The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Software / engineering practice

Vox Silva

blog.alexbeals.com

Websites, projects, snippets, and errata from Hanover to San Francisco

Software / engineering practiceGamingReverse engineering

’15’20’25
Posts
159 from 6 Sep 2014 to 16 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (36 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://blog.alexbeals.com/rss/

2026 26

  1. I miss crappy AI art
  2. Making my font smarter
  3. Explaining the Magelight XP glitch in Skyrim
  4. The Keymaster perk in Skyrim is mathemati­cally useless
  5. How Skyrim's NPC skill leveling works
  6. Picking apart Skyrim's pickpocketing
  7. Getting back on the bus
  8. Fixing UnitedWifi​.com not working on my Mac laptop
  9. Tic-Tac-Taid
  10. What are the grey bars in Screen Time?
  11. Extracting sound effects from a Switch game
  12. Switch Sports Golf and automating my Denon AVR
  13. Find out who owns a building in SF
  14. Deeplinking to Venmo users
  15. How to dump iOS app's source code
  16. The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters
  17. Making rigged word searches
  18. Why my macOS Messages badge lied to me (and the one-line fix)
  19. Tips and tricks for macOS lldb
  20. Turning a Chinese IoT camera into an owl livestream
  21. Cleaning up Anchor spam comments
  22. DataSF and scraping planning applications for my inner YIMBY
  23. Clearing space on my Linux server
  24. Resuming paused applications on macOS
  25. Claude Code's thinking animation
  26. Modifying requests with mitmproxy

2025 24

  1. Inspecting hover elements in Chrome
  2. Remove unused characters from fonts to save on size
  3. Creating custom yellow handshake emojis with zero-width joiners
  4. Showing keyboard strokes on macOS
  5. Enabling Touch ID for sudo
  6. Adding snippets to the blog
  7. Removing your location from Mailchimp emails
  8. Downloading large photos from Flickr
  9. Long live Dog-a-Day! (kinda)
  10. Combinations and permutations and locks, oh my!
  11. Leveraging private Uber APIs in a Chrome extension
  12. The lost art of contrast
  13. Downloading arbitrary Apple Podcast episode transcripts
  14. Patching MacForge to remove start process_extensions logs
  15. Debugging the changing QR codes for Fitness SF
  16. Make your iPhone grayscale
  17. Reverse engineering iOS Shortcuts deeplinks
  18. Getting access to the Letterboxd API with mitmproxy
  19. Unsubscribing from Reddit Community Notifications
  20. America’s reading habits
  21. Letterboxd Gaps
  22. Tracking down the movie poster for Possession
  23. Apple Podcasts transcript viewer
  24. Fixing low quality Wix gallery images

2024 11

  1. Harry Potter and the Anatomy of a Speedrun
  2. Delayed Gmail filtering
  3. Jack Sparrow's Compass
  4. Don't know your screen time code
  5. Custom Apple Wallet Passes for Fitness SF
  6. Roborock Routines and iOS Shortcuts
  7. Books Annotations App
  8. Rom-com Bingo
  9. Crossword Grid Builder
  10. Pearls Before SwAIne
  11. Add a screenshot folder to your macOS dock

2023 2

  1. Image Motion
  2. Dartmouth ID and Flipper

2021 1

  1. Searching Messages on Mac

2020 1

  1. Fiddler, Excel, and "Good Enough"

2018 6

  1. iTunes to Spotify Playlist Converter
  2. Making a Dumb Smartwatch Smarter
  3. ScreenMazer
  4. Lock and Unlock Mac from iPhone
  5. Grayscale Lock - Combating Phone Addiction
  6. The Trinity Hall Prime and other pixel primes

2017 29

  1. Saving GroupMe's
  2. Renaming Desktops on Mac
  3. Catan Map Generator
  4. Minor Anchor Tweak - Scrolling Fix
  5. Dartmouth Nutrition API
  6. Guessing Harry Potter
  7. Mercury - Tweak and Fun Code
  8. The Mathematics Behind "Ride the Bus"
  9. Cleaning out Google Groups
  10. TimerCL - A command line tool for timers on iOS
  11. Life at Dartmouth - Data Analysis
  12. Adding Lightbox Support to Anchor
  13. Adding Captcha to Anchor
  14. Venmo deeplinking
  15. Spacers for the macOS dock
  16. Message Indicator
  17. Markov Messages
  18. Reading WSJ Articles
  19. Automatically Changing Wallpaper
  20. OnceMore
  21. AlphabetSources
  22. Classy
  23. SurfShield
  24. Class-Dumping with Cycript
  25. Victor - Talking Back
  26. Victor - Echo Dot
  27. Victor - Belkin WeMo Switches
  28. Victor - Part 2
  29. Victor - Part 1

2016 14

  1. Dartmouth Banner Possible Exploit
  2. Dartmouth ID Magnetic Stripe
  3. Dog-a-Day Backend
  4. ShiftCycle Update
  5. Facebook deeplinking options
  6. Dart Dine
  7. Sudoku Solver: Online
  8. Colorize
  9. Pearls Before Swine Indexer
  10. GamePlan
  11. GroupmeAnalysis
  12. Movie Display
  13. Dog-a-Day
  14. Boingo Exploit

2015 39

  1. Sudoku Solver in Python
  2. What Makes a Mobile Game Great - Monetization
  3. What Makes a Mobile Game Great
  4. What's Line - Finished
  5. Sardines! - Optimizing Web Games - Part II
  6. Sardines! - Jumping into Multiplayer Web Games - Part I
  7. What's Line - Almost Done
  8. Rigging PollDaddy
  9. ShiftCycle
  10. PasscodeActivator
  11. What's Line - Progress Update
  12. Running Xcode Apps without Developer License
  13. Dartmouth Banner Redesign - Part 3 (The Fix)
  14. Anchor Modifications
  15. Redesigning the Blog
  16. What's Line - Mockup I - Accounts
  17. Releasing python-dartmouthbanner
  18. Summer Break
  19. Banner Security Hole - Fixed!
  20. Update on DartmouthRoomSearch.com
  21. Banner Security
  22. Kinect for XBox One (v2 SDK)
  23. Making an Avatar with Kinect
  24. Game Idea
  25. Pong Line App - Part 1: Definition
  26. Lone Pine Logo
  27. CBORD Laundry
  28. Pong Line App
  29. DartmouthRoomSearch.com
  30. Dartmouth Room Search - Visuals
  31. Dartmouth Room Search - Locating
  32. Dartmouth Room Search - Sprint
  33. How QR Codes Work
  34. Dartmouth ID Redesign
  35. Dartmouth Banner Redesign - Part 2 (Specific Breakdown)
  36. Dartmouth Banner Redesign - Part 1 (The Problems)
  37. Router Setup
  38. Changing Meal System
  39. Update on making DiD's

2014 6

  1. Mimicking the Dartmouth ID
  2. Accessing Meal Swipe Information (Python)
  3. The Dartmouth ID
  4. Ethernet Cables
  5. Finishing up XBox Connection
  6. WiFi Problems