darkoshi | web surfing and fascination with curious topics which totally eats up my time

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/657059.html

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web surfing and fascination with curious topics which totally eats up my time

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It has never occurred to me to post the output of what I search for. But yes, I certainly jump down similar rabbit holes. My main all-consuming 'let me explore this from 20 different angles" topics tend to run 1) some aspect of technology (my News Genius and Hypothes.is History output would run for pages; unfortunately I automatically clear History on every browser exit, so I can no longer prove this) 2) some aspect of politics (my Trump sessions would seem truly astounding, and yes, I do read most or all of every page I travel to) and 3) some aspect of science, health, food, food science, and occasionally the kittehs. Mathematics has a similar bewitching effect but those History outputs don't run as long because I hit my math floor pretty quickly, then my brain blows up and I'm done.

Back in the day I created my entire other blog by heating Firefox past its RAM capabilities again and again on straight AOL research. I used to have folders with literally hundreds of bookmarked links and the browsing sessions would probably reveal URLs stretching into the thousands every few months.

Every day I'm not doing that kind of super-intensive research is an absolute vacation for me, as I put most of that time in in addition to full-time jobs I was holding and housework and gardening and cats and cooking...yeah.

As long as exploring something from 20 angles at least stays sort of on the original topic, and if I was actually intending to research that topic, I wouldn't feel as disappointed with myself. But I tend to jump from one topic to another, and spend so much time on things which have very little to do with the original question I wanted to get answered. Then I end up feeling "gah, why did I do that?", or even worse, depressed by all the bad stuff I ended up reading about.

Personally, I like having my complete browser history available, for cases like this*, and also for in general. It's like having a record showing part of what I was doing on any arbitrary day, without having to physically write anything down.

That's why when I accidentally lose a portion of my browsing history, it upsets me. I've found that even if you have Firefox set to never delete history, it still only stores up to a certain amount. On my machine, it seems to be about 160,000 entries or 2.5 years. So if one really wants to be able to access all history, one has to periodically backup the places.sqlite file. Actually, it looks like there is now an about:config setting to let you control how much is stored.

But having the history get too big is probably a drag on browser performance. What what be good is a utility that runs every so often, to move my history out of the places.sqlite file, into some other file, which I could access with the Nirsoft MzHistoryView tool. Another thing to research!

*Though based on my history, I haven't researched the Iko-Iko lyrics before, at least not in the last 3 to 5 years... unless it was in one of those blips where I lost history... Or maybe I happened to be using a different browser... Now I'll never know.

I have researched the Iko-Iko history before! It was years ago. But that and the dancing baby on Allie McBeal tended to drive me nuts over the years - the baby especially, still does, have to block it out of my mind -causing me to have looked up both extensively at one time or another. What I remember of them is not so much anymore. Time to look them up again!

And yeah, there are tons of add-ons for backing up bookmarks. I used to use those but this was in the days before Firefox Sync came with Firefox, so for all of it to work I had to use add-ons like FEBE and SQL Lite. I think Foxmarks came into this, too.

The thing was, I reinstall operating systems so frequently to increase hard drive size, upgrade to newer operating systems or (back in the day) get rid of experimental AOL installs that were fubaring everything else that managing the backups became another task I just couldn't deal with, even with the master/slave configuration I had going on for a good 7-8 years and an external hard drive to back things up to (which I still back up music, files, videos, pictures, and some CSS and other stuff to).

I'd almost always lose the last week's worth of bookmarks on a fresh install or have to deal with an HTML file holding the last set of bookmarks that there was no way to merge with the new set, so I just stopped saving them the last five years or so.

Before I read where you said it, I was going to suggest the about:config setting but I see you got there, so that's good. As far as not wanting to hang onto my History, that came from learning about 10 years ago that most browsers have a major security hole in them where if you visit a page that marks the links you click on as visited (by changing link color), the owner of that website can exploit some kind of hole in the browser's code to view all the history in your History folder (which was one reason I held off using a visited color on my own blog for years: I didn't want to scare anyone else who might be as paranoid as I am). I am nothing if not eternally paranoid about hackers and being hacked, so for a good many years (I want to say at least 5-6, from the day the feature became available in Firefox until about one year ago) I set Firefox to "never remember History" so that it wouldn't even retain an in-session list of where I'd been.

Somewhere within the last year or two, though, I decided it was too much of a pain in the ass to keep that up, so now I have it set to forget History on exit. Which makes me uncomfortable because of said security hole above, but I'm trading paranoia for a bit more convenience.

If it wasn't for that one security hole my History settings might have historically been a bit more liberal, but being I've used Firefox steadily since 2006 and Firefox has always used too much RAM, the other problem is having a huge History list would probably make it even slower and more RAM-chewing and harder to deal with than it already is. So it's kind of hard to say...maybe if Firefox were (and had always been) a bit lighter on its feet - like say, Opera - I would be more of a History saver now.

While I'm on the topic of Firefox, anyway, I was wondering if I could ask you something, because I've literally googled within the last few months and couldn't find the answer... did Firefox not used to have a setting for text-wrapping? It seems the setting's been missing for the last year or so. Do you know where it is, or where it went?

I did find a way to change something in about:config to get text to wrap (which is kind of needed because with all the CSS editing I do, I have to view source a lot), but changing an about:config setting is not what I want to have to do every time I reinstall an OS and/or reinstall Firefox.

I'm not familiar with a config for text wrapping.

I've started keeping a list of what add-ons I have, and what customizations/settings I've done in Firefox, to make it easier to get back all my old settings when installing from scratch. It came in handy last month when I accidentally selected "yes" to "refresh" Firefox on my work computer, and it reset everything! But at least it didn't lose my history or bookmarks.

Thank you. Fascinating stuff about the song.

Edited 2016-06-25 21:17 (UTC)

Oddly enough, I was doing a bunch of reading on fringe mormonism this week. I hit a couple of those links, although I was spending more time reading about Ervil LeBaron and his thugs.

Now I read about him too, and several other pages. It's all hard to believe that such things have gone on and are still going on. And that people like that have the support of other people. Grrr.

I think that's one of the hardest questions I've ever discussed: what do you, as a state or as an individual, do with a kid who has been raised to believe that being married and having kids at 12 is okay?

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