NOTES
Quiet notes from working and living in Tokyo, and from making small tools along the way.
Check an extension’s site access, requested permissions and data handling explanations before installing. Learn what you can adjust afterwards and what store disclosures cannot prove.
How phishing emails lead to fake websites and misuse of your information. Check through your usual official app or bookmark, and learn what to do if you already entered details.
An unexpected page opens after you click Play or Read more. Learn how ads can lead to fake sites and what to check if you entered details, installed software or allowed notifications.
Real company details do not prove that a business runs an online store. Check the official website, URL, prices, payment options and return terms together. Includes Japan’s disclosure exceptions and a count of a published list.
People aged 65 and over accounted for 51.3% of Japan’s special fraud cases in 2025, excluding corporate victims, but their case count rose by 535. See what the share means and when to stop and check a caller’s request.
Four places to check before pasting work documents into ChatGPT: greetings and signatures, quoted emails, client and project names, and logs. Start with company rules, then reduce unnecessary information.
A local model and an offline application are different things. Three checks for LM Studio, what a Windows Firewall test showed, and the limits of that result.
Hidden Excel sheets remain in the file. Learn how to inspect a copy before sending, what to review before deleting data, and how veryHidden differs from ordinary hiding.
Check a PDF’s title, author, creator, and producer in Firefox. See what we found in ten files, what Document Properties cannot show, and what to check after editing.
What I check after AI helps me build a working Chrome extension: feature scope, permissions, network requests, local storage, and whether the store listing matches the behavior. Copy & Prep provides a small example.
Check tracked changes and comments before sending a finished Word document. Learn what No Markup hides, where to find Document Inspector in Word for Windows, and why to work on a copy.
A Chrome extension's details page has two separate sections, Permissions and Site access. Across our own seven extensions the Permissions section was empty every time, so the only thing left to read was Site access. How to judge the reach by whether the feature needs it, rather than by counting permission names.
I went looking for a count of misdirected emails in Japan's public sources. The regulator's 2,889 "missending" cases also cover posted documents, a survey of listed companies folds email into "misdisplay and missending," and the IPA threat ranking is decided by vote rather than by incident counts.
The signature, the quoted reply, a form, a spreadsheet, a log. Five places personal data travels into an AI chat when nobody meant to send it, and why the useful question is whether a detail is needed rather than whether it looks personal.
The front page I built with AI was calm and clear, and if you covered the logo it could have belonged to any other product. Why I think that was my choosing rather than the AI, and what I rebuilt it around.
My home address was sitting at the bottom of my own Chrome Web Store listing, because my developer account was declared a trader. What verified trader information is shown to users, and why switching to non-trader is not a way to hide an address.
The rejection was about the store listing, not the code or the permissions. Naming a dozen supported services felt like scope to me, but the spam FAQ says a description should not name more than five sites or brands. What I cut, where the list went, and what the official pages actually say.
What actually runs where in a Manifest V3 Chrome extension. The file layout, what manifest.json tells the browser, the isolated world between content scripts and the page, the service worker that does not stay running, messaging, and permission design — with short code examples.
Every Legacy Tools product is a Chrome extension rather than a web service. Not because extensions are technically superior — I wanted to place small safety features inside the browser people already use, starting with my aging parents. On that choice, and on not automating safety too far.
Chrome can do more than display websites. Extensions add small features to the browser you already use, and the Chrome Web Store is where you find them. How installing works, and what I check before adding one, from someone who publishes extensions.
Generative AI has shortened the distance between noticing a small inconvenience and building working software. How I split the work between ChatGPT and Claude Code, why larger software still feels out of reach, and how I decide how small a tool should be.
A snapshot of the tools I use as of July 2026. The same AI plays a different role depending on where it sits — chat, CLI, or design. The actual steps of shipping one Chrome extension, and the decisions that stay with a person.
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