useful things!

[eruthros]

1. I have this problem with reading things that make me angry on the internet - if they show up in firefox's url bar when I start to type something else in, I'll go "oh, I should check that" or "oh, I should see if there are new comments" and then I'll read them even though I know they'll make me hate the world. Like, I'd start typing some other url with an s, and then I'd end up at salon.com, even though I knew there would be nothing good there except maybe Glen Greenwald and that I'd read some lifestyles article and it would make me cranky, and then I'd read the comments even though I shouldn't and that would make me despair for humanity. And cranky.

But the thing is, I only do that when I see the name of the site in the dropdown; if I don't see it, it's much easier to resolve not to go there. So I use a handy firefox keyboard command to take things out of the suggestions - I highlight the suggested url that I want to avoid and shift-delete on it, and it is gone. It will reappear if I go there a lot anyway, but since mostly these are places that I don't want to go to, places I just end up out of habit or fear or something, it works for me.

Anyway it is a great tool and I <3 it.

2. Readability! If you use(d) readability, you probably know that they disabled their old bookmarklet in favor of their new browser applet in February. I hate the new applet - it doesn't play well with noscript, it tracks pageviews, it disables printing and saving to pdf, it doesn't work on locally saved html pages or on many secured sites, and it's basically no longer really about quickly getting me a version of a site that I can read - it's about content-management for other people. HATE.

However! There are places to get the old readability bookmarklet hosted elsewhere - Readabilitude (which on my system doesn't require me to temporarily allow scripts every time I want to use it) - and there are also alternatives that have other style features - e.g. Readable (which I haven't used because it does require temporarily allowing js every time).

I was just doing without it for a while, so I was glad when I found those a couple months ago.

3. Unrelated to computers! Many people I chat with have been reading or rereading Harry Potter fic in a burst of nostalgia. But it can be hard to find that exact story, you know, the one where Harry owned a owl-order bookstore, or that one where Snape rescued him from the Dursleys, or that other one where Blaise was a fashion designer, so in case y'all don't know about it I will link here to painless_j's themed lists, wherein ze links to all the fic ze can find for various tropes and plot devices. It's handy both for the purposes of finding that one story you lost and for the purposes of reading all the HP fic featuring glory holes or someone being sorted into a different house or someone taking up a career in mediwizardry.

4. And for anyone who's dealing with too-hot weather, sparkymonster made a post a while back with tips for dealing with hot weather; there are also a bunch of comments full of tips. It's pretty fucking hot here, so I appreciate those.

Comments

[monanotlisa]

this problem with reading things that make me angry on the internet

Story of my life, man.

Less tangentially, I don't have your URL!issue, but I do follow the treasure trail of links scattered by the bloglist, and kind as they are, the content usually...isn't. :/

re: 2 -- thank you so much! Me = so bereft (and also vexed, yes). Lovin' your new links.

[eruthros]

Yeah, I mean - for me, it's one of those compulsive behaviors I have; once I see the link I have to go there. So I'm glad to be able to just scrub the link, since it's how I stopped going to many websites that make me angry! But it's so hard to avoid finding new angry-making things anyway.

I am very pleased with my new readabilitude bookmarklet too!

[anatsuno]

oddly enough, the old bookmarklet I have for readability still works? it does trigger NoScript to tell me there's omg XSS cross-stripcting going on, do I REALLY WANT THAT, but eventually it works and gives me a URL that ends with ?legacy_bookmarklet=1

I shall check out your most precious links too, though. <3

[eruthros]

Weird! Mine didn't work the same way - it would work sometimes, and require the XSS etc stuff, but it didn't work on some pages at all. (And it definitely didn't work on pages on my hard drive, which was super irritating!)

[shaenie]

I love you for your recs link. Just sayin'.

[eruthros]

Thanks!

[blushingflower]

It is stupidly hot here, but I couldn't even read all the comments on that heatwave post, so many of them involved the direct application of cold things to skin, which just, gah, no, red, do not want.
(I literally physically recoiled at the suggestion of a cold foot bath. I'm sure someone thinks that's refreshing, but to me, that sounds like a horrible form of unsexy torture.)

My solutions are: don't go outside if you don't have to, wear flowing dresses, drink plenty of water, stay in the shade (even walking down the street, if one side's shady and the other's in sun, I stick to the shady side). Also, carry a wrap, because everywhere in DC over-compensates with AC.

[eruthros]

Ha, I just did one of those things! My problem is that I don't have air conditioning, so the "stay inside" part isn't necessarily very helpful unless there's also cool showers/cloths/whatever. But all of your outdoors-advice is very useful slash true.

[blushingflower]

Yeah, my parents house in Utica doesn't have AC either (or, rather, it has broken central air, and they install a window AC unit in their bedroom in the summer). In which case: lots of open windows and doors, no closing of internal doors (cross-breezes are your friend) and lots of fans. I spent one summer sleeping on the couch on the back porch because it was cooler than in my room (also, that TV had cable).