Articles
Notes, tutorials, and build logs from things I'm working on.
Killing the Tofu Box for Good: Grafting a Star into Noto Color Emoji
That empty box isn't broken text - it's a missing glyph. How I grafted a star into Noto Color Emoji with fontTools and built a font that can't tofu.
How to Automate Email with Forward Email (and Save $100+/yr vs. Google Workspace)
Google Workspace bills per mailbox and won't let you script DKIM. Forward Email is flat-rate with a REST API that automates everything — DKIM included. How I moved 27 addresses off Workspace in an afternoon.
The Secret Button That Wasn't There: scripting the Twitch API
I went to grab my Twitch client secret and the button wasn't there. Here's the whole path to scripting the Helix API — creating the app, the Confidential-client gotcha, minting a token, and a CLI hook.
I Gave dev.to a Command Line: scripting the Forem API end to end
I cross-post my build-logs to dev.to, and doing it by hand got old. Here's the Forem API end to end — getting the key, the one call that publishes, and the canonical trick that keeps your own site ranking.
A SYSTEM Command Queue: letting automation run elevated without a UAC every time
I wanted my automation to run admin commands without a UAC prompt every time. The answer: a SYSTEM scheduled task that polls a user-writable queue file. Here's the build — and an honest look at why it's a loaded gun.
Who Manages Your Chrome? Killing "Managed by your organization" for good
Chrome says "Managed by your organization" but you don't have one. The culprit is a leftover, often ACL-locked Group Policy key. Here's how to find what's setting it via chrome://policy and delete the locked key properly — take ownership, strip the Deny ACE, remove it.
Cracking Open a 2004 Game: pulling every asset out of a Clickteam EXE
Old Multimedia Fusion games pack every sprite, sound, font, icon, runtime DLL, and event script inside the .exe. With Anaconda (a Python 2.7 Clickteam decompiler) you can pull it all back out — on a real game you can download and follow along with.
Real-Time Speech-to-Text in the Browser with Deepgram
A minimal, framework-free dictation box: click a mic, talk, and watch words stream into a textarea live as you speak. The full pipeline — getUserMedia, Web Audio downsampling to 16 kHz PCM, a Deepgram WebSocket, and partial-vs-final rendering — with runnable code.
Breaking Veo's 8-Second Wall: a tiny tool for long AI videos
Google Veo caps clips at 8 seconds. Here is a tiny tool that chains clips into long, continuous videos — with the full MIT-licensed source.
The Editor That Wouldn't Phone Home: hooking a webview's message bus
VSCode-style editors fence their UI inside a webview locked down by CSP. Here's how I loosened my own copy's policy, hooked its message bus, and caught a Claude rate-limit cap the instant it arrives — with MIT-licensed glue scripts.
Your PC's Flight Recorder: turn Wireshark into an always-on network log
Wireshark ships a headless engine, tshark, that you can run 24/7 — one plain-English line per packet into a rolling, self-rotating log. An always-on flight recorder for your own network, in two small PowerShell scripts.