Vox Silva
Alex Beals
The personal blog of Alex Beals
August 2026
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All posts (159)
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.
The Wall Street Journal has a bunch of super insightful articles. However, nearly all of the articles are behind a paywall. You used to be able to just google the URL, and click the top link but that’s since stopped working. This worked based on the custom referer: Google was an approved referer to bypass the...
A few days ago, I stumbled upon some Firewatch wallpapers for the different times of day, and wanted to have the wallpaper on my mac automatically switch through them. However, all of the solutions I found for this were overly complex, or just plain didn't work on macOS Sierra. So, here's my solution that doesn't...
OnceMore is another Cydia tweak that I developed, and probably the one that I use and benefit from the most. It's incredibly simple: it just adds a 'Restart' button when a timer goes off. While this is a pretty minor quality of life improvement, I do a ton of things that I try and do in a set time. Whether it be...
Every so often I go through the [Request] posts on /r/jailbreak over on Reddit to see if there are any that either are interesting, or could be easily done as a minor quality of life tweak. 'AlphabetSources' falls under the second one. Someone made a post asking for an alphabetical view to the repo sources in Cydia.
I have a love/hate relationship with Dartmouth. While I love the school, most of the tech infrastructure is horribly outdated, and mainly serves as something to be worked around, rather than a useful tool. Finding classes is just like this. You can search by department, and by time period, though you'll have to...
In September, me and a few friends entered HackDartmouth III, a Dartmouth-based hackathon. I'd signed up for the one the year before, but me and my roommate slept through it, so this was the first one that I'd be doing at Dartmouth (I did one junior year of high school). We were undecided as to which project to...
I keep forgetting how to do this, so I thought that I would just write it down somewhere. First, you'll need the classdump-dyld tweak package, which you can get from Cydia on the BigBoss repo (it's by Elias Limneos, who hosts the only reason I do tweak dev), and you'll also need cycript. Then, you'll need the...
I got it into my head that I wanted to be able to programmatically make my phone speak whatever I wanted it to. Effectively Siri, but unprompted, and without care for silent, or low volume. On a normal phone, this would be impossible. But on a jailbroken phone, there was probably a way to do it. I first started up...
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