and wanted to schedule some of them to run. This is...
The Books app on iPhone (previously named iBooks) allows you to highlight text and leave notes. Unfortunately there's no good way to export these, as the information isn't stored in the ePubs themselves. The information is saved in the...
I noticed a while back that a lot of new romantic comedies (especially those pumped out by streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime) have optimized their formulas to the point that you can predict basically the whole plot from...
I have been getting into crossword constructing, but found the initial process of staring at a blank 15x15 grid to be one of my least favorite parts. Just like themes and seed entries can be good ways to get a foothold, I ended up...
Back in 2016 I wrote some code to automatically transcribe 'Pearls Before Swine' comic strips to make them searchable. At the time, this transcription relied on Tesseract, the "state of the art" OSS OCR program. As part of that I used a...
I often forget how to do this, but I find it incredibly useful so here's a quick image-rich tutorial on how to set up a Screenshots folder in your dock on MacOS that's visually accessible:
My brother is an artist (check out his stuff at https://www.instagram.com/beals.art/ or at https://spencerbeals.com). He had created some art pieces that he wanted to talk about in depth, by panning over the image. Unfortunately while...
I was up on campus again for my 5 year reunion, and it felt wrong to not be doing something slightly sketch around the Dartmouth ID, just for old time's sake. Luckily, I'd recently acquired a Flipper Zero for some exploration around the...
My family's dog of 10 years, Neko, unfortunately passed away a couple of months ago. My parents decided that now was a good time to start looking for another beautiful dog to bring into their life, but were having some trouble finding a...
For years, Spotify had a way to import playlists from iTunes into Spotify. Now, there are a variety of websites that claim to do it, but either can't accept large .xml files, or crash constantly. So I decided to write up my own. It just...
I recently was in the market for a watch. I wanted a smartwatch, but I wanted something that looked more like a normal watch, as opposed to a slab of silicon and a screen mounted on my wrist. I still wanted sleep tracking, athletic...
For one of my final CS classes, I was brainstorming a list of tech that I hadn't developed anything for or worked with, and screensavers on Mac were on the list as something that would probably lend itself to an easy short-term project....
A few weeks ago, I was considering entering the Dartmouth hackathon, but decided not to because I woke up too late to give someone else a chance to win. However, when browsing around the Devpost site, I found a project called ezTouch. It...
Grayscale Lock is a Cydia tweak that allows you to set grayscale status on an app-by-app basis. This is mainly to curb phone addiction, while making it harder to turn off than just manually turning it on. It also allows the grayscale to...
About 3 months ago I watched this video by Numberphile on the "Trinity Hall Prime". You can watch the video but here's a quick summary. As a graduation gift, a mathematician from Trinity Hall produced the following 1350-digit prime...
Search Random