Blog on bbaovanc's Website

The Discord Sex Hack is dead. (or: 69 to 67)

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 20:29:27 -0500

The day has finally come. On June 30, Google killed the Tenor GIF API, and the Discord GIF picker has switched to Klipy. Any Tenor GIF that you’ve already favorited will still work, but this means that the Discord s/e/x hack no longer works with new GIFs chosen from search results or the trending categories in the Discord GIF picker.

But not all hope is lost.

How to create (or remove) a swapfile on Linux

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 17:26:44 -0500

A step-by-step tutorial on how to create or remove a swapfile on a Linux machine, and how to decide if you need one.

How the "Discord sex" (`s/e/x`) hack works

Wed, 11 May 2022 21:11:17 -0500

There’s this trick going around on Discord recently where if you send any GIF from Tenor, and then type s/e/x, then it turns it into a different meme GIF. Here’s how it works.

Using GitHub Actions to audit my website with Google Chrome Lighthouse

Sat, 07 May 2022 00:54:11 -0500

The other day I set up automatic testing of my website using Google Chrome Lighthouse. I’m also running my own Lighthouse CI server to store test result history and show trends. Here’s an outline of what this means, some of the results I’ve obtained so far, and my thoughts on the usefulness of Lighthouse.

Newsletter for my blog posts

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 01:00:14 -0500

I created a newsletter for blog posts on my website so you can sign up for email notifications when I post new ones, so I have more than just an RSS feed.

Caddy is literally the best webserver

Sat, 13 Nov 2021 00:43:35 -0600

After switching from NGINX to Caddy on all of my websites, I have come to the conclusion that Caddy is the best webserver in existence. With automatic HTTPS, a simple configuration file, and more, Caddy is just the best webserver overall for general use.

Using Github Copilot to write a blog post

Sun, 07 Nov 2021 16:17:15 -0600

I found out that GitHub Copilot can write in Markdown, so I decided to get it to write a blog post for me. Here’s how I did it.

Experimenting with GitHub Copilot

Sat, 06 Nov 2021 23:56:47 -0500

I decided to play around with GitHub Copilot. Here’s some of the code that I got as a result.

Youtube URL structures you should know

Sat, 30 Oct 2021 21:20:38 -0500

Knowing the basic structure and parameters in a YouTube URL can come in handy on the occasion you need it. Here’s how to find the video ID, link to a specific timestamp, and more.

The redesign of my website

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 14:03:05 -0500

For the past three weeks I’ve been designing and perfecting a new theme for my website with the goal of keeping it simple but not ugly.

Allow non root processes to bind to privileged ports in Linux

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 21:29:52 -0500

In Linux, processes cannot bind to privileged ports (<=1024) unless they are running as root. Here’s how to allow any process to bind to privileged ports.

Checkra1n GUI on other Linux distros

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 21:19:51 -0500

You can run the GUI version of checkra1n on non Debian-based distributions.

How to put `(edited)` in the middle of a message in Discord

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 18:48:34 -0500

You might have seen a trick on Discord where the little (edited) caption appears in the middle of a message instead of at the end. With a small hack involving the right-to-left embedding character (U+202B), the (edited) text can be moved to any location inside the message.

Text substitution in Discord using `sed`

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 18:48:15 -0500

Discord has (very primitive) support for text replacement using sed syntax.