Author Archives: jik

Hack of the day: CGI script for temporary download bandwidth throttling

I wrote a self-service way for my family to tell my computer to stop hogging all the download bandwidth so they can do their online meetings or gaming.

News broadcast soundbites: how the sausage is made

By the time they’re talking to you to record the soundbite, they already know what they want you to say, they just need to get you on camera saying it. There are some amusing aspects to how this played out in this case.

I appeared briefly tonight on the NBC Nightly News

I appeared tonight on the NBC Nightly News in a segment by Peter Alexander about bad stuff the Trump administration has done recently and how people are reacting to it (I imagine this may be a daily segment?).

New IG reel from Feds Against DOGE: why VA data privacy matters

Watch this video and then get involved! The only way we stop this if if people get off the sidelines.

Boston Herald article about my termination by DOGE

The article about my firing from USDS and VA is fair, accurate, and even-handed.

Tampermonkey script: no, Newegg, I don’t freakin’ want to subscribe

Script to prevent Newegg from subscribing me to their spam against my will.

Tampermonkey script to un-Gmail Google Contacts

When you click on a contact’s email address in the Google Contacts web app, instead of opening a new draft in your default email app with the “To” field populated with that email address, which is what it should do, Google Contacts opens a Gmail compose window. I hate this behavior. While I do have… Read More »

Lessons learned from setting up a Linux desktop VM on a Windows 11 Home host

VirtualBox is more functional than Hyper-V Manager but much slower. There are a lot of tricks for getting this right. If you turn off Secure Boot you might permanently lock yourself out of Windows.