Top all-time · #14062
Vox Silva
Personal blog · blog.alexbeals.com/posts · on HN as dado3212programminggames
Vox Silva's personal blog at blog.alexbeals.com covers programming and games. Since 2024, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 24 times, most often “Harry Potter and the Anatomy of a Speedrun (2024)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Websites, projects, snippets, and errata from Hanover to San Francisco
Most-linked posts?
- Harry Potter and the Anatomy of a Speedrun (2024)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-12-18
- Explaining the Magelight XP Glitch in Skyrim2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-10-07
What Hacker News says?
I ended up doing this with Screen Time, but not knowing my own passcode. Having a partner or close friend is generally the approach I'd recommend, but you can also do this with iPhone Mirroring — I wrote up a how to guide in https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/setting-an-unknown-screen-t... .
Comment linking /posts/setting-an-unknown-screen-time-code
on “iPhone dumbphone”Submitted Creating custom yellow handshake emojis with zero-width joiners as a story · 83 points
HN discussionI did something very similar for Fitness SF in the Bay Area! https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/custom-apple-wallet-passes
Comment linking /posts/custom-apple-wallet-passes
on “I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer”Submitted Reverse Engineering iOS Shortcuts Deeplinks as a story · 40 points
HN discussionRecently, a lot of reverse engineering. I’ve been writing them up on my blog, so there’s a growing list of technical deep dives from this year: around Letterboxd with mitmproxy[0], iOS Shortcuts deeplinks[1], the QR codes for Fitness SF[2], and binary patching some non-open source code[3]. Hopefully followable even if you don’t have as much debugging or reverse engineering experience. [0]: https://blog.alexbeals.com…
Comment linking /posts/start-process-extensions
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)”Submitted Making My Font Smarter as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWrote up a blog entry super recently about the nostalgia of the flaws - https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/i-miss-crappy-ai-art
Comment linking /posts/i-miss-crappy-ai-art
on “Image generation has come a long way since August 2022”Submitted Explaining the Magelight XP Glitch in Skyrim as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'm a big fan of sidenotes as a solution for this. If you're on desktop they'll pop out to the side and it's easy enough to glance over at them or stay focused on the main text without having to navigate around. On mobile that obviously doesn't work, but instead you can just have them open inline, so you don't have to deal with the annoying anchor link jump behavior and remembering where you were. And it's all doabl…
Comment linking /posts/possession
on “Give footnotes the boot – alternatives to footnotes on the web”Submitted I miss crappy AI art as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://blog.alexbeals.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?”Submitted Explaining the Magelight XP Glitch in Skyrim as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou can also strip unused characters from fonts! I use Prism to render code blocks on my blog, which pulls in FontAwesome for only two characters. Stripping all but those two characters reduced the font file size from 160kb to 680 bytes.[0] [0]. https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/remove-unused-characters-fo...
Comment linking /posts/remove-unused-characters-font-size
on “The three lines of CSS that saved me 40kb and might do the same for you”Submitted Downloading arbitrary Apple Podcast episode transcripts as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI write a blog that’s not about AI, though is very technical.[1] For non-self promotion I’m a big fan of Jenn’s, who I got introduced by the first Inkhaven cohort.[2] [1]. https://blog.alexbeals.com/ [2]. https://jenn.site/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite blogs not about AI?”Submitted Harry Potter and the Anatomy of a Speedrun (2024) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Harry Potter and the Anatomy of a Speedrun as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Extracting sound effects from a Switch game as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why my macOS Messages badge lied to me (and the one-line fix) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Turning a Chinese IoT camera into an owl livestream as a story · 1 points
HN discussion