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)

Building a virtual CPU from NAND gates up

2025-07-21

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve spent entirely longer than I probably should have falling down the rabbit hole that is the game Turing Complete.

In a nutshell, you start with basically nothing, build up simple logic gates, create memory cells and 1-bit addition, build that into 8-bit math and logic, read instructions RAM, implement loops, and function calls (in hardware!), and eventually use your very own custom built CPU to solve a few programming challenges.

Ludum Dare(ish) 56: BugShine

2024-10-07

Ludum Dare? That’s been a while!

I didn’t actually enter the game jam. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I was going to write anything. But I had a bit of an idea and spent a few hours only on Sunday hammering something out:

Yeah, I did another cellular automata thing 😄

It’s not at all complete, but the basic idea is:

Generate a random level
See it with multiple players (colonies of bugs)
Each bug will send out waves of ‘shine’, expanding their territory
Take over the map to win

It’s sort of got that?

I’m using Rust as I’ve been doing a lot recently.

The main libraries are:

pixels for the rendering; it gives me direct access to a pixel buffer, which is my favorite
winit for windowing; this did require the feature rwh_05 to be properly compatible with pixels, which took a minute to track down

Other than, that, it’s straight custom code which you can see in it’s entirety on my github.

main.rs - creates the window and handles input
world.rs - runs the simulation mostly in an update function; with generation in new

I think that perhaps the only really interesting bit about the code is how the ‘shine waves’ work. Basically, I have a grid of the state of each cell, but I also have a Vec that tracks ‘active’ pixels. Those are the only ones that can update–which both helps performance and makes the simulation appear the way it does.

Overall, a nice quick project. More than anything, it actually convinced me to try setting up something that can render pixel buffers on Rust. And with a (very minimal) GUI, too! Both things I’ve been meaning to learn.

I probably won’t do anything more with this code, but it’s got the seeds of something more interesting. Keep an eye out. 😄

Onward!

AoC 2022 Day 17: Tetrisinator

2022-12-17

Source: Pyroclastic Flow

Part 1

Simulate Tetris on a 7 wide board with a given (infinitely repeated) series of left and right inputs to be applied on each frame before dropping the block and a given (infinitely repeated) set of blocks. Once 2022 blocks have been dropped, what is the total height of the placed blocks?

AoC 2021 Day 21: Dicinator

2021-12-21

Source: Dirac Dice

Part 1: Play a simple game (describe below) with a loaded D100 (that always rolls 1, 2, 3, … 99, 100, 1, …). Return the score of the losing player times the number of times the die was rolled.

raco pkg install noise

2021-08-05

What feels like a million years and a lifetime ago, I wrote up a library for perlin and simple noise in Racket. Inspired by Jens Axel Søgaard’s new Sketching library (processing in Racket) and a conversation thereabout, I figure it’s about time to push noise to the raco package manager!

LD46: Tetris Life Scoring

2020-05-12

And so it ends.

Results

Category	Place	Score	Ratings
Overal	282^nd	3.688	26
Fun	408^th	3.438	26
Innovation	17^th	4.28	27
Theme	290^th	3.917	26
Graphics	608^th	3.313	26
Audio	436^th	3.182	24
Humor	761^st	2.205	24
Mood	529^th	3.208	26

LD46: My favorites (so far)

2020-04-20

As part of Ludum Dare, you’re supposed to review games. Here are some of my favorites (in the order I reveiwed them, so no particular order).

LD46: Tetris Life v1.0

2020-04-19

Controls:

Left and right to move the block and forth
Z and X to rotate it (or crash into things)
If a block gets stuck, you can hit ENTER to lock it in place
ESC to quit the current level

Goals:

To win: Get the plants to the top of the level
To lose: Kill off all of the plants #keepitalive

EDIT: I have included a v1.1 update that fixes a few minor bugs. Feel free to play either the official v1.0 build or the slightly updated (~10 minutes) v1.1 build with:

Add a ceiling
Correctly scale target
Scale control speed by difficulty

And there you have it. This page will serve as the main entry for Ludum Dare. If you’d rather download an executable for Windows/OSX/Linux, you can do so on the GitHub release page: