Programming

The earliest memory I have of ‘programming’ is in the early/mid 90s when my father brought home a computer from work. We could play games on it … so of course I took the spreadsheet program he used (LOTUS 123, did I date myself with that?) and tried to modify it to print out a helpful message for him. It … halfway worked? At least I could undo it so he could get back to work…

After that, I picked up programming for real in QBASIC (I still have a few of those programs lying around), got my own (junky) Linux desktop from my cousin, tried to learn VBasic (without a Windows machine), and eventually made it to high school… In college, I studied computer science and mathematics, mostly programming in Java/.NET, although with a bit of everything in the mix. A few of my oldest programming posts on this blog are from that time.

After that, on to grad school! Originally, I was going to study computational linguistics, but that fell through. Then programming languages (the school’s specialty). And finally I ended up studying censorship and computer security… before taking a hard turn into the private sector to follow my PhD advisor.

Since then, I’ve worked in the computer security space at a couple of different companies. Some don’t exist any more, some you’ve probably heard of. I still program for fun too, and not just in security.

But really, I still have a habit of doing a little bit of everything. Whatever seems interesting at the time!

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Recent posts

Syncing Kobo Annotations

2025-12-29

I’ve recently been trying out a Kobo. Amazon has some issues and Kindles are hard to do any amount of customization to, let’s just leave it at that.

So what fun tricks can one do with a Kobo?

Well, for one, it’s a Linux system. And if you attach it to your computer, you get access to a lot of the local filesystem. This includes the SQLite database holding all of teh system metadata, along with places to install all sorts of interesting scripts.

One that I’ve been wanting in particular is the ability to extract my annotations. It’s a great way to review books. Highlight, write a note, and then export right at the end.

So how do you do that on a Kobo?

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Locking BGA tabs with UserScripts

2025-12-20

I play a lot of games on Board Game Arena (BGA!). A lot of those are turn based games with random people, but I have two subsets of games that I consider ‘more important’:

  • Turn based games with people I know
  • Alpha games I’m testing

Unfortunately, the first tends to have longer ‘per turn’ times and the latter doesn’t have a timer at all, so both end up right at the very end of the sorted table list. But both, I’d rather play first and in-between other games.

Super niche problems, I know.

Generally, my solution has been to keep a tab open for each of those games in a Firefox Tab Group, but in those cases, I keep navigating off those pages accidentally (thank you next table button).

Super super niche problems, now.

In any case, I whipped up a quick userscript (I use ViolentMonkey) that will:

  • Detect if a tab I’m on is one of the games I want to ’lock’
  • Remove the next table button (buttons; there are two different ones)
  • Disable navigation (at least make it pop up a warning)
  • Periodically refresh the tab (BGA tends to go to sleep in the background)

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AoC 2025 Day 10: Linear Algebranator

2025-12-10

Source: Day 10: Factory

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

Given a target light pattern [.##.] and a series of buttons ((3) (1, 3) etc) where the first button toggles light ‘3’ (the 4th light) and the second toggles the first and 4th etc, what is the minimum number of buttons you need to press to match the light pattern.

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AoC 2025 Day 7: Laser Splittinator

2025-12-07

Source: Day 7: Laboratories

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

You are given a map like this:

.......S.......
...............
.......^.......
...............
......^.^......
...............

A laser shines from the top S and splits each time it hits a ^, making this:

.......S.......
.......|.......
......|^|......
......|.|......
.....|^|^|.....
.....|.|.|.....

The two lasers in the center of this example merge to count as one laser.

Count how many times lasers hit splitters.

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