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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Another quick thing that I set up for the first time in a long time. It’s honestly as much a note for myself as anything, but perhaps you’ll find it useful too.

The problem: We were having intermittent issues with a content security policy. One of the warnings that cropped up was the inclusion of 'inline-speculation-rules' in the policy. This is currently only supported in Chrome and the issue was only appearing in Firefox. I could of course go through the effort of removing the header locally and testing–but what if I could lie to the browser and change the header on the fly?

Well, for that, you have a number of options. Burp Suite, ZAP, Charles Proxy. Many more, I’m sure. Any of these can modify traffic on the fly like that, but they’ll all designed for so much more than that, making them a bit unwieldy. What I really wanted was something that was a whole lot smaller and did only this one thing (or could be at least configured as such)

Enter mitmproxy. I’ve used it before, but never quite like this. As the name suggests, mitmproxy is designed to man-in-the-middle yourself as a proxy–feed all web requests through it and it can read requests, modify and forward (or block them), read responses, modify or replace them entirely, and all so much more.

Exactly what I needed!

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