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Vox Silva

Alex Beals

The personal blog of Alex Beals

August 2026

September 2026

October 2026

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All posts (159)

4mo
For my 400 Divisadero series and to help track down some stolen property from my girlfriend I needed to figure out who owned a given building in SF. Here's the process I followed, using 740 Valencia Street as a random example (because it's the address for Dandelion Chocolate and I like their stuff).
4mo
I wrote up a dump of all Venmo deeplinks back in 2017. I was recently looking through backlinks to the blog and saw this StackOverflow post trying to open a user's account based on their username. Figured I'd do a quick update and point to an answer. While I tried dumping from the Venmo app the app insta-crashes on...
4mo
Reverse engineering apps is made a lot easier with the source code, but apps distributed through the App store are encrypted with FairPlay encryption, making decompilation much harder. Our salvation lies in jailbreaking, because in order to run the app the unencrypted version has to be loaded into memory. We can add...
4mo
Fleurons, and other printer's ornaments are decorative elements used in typography. Many of these have made it into fonts in the digital age, with Unicode supporting classic fleurons like ❦ and ❧, but also additional symbols-turned-visual indicators ranging from the aptly named ❀ (White Florette) to the lesser known...
5mo
While Elon's purchase of Twitter did knock me off the platform for a bit, I returned for bad political takes, mediocre housing takes, good energy takes, and a surfeit of memes. A post recently caught my eye showing off a rigged word search. I wanted to make my own, so I quickly built a generator.
5mo
I will be the first to admit that I'm sometimes bad at responding to texts — but I'm not 113-unread-messages bad, as the notification badge on my Mac makes me out to be. It sits there mocking me, over a hundred messages that despite my best efforts I can never clear. No matter how many times I right-click to try and...
5mo
If there's one thing that I've internalized from years of work, it's that if you do something twice, write it down. I reference stuff I wrote 6 years ago daily. I'm now hitting a lot of the same questions and patterns for answering in my lldb investigations, so here's my living public wiki.
6mo
My brother Spencer works as an artist in Asheville. He's also into nature conservation, leading a nature journaling class and regularly weaving ecology and local wildlife into his work. When UNC Asheville announced plans to turn a local urban forest into a soccer stadium, he pushed back, in part by raising awareness...
6mo
I have Captcha set up for comments on this blog but stuff can still get through. While Anchor became defunct in 2020 maybe there's someone else out there still using it who would benefit from this (and I know my future self certainly will).
6mo
I am doing a series of blog posts diving into 400 Divisadero Street, a defunct car wash and gas station in San Francisco that they're trying to turn into apartments — and have been for over a decade without breaking ground. The reasons for the lack of (visual) progress is multifaceted, but to properly dive into it...
7mo
All of my websites and projects run off a single 18G EC2 instance. This is cheap, but does mean I occasionally run into "No space left on device" errors when rendering the blog if I've done something stupid without realizing. This happens enough that I wanted to document what commands I run to recover space.
7mo
I have a penchant for having way too many tabs of Chrome open, and even though I keep buying more RAM I occasionally am still forced to interact with this screen, informing me that I have run out of memory. But if you hit Cmd+Shift+Esc then it disappears, replaced by the normal "Force Quit Applications". What then?...

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