Vox Silva
Alex Beals
The personal blog of Alex Beals
July 2026
August 2026
Top Words
- dartmouth
- banner
- anchor
- victor
- game
- update
- redesign
- making
- macos
- code
All posts (151)
When I got to college a friend introduced me to a drinking game called "Ride the Bus." The rules for the full game are here, but I was interested in the final section. For that section, there are four questions. For the first card, is it red or black? For the second card, is it higher or lower than the first card?...
Google Groups are one of the products that has languished in 2014 in terms of its feature set and visual design. This means that many useful abilities like mass-deleting topics and exporting Google Groups aren't implemented. For exportation, some people have come up with clever workarounds by crawling the website....
As many of my posts on this blog reference, my phone is jailbroken. Activator, a popular tweak allows you to link activating events (such as unlocking your phone, entering a wifi network, or pressing a sequence of buttons) to various listeners (such as setting the brightness, adjusting the volume, sending a text, or...
I realize that this blog isn't the standard one, where someone would write about how they were feeling, or reblog pictures of cute dogs (that's what I have Instagram for!). So despite the fact that this post is nearly entirely data driven and still relied on CS, it's slightly out of the norm in that it's a look at...
Previously, the images weren't ideal on the blog. While they were typically large enough if viewing it on a desktop computer, it didn't work great on phones, because you couldn't expand the images in any way. For Dog-a-Day, in viewing previous images I used a lightbox solution called FancyBox. They recently released...
I was getting a lot of spam messages on this blog, so I decided it was long overdue to add a captcha to the form submission. Which means a fun dive into the completely undocumented world of Anchor CMS!
I tried to deeplink into the Venmo app, but couldn't find a lot of public documentation on it. So I cracked the main app, and found all of the deeplinking strings, which are listed below:
Just a small thing that I found out about today and wanted to write down somewhere. Using Terminal, you can create blank spacers for the macOS dock. Simply run defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}' for as many spaces as you want, and then restart the Dock with...
I find that I commonly open chats in Messages on my computer to make the 'unread' indicator go away. However, if there's any delay in answering them back, it's quite common that I'll simply forget to respond to the text for a while. I've already addressed this on my iPhone using a Cydia tweak (post coming...
I was talking to a friend from college about automatically generating flavortext and death messages for a game, to keep it unique. We were talking through markov chains (here's a great resource to read up on them), and he mentioned the possibility of using your iMessage chat database from your phone.
Page 8 of 16