Vox Silva
Alex Beals
The personal blog of Alex Beals
July 2026
August 2026
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All posts (151)
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 just the title and movie poster. To bring a little more spice into them, I started...
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 building this tool to allow you to explore interesting constructions through an...
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 segmentation algorithm based on linear whitespace to separate the original strip...
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 there are a lot of tools online for a Ken Burns-esque single pan-zoom combination,...
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 old Gamebody Link Cables which allowed me to put some of my historical...
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 dog that fit their requirements. Neko, and our dog before that, Macy, were both...
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 takes in the iTunes Media Library.xml file, extracts the playlists, and lets you...
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 tracking, and notifications, but not with the changed appearance. I settled on a...
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. I had recently seen a series of animated gifs of automatic maze solving, and so...
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