eruthros

useful things!

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 17:48:41 GMT

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.

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Hahahahaha no.

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 00:14:01 GMT

So, okay, remember how I posted a while ago about my laptop touchpad being broken? And how a Dell technician was going to come by to replace it and the DVD drive?

In the last week, this is what's happened:

Wednesday: I talked to Dell technical support and had them send out replacement parts and a repair guy.

Friday: The repair guy came by and replaced the touchpad, hurrah! But, oh damn, they sent the wrong optical drive. The repair guy called Dell to have them send the right part and gave them the part number. "Be back Tuesday," he said.

Tuesday: The Dell repair guy came by again. He had the computer half-disassembled before he realized that they had overriden the part number he'd put in the system, and sent the same (wrong) optical drive again. He spent half an hour on the phone with them getting them to put a note in the system "NO WE MEAN IT SEND THIS PART."

Today: Dell repair guy came by again, this time with the right optical drive, hurrah! But half an hour after he left I started to get suspicious - the fan had not spun up at all. Like, at all. And the laptop was getting too hot to the touch. And I put my computer to sleep for a while, suspicious, but it kept happening.

So I talked to Dell's technical support over chat. "I'm pretty sure the repair guy just didn't get the cables back right," I said. "The optical drive doesn't impact the fan," the technical support guy said. "He had my laptop disassembled," I said.

Then the motherboard did it's safety-shut down thing, and I lost that chat session, which was really all for the better, because when I called they bumped me up to a manager.

Who agreed that probably the technician had just failed to reconnect the cables, but -- for warranty reasons -- I can't take the cover off the latop. (I totally could, though.) And, for making-sure-they-have-the-repair-covered reasons, they're not just going to send the repair guy back tomorrow to check the cables.

No. They're sending out a new motherboard and fan and heat sink.

You know, just in case.

And they won't be here until Monday.

There is not enough facepalm in the world right now, guys.

Until then, I'll be doing twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off on said computer. Or getting one of those fan lap desks, which should extend that to forty minutes or so - I've always meant to get one of same.

But, okay, guys, that will make a total of four trips the repair guy has made up here. FOUR. I am caught between LOLZ and CRANKY.

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Firefox 4!

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 17:18:12 GMT

1. ... whoah firefox 4 is fast. Like. Whoah.

I use chrome for some things, not because I like the interface and options all that much, but because sometimes it's much easier to have two browsers open. And the only thing I regretted about mostly using firefox was that it took so much longer to open and to load pages. But now it is WARP SPEED in comparison to firefox 3.x

I had to excitedly demonstrate this to t'wings, but I was briefly thwarted by the fact that I ask firefox to ask me whether to restore my previous session. I was like "look! I just click the button and ... okay, have to click through that dialogue choice ... but now it is there!"

2. Aaaaah there is no status bar you guys how can I tell if the site is asking for cookies or whether that's where I look to learn things what is stylish doing up there next to the search bar it belongs down in the lower right corner ahh.

3. CookieSafe, you do not work in Firefox 4, stop pretending that you do. Your buttons do not button, your menu does not menu, there is no there there.

I swapped to Cookie Monster temporarily, because I need a cookie manager, but I'd prefer something that has a toolbar button.

4. I love how easy it is to run two firefoxes at the same time. Firefox 4 is in beta, and I didn't want to screw up my old default profile. But otoh I didn't want to do the hard finding-the-bookmarks and session-manager preferences stuff. A little profile manager, a little copy paste, and I have firefox 3.6 and 4 using basically the same preferences but two different profiles.

5. Look the default position of the toolbars in Firefox 4 is just wrong, I'm sorry, what is that with the tabs above the location bar, I cannot deal with change you guys. Fortunately there is a ticky to fix it.

6. Seriously, I don't know why I put this off for so long. I heard such bad things about firefox 3.6.1.6 that the idea of upgrading just felt like irritating work, I think, but wow this is so much better.

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Wed, 22 Dec 2010 22:16:49 GMT

So the AC adapter for my laptop stopped working sometime on the plane yesterday - now it just goes squeak! squeak! and doesn't charge anything.

My system is still under warranty, but it still means that rather than going out to lunch today I had to call Dell four times: once to say there was a problem and be promised a dispatch number shortly, once when I didn't get said dispatch number ("I'll phone you back in ten minutes!"), once to talk to someone in the wrong department who was all "dispatch request? what?" (thanks, phone tree), and once to talk to an amazingly efficient woman who took care of everything and kept putting me on hold for five minutes to go track down everyone who screwed up this morning. Now, perhaps as an apology, they are sending out an AC adapter and motherboard ("just in case!") with a technician who will arrive in two to three business days. Honestly I would have preferred just the AC adapter, thanks -- when it makes hideous noises when plugged into the wall regardless of whether there's a computer on the other end, I really don't think the problem is likely to be the motherboard. Though it would be hilarious if it was, in part because that would make the fifth count them fifth motherboard I've gone through in the last two years.

And people say the extended warranty isn't worth it! They clearly haven't met Dell.

ANYWAY, this means I'm tying this on the computer my parents use for TV, so the monitor is GIANT and SHINY and hard to read on and the keyboard barely works. And it's now clearly too late to go out to lunch. Maybe I'll watch some tv and do some knitting instead.

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minor computer annoyances

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 14:14:33 GMT

Some of these are things I've fixed, some of them aren't.

1. New VLC makes me go aaaaaaargh. Every time I start it up or open a new file, it tries to rebuild the font cache. ( and then? more about the font cache )

2. So, okay, Helvetica Neue is a shitty web font in Firefox for Windows. ( fistshake at designers who insist on Helvetica )

3. Websites that don't put a line break between paragraphs. Especially with lots of text. NARGH. I have so much trouble reading e.g. racialicious's link roundups, but readability has trouble parsing the unordered list format, and zap doesn't make bookmarklets for that. I have looked for other bookmarklets to add line breaks to lists, but my googlefu failed me. Anybody else have anything?

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Tue, 18 May 2010 22:44:15 GMT

1. I had a dream the other night in which I won the lottery. I spent the entirety of the dream filling out forms and visiting accountants and dealing with, like, filing taxes and mutual funds. I didn't even get to spend any of it, but on the other hand it seemed so realistic and plausible that I woke up and simultaneously thought "but I don't even buy lottery tickets" and "shit, I forgot to fill out form 27-B." Let me just say, though, how bummed I am that I couldn't even buy a pony in a dream about winning the lottery.

Anyway, I blame the episode of Numb3rs with the ridiculous lottery plot.

2. Speaking of Numb3rs, now I am out of Numb3rs -- I ran out of show without noticing. And ( some moderately spoilery things happened )

3. I have learned how to hardcode subs into an avi file when I get them in srt format, which is ... not the usual direction I'm trying to go! But it's handy for making clips of things to share. If this is a thing you are also interested in, and you're on a PC, ( this is what I did )

4. Oh my god you guys our upstairs neighbors have been trying to save money on trash tags by throwing "compost" in a corner of the backyard.

At first we thought it was, like, some random neighbor trying it once, or a broken trash bag, or something that was thrown over the fence, because there were candy wrappers and shit in it. So we covered it with leaves and dirt and sprinkled clover seed mix on it, because we don't have enough leaves to really compost here. But NO, because today there is MORE, plus they left out the plastic bin they use to collect their "compost." So it is clear that this is on purpose, as if they can compost by just throwing down whole tomatoes and peppers and corn cobs and the occasional candy wrappers on top of the dirt and leaving them there in a pile. Without stirring. Or adding dry leaves or yard waste. Household trash alone does not make a free-standing compost pile, upstairs neighbors. It just makes a moldy mess, ugh ugh ugh.

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