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Vox Silva

Alex Beals

The personal blog of Alex Beals

August 2026

September 2026

October 2026

Top Words

  • dartmouth
  • banner
  • making
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  • code
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  • skyrim
  • macos
  • changing

All posts (159)

8mo
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, freeing my time up for deeper mental pursuits, and much more importantly (and...
9mo
I was recently reverse-engineering parts of the OpenTable API, and wasn't sure how to refresh the Bearer token. We can get the initial one by going through a number of requests: https://mobile-api.opentable.com/oauth/consumer/token to get a logged out token, then through...
9mo
How to inspect hover elements in Chrome by pressing F8 twice while DevTools is open to the Sources tab
10mo
Shrink webfont file sizes with pyftsubset to speed up loading and save bandwidth.
10mo
Create custom emoji handshakes using yellow hands like 🫱‍🫲🏿 and 🫱🏿‍🫲.
10mo
The mouse click recording feature in macOS video recording is really helpful for showing what you're doing (and something that I've used for videos for this blog previously, such in my writeup on how to set your screen time passcode without knowing it). But sometimes you also want to show keyboard presses, and...
10mo
If you have a long password, running a command with sudo can be a bit of a pain. Luckily if you have a recent Macbook with Touch ID you can use it for sudo as well. Just run the following command:
10mo
As you may have noticed by my propensity for footnotes sidenotes I love asides. Likewise there are a lot of small things I come across that either aren't meaty enough for a full post, or trend so narrowly technical that I feel hesitant about broadcasting (a reticence my college self did not share, just look at my...
10mo
You can delete your address from your footer as long as you keep the REWARDS piece.
10mo
I recently brought back Dog-a-Day which requires me to source a bunch of high resolution Flickr photos. In the interim five years since when I was last doing this, Flickr has started limiting download resolutions uploaded by free accounts:
10mo
Back in college I ran a service called Dog-a-Day, where I emailed subscribers a picture of a dog every day, along with a fun caption. This was initially just a Christmas present for my dad but it spiraled into a full service with some ~200 subscribers. I stopped it in 2020 after five years, but am resurrecting it...
10mo
I bought a cheap push-button combination lock and fell down a rabbit hole when I realized it didn't matter what order you entered the code in. I ended up doing a teardown of the entire mechanism and designing some 3D models to explain how they work (and why the manual’s advice to set a 5–7 digit code is so...

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