Darkoshi

new laptop, switched over

2023-08-07T07:16:17Z

Finally, I have switched over to using the new laptop as my primary one. I am not finished setting up all my programs and settings, but the most important parts are done.

I figured out how to customize the menu colors in my Firefox and Waterfox browsers via my userChrome.css file. I hadn't planned to do that, but for some reason the browsers' menu spacing was less compact on the new laptop than the old one. While researching how to fix that, I also found out how to change the colors:

/* Make menus more compact, and change their color */
menupopup > menuitem, menupopup > menu {
	padding-top: 2px !important;
	padding-bottom: 2px !important;
	color: #00ffb2 !important;
	background: #4d056e !important;
}
menupopup > menuitem:hover, menupopup > menu:hover {
	background: #000000 !important;
}

I had a week of vacation to do it.
Besides the new laptop, I:
- baked brownies and chocolate chip cookie bars
- made cucumber salad
- cooked grits
- sewed a cloth cover on my headphone's headband after cutting off the original one which was sticky with age
- tried out the solid bike tires; returned them.
- watched some TV, including 3 more episodes of "I Don't Want to Be Friends With You".
- miscellaneous other minor things

I am not feeling rested at all. But at least I'm using the new laptop.

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Waterfox, Firefox and overriding new tabs to display local file

2020-06-07T04:05:08Z

I've been using Waterfox Classic, which allows old pre-Quantum Firefox add-ons to work.
Today I finally tried out Waterfox Current, which doesn't support those old add-ons and is based more on the current version of Firefox.

With Waterfox Current, my prior methods of overriding the new tab page to display a local HTML file did not work. I tried out several other ideas*, which did not work either.

I finally found a way to make it work, using the js/cfg file method described on these pages:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1210576
https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/elqmwf/new_tab_homepage_local_file_broken_userchromecss/

According to the 2nd page, that method worked for Firefox v72.
I had noticed a while back that the new tab override wasn't working for my current-version Firefox browser either, but I don't use that browser much anyway.
Now today when I try using the same 2 files that work for me in Waterfox Current, with Firefox 77.0.1, they still don't work there! Fie! Fie! Fie on you, Firefox!

*You can use an add-on to have new tabs open your home page, but it doesn't work when the home page is a local file.

You can use an add-on to open a specific website (but not a local file**) in new tabs.

**Unless the add-on copies the local file to the add-on's storage space, in which case you need to reload it in the add-on every time you update the file. Having a (static) local file which the add-on loads to its storage space redirect to another (dynamic) local file does not work.

You can use an add-on to redirect from one URL to another. But redirecting the new tabs from a specific website to a local file does not work; that gives a Security Error.

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Firefox 63, how to save screenshot of full webpage

2018-11-12T02:14:33Z

Firefox used to let you save a screenshot of the full web-page via the Developer Toolbar:
https://darkoshi.dreamwidth.org/629515.html

(By the way, if you accidentally tried that from the toolbar shown in the Web Console instead of the Developer Toolbar, it didn't work, and showed an error, "SyntaxError: missing ; before statement".)

The Developer Toolbar has been removed in version 63 of Firefox:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=gcli-removal
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/05/21/firefox-62-developer-toolbar-removal/

So now you can save a screenshot from the Web Console; but you need to include a colon (:) in front of the command:
:screenshot --clipboard --fullpage

See:
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/08/27/screenshots-from-the-firefox-developer-tools-console/

In the Web Console settings, you can also select the "Take a screenshot of the entire page" option under "Available Toolbox buttons", to get a Web Console toolbar button for taking a screenshot. Using that button, rather than saving the screenshot to the clipboard, automatically saves a PNG image in the Downloads folder.

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Firefox status bar

2018-09-06T05:08:20Z

My main Firefox browser that I use at work, which is on an ESR update channel, was finally updated from a pre-Quantum version to version 60.

I found that there is actually a way to get back a status bar, for displaying URLs when hovering over links, rather than having the URLs pop up and disappear:

http://www.optimiced.com/en/2018/02/11/restore-status-bar-in-firefox-quantum/

It sounds like there's even a way to put add-on buttons on the status bar too. But I haven't tried this yet, so I'm not sure:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/8bfxji/been_trying_to_revive_the_addon_bar_statuspanel/

Hmmm. I'll need to see if there's a way of changing the status bar color. I don't like it being gray.

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Firefox high CPU

2018-05-27T07:47:55Z

The latest version of the Context Search add-on (3.66) for Firefox seems to have a bug causing high CPU and disk usage.
See the Github problem page.

Disabling the add-on and restarting Firefox prevents the problem. (you may need to kill Firefox from Task Manager).

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taking screenshots of full web pages

2018-03-03T08:13:13Z

I was looking for an add-on to let me save an image of a full web-page, even if only part of the page is visible without scrolling.

I found out that you can do it in Firefox (and Waterfox) even without an addon:
From the menu, select Tools - Web Developer - Developer Toolbar. That will make it show an entry bar at the bottom of the page.
Then type "screenshot --clipboard --fullpage" into the entry bar, to save the image to the clipboard. Or you can save it directly to a file, using other parameters.

In some cases you may get an error message while doing that, and it may not work. It depends on how the webpage is set up. But I got around that by first saving the page as a single HTML file, opening the saved file, and then doing the above. This way, the screenshot didn't have all the images and colors of the original page, but it had the important stuff that I wanted to save.

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Firefox Quantum text color? { never mind }

2017-12-26T07:23:07Z

These 2 pages (and some others) display okay (black text on a white background) for me in Firefox ESR (v52), whereas they are very hard to read (light gray text on white background) in the latest Firefox (v57):

http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2017/12/a-brief-blood-boiling-history-of-the-opioid-epidemic/

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/ride-hailing-new-york-traffic/549131/?single_page=true

What is causing the gray text? I restarted with add-ons disabled, and the text is still gray.

...Ok, so in my browser settings, the default text color was set to gray. The above pages must specify the background color as white, but must not specify a text color. (If you design a web page, you should either specify both colors or neither, not just one of them.) Those pages were using my default gray text color on their background white color (my default background color was dark, not white). Changing my default text color to black fixed the problem.

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Keyboard on keyboard. Spoofing user agent strings.

2017-11-28T05:00:10Z

Over at Qiao's house, I hooked up a bluetooth mouse and keyboard to my laptop, as typing directly on the laptop gets frustrating after a while.

The laptop sits on a movable cart. First I tried putting the keyboard on another little table/stand in front of the cart. But that way, the screen was too far away. Then I tried turning the laptop sideways on the cart, so the keyboard could fit in front. But that way, the mouse didn't fit. Then I thought to try placing the keyboard right on top of the laptop's keyboard. I thought that would cause the laptop's keys to accidentally get pressed. But it doesn't. It works perfectly fine that way. Hah.

..

While searching for add-ons that work in Firefox 57, I found uMatrix. It's similar to NoScript, in that you can select what items are allowed to run for each web page. But it's a little different. For example, I think uMatrix can be configured to only allow Facebook scripts to run on Facebook pages. Setting up those kind of rules in NoScript isn't easy. Each add-on can do certain things that the other doesn't, and many people use both. So now I'm trying out uMatrix.

uMatrix can spoof your browser's user-agent string by randomly changing it every x minutes. You can customize the list of strings that are used. The next link has a dynamically created list of the most common user agents strings, based on the people who have visited that site. A comment on the page explains that the numbers are somewhat skewed to older browser versions, as it takes some time for the older entries to drop off.

As long as I'm still using Firefox, I think it is best to only spoof using other Firefox user-agent strings. Firefox's market share is low enough that I don't want to make it seem even lower by pretending to be using a different browser.

So, below is a list of the most common Firefox user agent strings, taken from that page today, along with their percentage. Each individual string is fairly uncommon, but sum is about 17%. That's actually pretty high, compared to the numbers on the Wikipedia browser usage share page.

2.7% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
2.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
1.5% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
1.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
1.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
1.1% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
0.8% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.6% .. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
0.6% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
0.5% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
0.5% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
0.4% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
0.3% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
0.2% .. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0

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Firefox notes, running Quantum and pre-Quantum

2017-11-25T03:16:15Z

Firefox Developer Edition
The Firefox Developer Edition has its own profile path, so it can run side-by-side with a normal or ESR Firefox installation.

Firefox Portable
It has its own profile path, so it doesn't interfere with a normal Firefox installation. Regarding updates, it says "To upgrade to a newer version of Firefox Portable, just install a new copy of Firefox Portable right over your old one. All your data will be preserved. You can use the built in updater as well, but some non-personal files or directories may be left behind."

There are separate portable installs available, depending on which Firefox version you want to run:
https://portableapps.com/support/firefox_portable
https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox-portable-esr
https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox-developer-portable
https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox-portable-nightly
https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable/test (beta)

Each one has its own profile folder. You can install and run multiple portable versions.

If you want to run multiple versions at the same time (or if you want to run the portable and regular versions at the same time), you should copy the FirefoxPortable.ini file from the portable version's "Other\Source" subfolder to its root folder, and edit it to update "AllowMultipleInstances" to true.

There is a separate app which lets you set up multiple profiles with Firefox Portable. But this only works with the regular portable version, not the ESR or other versions. There are other ways setting up multiple profiles which may work with the other versions.

This page has older versions of the regular Portable Firefox and ESR versions.

Firefox Versions
If you don't want to use the latest Firefox version, it is safer to run the ESR version than version 56, as the ESR version will continue to get security updates. The ESR channel won't get the v57 (Quantum) changes until around March 2018. Hopefully by then, more add-ons will have been updated to work with Quantum, or replacements will be available.

You can copy your profile (which has all your add-ons and settings) from a regular Firefox install to one of the portable versions.
However, profiles from Firefox 55 and later won't work with older Firefox versions. If you are downgrading from version 56 or 57 to the ESR version (which is currently at 52.5), you'll have to recreate your profile from scratch.

NoScript
The NoScript add-on is now available for Firefox 57, at least in a preliminary state. The interface is different than before. Either I haven't figured it out yet, or not everything is working quite right yet. I haven't found any good instructions for it yet.
(I tried setting "Temporarily Allow" for a few domains, but the webpage still didn't work, even though the same page did work with those same settings in Firefox 56.
Also, in Firefox 57, the domains shown in the NoScript drop-down don't include all of the domains that are listed in Firefox 56, for the same page.)

Status (etc) bar add-ons
Design and implement an API for Toolbars - bugzilla entry. Hopefully this will be implemented, so status bar add-ons can be made to work again.

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this week

2017-10-16T05:10:39Z

Let's see. Monday, the dogs dug out from Qiao's yard.
Tuesday night or morning, they dug out from my yard. Or maybe dug and climbed; I'm still not certain. Searched the neighborhood nearly 3 hours for them and then finally found them in 2 different backyards one street over. Which I only noticed because our neighbor's dog barked and looked in that direction. (When I was searching before, I tended to look everywhere *except* in other fenced areas, wrongly assuming that if a yard was fenced off with a closed gate, that the dogs wouldn't have been able to get in there).
Then we took them back to Qiao's place where we can keep the small dog (the main instigator) tied up with a cable more easily until the fence is better secured. I think I will have to put down mesh fencing along the ground after all.

Wednesday, I cut up and cooked 2 butternut squashes that my mom gave me from her yard. They grew on their own out from her compost bin; not just these 2, but several more, all summer long.

Thursday, Qiao's retina started detaching.. he had surgery on that eye just 2 months ago for the same problem, but this time it is even worse than before (even though at an appointment 2 weeks ago, the eye doctor said it was looking good). He has emergency surgery scheduled this week on Tuesday. I hope they can fix it. His other eye also had the same problem several years back, and that one has been ok since its surgery (which was done using silicone oil, versus the recent surgery which used a gas bubble). This time the doctor's notes say he might use a scleral buckle, and/or silicone, or another gas bubble. We're hoping it won't be a bubble again, because Qiao had a hard time keeping the required face down position last time.

Friday, I made a new patient appointment with a doctor, so that I'll finally have a "primary care doctor". The nearest doctor's offices to me weren't taking new patients. So it's at a place somewhat further away, but not too far. The earliest appointment date they had was early December. Initially, it will be to discuss these foot nerve issues and/or whatever comes back from the blood test results and/or maybe the cracking sounds my neck has been making for almost a year now.

Today I ordered a new washing machine. I found out that there aren't any specific standards that must be met to call a washer "high efficiency". I found out that different companies / countries use to measure tub capacity differently, so that what one might call 2.5 cubic feet, another might call 3 cubic feet. But around 2011 the U.S. government started enforcing standardized measurements. I found that a lot of washers now include a setting for "Casual" clothes. Ie., whites, colors, casual, delicates, jeans, bulky items. The other ones are familiar, but I have no idea how "casual" clothes are supposed to be different than the others, or how they are supposed to be specially washed.

At work, they are finally giving me a new laptop with an SSD hard drive. It will be Windows 10 though; I'll have to get used to that.

I've started updating my Firefox add-on "ToggleDocumentColors" for WebExtensions. But because of everything else, I haven't had time to do much yet. It has to be implemented totally differently than before, because WebExtensions don't let you read or update the browser about:config settings. That boggled my mind when I found out. So instead, the add-on will have to "inject" a CSS sheet into the page, and the user will have to enter their desired colors as add-on settings, instead of the add-on being able to use the color settings the user already entered in the browser settings.

On Friday morning, an alarm siren was going off in a nearby shopping center. It could be heard at my house even inside with the windows closed - in the rooms on that side. That includes the room with my computer, and we had a Skype meeting that morning, so I was hearing this faint high-low-high-low-high-low siren noise in the background for more than an hour. By the time I was ready to leave for work, I was so annoyed that I started yelling (inside the house), in a wailing way, imitating the sound. It was slightly amazing - I was really able to imitate it pretty well... sort of like the wailing done in some North African cultures when someone dies. Ululation, that is the word. But I was using my throat/vocal cords to ululate, as opposed to my tongue. My voice was hoarse for the rest of the day.

Late Friday evening when I got back from work, the siren was still going! I called the police to report it, and was thankful that I was going to Qiao's house for the weekend.

Sunday evening when I got back from Qiao's house, the siren was still going!!!! I called Qiao and told him that I was coming right back, after I gathered my stuff for work, and more food. On the way back, I drove down to see where exactly the siren was coming from. It wasn't from where I expected; it was from an empty store even further away.

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Firefox search bar disappeared, and came back, oddly

2017-10-12T01:38:15Z

My search bar, which is usually to the right of the URL bar, disappeared. Yet it still displayed for my other Firefox profiles.

When hovering the pointer over the right edge of the URL bar, it changed to a resize icon, but it didn't let me resize the URL bar smaller (in case it had overlayed the search bar somehow).

In the Customize window, the Search bar still displayed to the right of the URL bar, like normal.

I disabled one of my add-ons which is related to the search bar, but that didn't make a difference.

When I restarted in Safe mode with all add-ons disabled, the Search bar displayed like normal.

After restarting again in normal mode, I disabled my add-ons a few at a time. Eventually the Search bar displayed again, but I wasn't sure which add-on it had been. So then I re-enabled my add-ons a few at a time. The Search bar kept displaying, even after all of them had been re-enabled.

It's possible that when one of the add-ons updated to a new version, it somehow caused the problem. And that disabling/re-enabling the add-on fixed the problem, as doing that may cause the add-on to execute some re-initialization logic, depending on how it is coded.

Update - 2017/10/14:
Today my NoScript toolbar button has disappeared. And I recall this happening with NoScript once before in the last few weeks. So apparently the problem with things disappearing isn't limited to the Search bar.
I restarted with add-ons disabled, then restarted with add-ons enabled, and now the NoScript button is back.

Update - 2017/10/25:
The problem with the NoScript icon disappearing has been reported by others too.

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we's got it yeah baby we's got it

2017-05-13T06:21:00Z

About 6 years ago at work, I set up an online group on one of the corporate websites intended for that purpose. It was a group for our developers to share information and post questions & answers. Many coworkers joined the group, and it got a good bit of use in the first years (about 180 posts/threads). But the activity eventually lessened, and the last post was 2 years ago (for various reasons, I suppose).

Recently all group owners were notified that the website was being shut down soon, in favor of some other new site on different technology. We were told that if we wanted to save our group's content, no tools were being provided for doing so, but that we could copy and paste the content into Word documents.

I harrumphed at the thought. Opening each and every post, and copying/pasting it into a Word doc? You've got to be kidding. As the group hadn't even been used in 2 years, and much of the info there was no longer pertinent, there didn't seem much point in trying to save the content.

But yesterday I took some screenshots of the pages which listed the post titles, for memory's sake, or nostalgia, or because maybe that could somehow be useful.

Today a coworker emailed me a question. It reminded me of one of those posts, which explained how to find the foreign key relationships of a table in SQL Explorer. So I went back and read that post. It helped me answer the question.

Then I wondered if I could find an easier way to save the group data after all. I discovered that each thread had an option for saving to a PDF file - and to get that PDF, you only had to append ".pdf" to the URL of the thread's page.

If I could get a list of all those URLs, then I could save off the PDFs. Scrolling through the posts, 20 titles & URLs are shown per page. So I saved off about 10 HTML pages like that. Then I used File Locator Pro (an awesome tool; I highly recommend it) to parse out the URLs along with the titles. I used a reg-ex search query, and saved off the matches, using this method: export just the content found by a regex expression.

Then I determined how to save off the PDFs from the URLs. After logging into the website in my browser, entering the command "start firefox [URL]" in a command window would open the URL in a new tab of the browser. So I divided the URLs into groups of 10, and used a batch file to open the URLs, ten at a time. (I didn't want to do all 180 at once, as I had a feeling that would either crash the browser and/or get me into some kind of trouble, as in who's this person fetching a zillion pages from our webserver all at once?).

Then I used a Firefox plugin, Mozilla Archive Format, to save all open tabs to a MAFF file. A MAFF file is a zip file containing a folder for each tab. Each folder has an index.html (or in my case index.pdf) file, along with a RDF file which has metadata including the page's original filename.

So, once I had saved off MAFF files for all the URLs (about 18 MAFF files), I unzipped them all, extracted the PDFs, used another batch file to rename them back to the original numeric filenames (which puts the posts in order by date), and to include the post titles as part of the filenames.

For creating the batch files, I use Notepad++'s column editing to edit a bunch of lines at once, and macros to apply the same changes to each line.

And voila, I now have the group's entire content exported as PDF files which can be browsed or searched. And it only took me a few hours to do, most of which was figuring out how to do it as opposed to actually doing it.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the files now, but at least I have them.

Figuring out how to do things like that makes me feel clever.

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LiveJournal servers moved to Russia

2016-12-28T05:21:34Z

(info originally via someone else)

There's a flood of new Dreamwidth accounts being created:
https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/233944.html?thread=1301156056#cmt1301156056

Which is likely due to the LiveJournal servers having been moved from California to Russia during the last week:
https://dw-maintenance.dreamwidth.org/73907.html?thread=2581171#cmt2581171
https://dw-maintenance.dreamwidth.org/73907.html?thread=2577075&style=mine#cmt2577075

Meaning that Russian authorities now have much easier access to user data, and are blocking many accounts:
http://en.news-4-u.ru/within-days-after-moving-servers-lj-in-russia-ilv-blocked-almost-100-entries.html

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fdolboeb.livejournal.com%2F3078638.html

.

I've also had problems loading certain LJ pages, especially ones that use the default style. For example, the comments don't display, the drop-down list by my username at the top-right part of the page doesn't work, and on Profile pages, the Bio & Interest sections are blank. Oddly, this is only happening to me when logged in. When I log out, those same pages display ok. So I'm not sure if that is due to server issues or something else.

I am seriously considering no longer cross-posting protected entries to LJ. If you are currently only on my LJ Friends-list, and if you create a Dreamwidth account, let me know and I'll give it access.

By the way, if you use Firefox and want an add-on for translating selected text and/or full web pages (including Russian), I recommend this one - it works pretty good for me:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dictionary-anywhere/

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more cookie adventures

2016-09-24T05:33:39Z

Yesterday while trying to get my LJ login to persist, I accidentally deleted all cookies. And now today it was Dreamwidth that kept logging me out! Even though I didn't change my Dreamwidth exception, which was working before.

Obviously I didn't completely understand how the cookie exceptions work, so I read up on them, and did some more testing.

Cookie settings - from http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/how-to-create-totally-secure-cookies :

Path: The default value of “/” means every request will get the cookie, while “/forums/” would limit the cookie to just that path.

Domain: Setting “www.example.com” will mean only the exact domain “www.example.com” will be matched, while “.example.com” will also match again any subdomain (forums.example.com, blog.example.com).

Secure: tells the browser (or other http clients) to only send the cookie over SSL connections.

HttpOnly: tells the browser that it should not allow JavaScript to access the contents of the cookie. This is primarily a defense against cross site scripting.

(so apparently "HttpOnly" has nothing to do with HTTP vs HTTPS, but "Secure" does.)

The DW cookies have Path = "/", Domain = ".dreamwidth.org", HttpOnly = true, Send for = "any type of connection" (which must mean Secure=false). So the cookies are sent from the browser to the DW server when any DW page on any subdomain is opened, and for both http and https.

But the Exceptions are what control how long the cookies are stored.

Based on the following pages, you don't have to enter subdomains (and you shouldn't use wildcards) in the URLs for Exceptions - all subdomains are included by default. Ie. "yahoo.com" includes "mail.yahoo.com".
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336207
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=286499

Based on my testing, HTTP and HTTPS exceptions are mutually exclusive. Adding an "http://" exception will only work on pages using HTTP. Adding an "https://" exception will only work on pages using HTTPS. So if you've set your cookies to be deleted when closing the browser, but you want your "ljloggedin" cookie to persist whether you've logging in from an HTTP *or* an HTTPS dreamwidth page, you need to have "Allow" exceptions for both "http://dreamwidth.org" and "https://dreamwidth.org". Whereas if you are careful to only login from the HTTPS pages, you should only need the latter.

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Internet Archive's Wayback Machine add-on

2016-08-13T18:34:51Z

No More 404s! Resurrect dead web pages with new Firefox add-on

If you use NoScript or some other JavaScript blocker, you have to allow JavaScript for the archive.org website, for the above add-on to work.

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firefox add-on signing

2016-08-13T17:33:33Z

Just FYI. As of Firefox 48.0, for security reasons, add-ons will no longer work unless they've been verified/signed by Mozilla. This is done automatically for ones hosted on the Mozilla site, but for ones hosted on other sites, must be done manually by the developer. This is actually not a new thing - it has been the case since Firefox 43.0. But until now, users could override it by setting the "xpinstall.signatures.required" preference to false on the about:config page. Now, that preference is no longer supported - to avoid malware from being able to change the preference without the user's knowledge.

From what I understand, a side effect of this is that any add-on which as part of its functionality, changes the contents of its own folders, won't work either.
For example, the Change Profile's Window Icons add-on allowed the user to select a custom icon for Firefox browser windows, and copied the selected icon file to a subfolder, which allowed it to override the default Firefox icon. This allowed you to use different icons for different browser profiles. Now this add-on no longer works, although it can still be installed from the Mozilla site. The problem with this add-on doesn't happen after selecting a new icon, as I expected it would... The buttons in the add-on's options window don't even work anymore (probably due to some other issue), so you can't even select any icons.

As the above add-on no longer works, I created these 2 add-ons with static replacement icons, for me to use instead:
BrowserIconsBlue
BrowserIconsPink

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Firefox Heartbeat

2016-08-07T17:04:07Z

I'm getting a banner across the top of all my Firefox pages today: "Want to try something new in Firefox?" with a "Get it now" button, a "Learn More" link, and an "x" to close the banner.

The Learn More link states:
Heartbeat is User Voice in Firefox.

Heartbeat provides real-time understanding of our existing Desktop user population, allowing us to pivot more quickly based on the needs and desires of our users. Heartbeat ties user perception to technical information so we can take your feedback and feed that into future Firefox releases.

The Goals of the project are listed as including:
Reduce user frustration by increasing our visibility into pre-release versions of Firefox so we catch and fix bugs earlier

Respect users time and effort by doing minimally intrusive questioning. Small samples, long rest periods, and simple interactions. We want to collect Just Enough data to be useful.

So I started thinking, Great! You mean they might ask my opinion on new features, and use my response to improve the product?

But then I scrolled down, and it appears that all it does is let you provide an overall rating of Firefox, from 0 to 5 stars. WTF? And once you enter a rating, you get a set of fairly useless links. WTF? How is that supposed to reduce user frustration? How is that supposed to catch and fix bugs? Where is the "questioning" mentioned in the goals?

I suppose if they are getting average ratings of 4 one day, and after releasing a new version of the browser, the rating goes down to 3, that may give them a general indication that users are displeased with something. But still, that seems rather useless. Does that mean that if I'm suddenly displeased with something new, that I should give them 0 stars that day, just to impress upon them that I'm displeased? Otherwise, unless they've passed the tipping point to where I'd actually prefer another browser over Firefox, my overall rating would still have to be high, as otherwise I'd actually be using a different browser.

I guess I'll click "Get it now" just to see if it really only includes what that page shows, or if maybe there's more to it.

..

Update: I found a page where you can leave positive or negative feedback on Firefox - this may be more useful (or may at least *feel* more satisfying) than giving a star rating:
https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/feedback

Update 2: Well, it looks like there's more to it than star ratings.
A Smarter Firefox
Firefox Guide Study 1

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Firefox history

2015-10-19T03:53:17Z

I accidentally deleted my Firefox browsing history today. I have a backup from a few months ago, so only a few months are lost.

I only intended to delete the cache, cookies, and active logins. It didn't seem to be working (it wasn't logging me out of Dreamwidth) so I tried several times. On maybe the 3rd attempt, Firefox locked up at 50% CPU for a long time, so I terminated Firefox. Only then did I realize my mistake, and that maybe it was using a lot of CPU while trying to delete a decade's worth of history.

Then I checked my profile folder. My places.sqlite file was 71 MB in size, exactly the same size as my last backup. I wondered if maybe my history wasn't really deleted, even though it was no longer showing up in the History view.

So I installed the SQLite Manager add-on and opened the sqlite file.

Surprisingly, the moz_places table still seems to have all my history entries. The only thing which shows that they are deleted is that visit_count is zero, and last_visit_date is blank.
So the site history is still there, just not the dates of when I visited what. Yet, each entry has an ID, and the IDs are in increasing order based on the dates that I had visited the sites.

I have to assume that the entries are still there only because I terminated Firefox while it was in the middle of doing its deletes. According to this bug: Clearing firefox's browser history doesn't change places.sqlite file size, the deleted data should be getting zero-filled even if the file size remains the same. But that comment is 8 years old. The last comment seems to indicate the data may not be actually getting deleted or zero-filled, only hidden.

In comparing the current places.sqlite with the backup, the IDs of the old entries don't match up... the current one seems to be missing entries compared to the old one, even though the total number of entries is only different by 46. So... I guess old entries have been getting deleted automatically by Firefox anyway in the last months, due to the maximum allowed history size.

Hmm.

Let me try the delete again, without terminating it this time. I'll take my shower in the meanwhile. Then I'll check if the entries really get deleted.

Update: Allrighty, over an hour later and the Firefox window still hasn't refreshed, and Firefox is still using 50% CPU. (I'm posting this from a different browser). It can't take that long to clear out 71 MB of data. Or rather 61 MB, as I had earlier decreased the size by running the places maintenance add-on. So it must be looping, or have a serious performance issue. Oh well. I don't have the time to research it more. I'll just revert to my old backed up history.

... After closing Firefox, the places.sqlite file didn't change in size, but the places.sqlite-wal file was over 465 MB! Now after restarting Firefox, the latter file is back down to 37 MB. SQLite Manager is showing that the moz_places table now has about 1000 fewer entries in it (out of 104k) than before. Serious performance issue.

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firefox oddity

2015-10-17T06:44:16Z

My home page contains many of my frequently visited links.

Lately my Firefox Back button often skips the prior page if it was my home page.

For example:
Home Page -> Page 1
click back button (goes back to Home Page, as expected)
Home Page -> Page 2
click back button (goes back to Page 1 instead of Home Page)

When I close and restart the browser and purposely try to recreate the problem, it doesn't happen.

When it has happened, and I checked my History, the History includes the Home Page - so it's not that my Home Page is being filtered out of the History.

At work, I've noticed a different problem occasionally.
Home Page -> Page 1
(back button is disabled)

Has anyone else noticed these kinds of issues lately? I'm wondering if it may be due to an add-on. But as I haven't been able to recreate it at will, I haven't tried disabling the add-ons yet.

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flash! fla-ash, the savior of the universe!

2015-07-16T03:36:26Z

why firefox has been blocking flash

and today the download page does show a version number. weird.

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that's my saturday

2015-07-12T07:30:13Z

I started watching Last Tango in Halifax on Netflix from the first episode. I've watched 4 so far, probably over the course of 4 weeks.

Even with shows like these which keep my attention and interest, I still pause them quite often in order to do other things. I've just got so much to do. That's also why I can barely find enough time to watch one episode a week. I watched the last one Wednesday night, past midnight* just cuz I wanted to, and naturally didn't get enough sleep that night because of it.

*actually, based on my browser history, I started watching it before 11pm, but then got side-tracked looking up info on audio sync issues and how to get the subtitles to display while watching it on the TV.

I get envious of Qiao and the amount of stuff he watches. He just finished watching all 10 seasons of Criminal Minds back-to-back (233 episodes! based on what Wikipedia says). He seemed to be watching 3 or 4 a day. (How can anyone do that and not have nightmares from it?) Today he watched 3 movies for a change. And he did an online course.

I vacuumed, washed 4 loads, changed sheets, ironed my shirts, fixed a seat cover for the chair, cut grass, cooked yellow squash, and washed dishes. Then I ate dinner and played some Words With Friends. At 1am, I thought I'd still have time to watch an episode of Last Tango before going to bed. But I decided to do a quick donation first, which ended up taking longer than expected (dang Firefox telling me I need to update Flash when apparently I already had the latest version, and dang Adobe website not displaying anywhere what the latest version number is, so that I waste time reinstalling the same version I already had). Then I read some DW. Now it's really too late to watch an episode.

I still need to do some research for a trip I'm going on. Not tonight, but I should tomorrow. I need to check Angie's List for ideas on who to use for some tree trimming. I still want to research HVAC options, and various other stuff.

My hands are hot. I forgot to wear gloves while using the string trimmer.

So many injustices in the world. So depressing.

A few days after I started taking SAM-e supplements, I had one of those rare tingly/goosebumpy feelings while hearing a song on the radio. It seemed encouraging. But in the weeks since then, nothing. They seem to be having no effect at all, and I'm getting tired of taking the dang pills already. I was going to start taking a larger dose, but that seems even more of a nuisance.

Wasps are getting into my stove's range hood. I had closed off all the small openings to prevent wasps from getting into the house a year or 2 ago. Yesterday I heard some buzzing up there. I discovered a bunch of dead wasps on the filter. Plus 2 still alive. I saved them; got them outside. Cleaned up the dead ones. Unblocked the openings; better to have a few wasps get in the house, than having them trapped and dying up there. Faced a dilemma: should I cover up the part of the filter that is meant to let light though, to keep from having the kitchen light attract the wasps? Though in doing so, I would no longer be able to see if any wasps are trapped up there (like the one I found today and freed). I ended up putting foil over it.

I should have taped the foil on from the bottom instead of the top. Then I could have more easily removed it to check. Too late now. Sigh.

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Amazon Smile for charity

2014-12-24T00:53:40Z

If you shop on Amazon a lot, consider participating in their Amazon Smile program, whereby they donate 0.5% of the price of your eligible purchases to a charity of your choice. All you have to do is log on to smile.amazon.com instead of amazon.com. More details here.

If you have trouble remembering to use the special URL, this Firefox Addon will automatically redirect all Amazon URLs to Amazon Smile. However, it requires you to remain logged in to Amazon, and it sounds like it may cause issues with some Amazon pages.

As I already had the generic Redirector add-on installed, I've now configured it to redirect me. Rather than redirecting all Amazon URLs, I'm only redirecting the sign-in page: from "https://www.amazon.com/*signin*" to "https://smile.amazon.com". This way I can still browse products without being logged in, and then only log in when I want to buy something. This seems to work ok, but has a drawback in that it doesn't automatically return you to the product you were browsing before logging in. Another drawback is that if you add items to your cart via amazon.com, and then log in to smile.amazon.com, it shows your cart empty. Maybe if that happens to me a few times, it will make me start remembering to log in before adding items to my cart.

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refreshened ironed bitten

2013-11-18T04:07:20Z

The "View - Reload" menu item has been removed from version 25 of Firefox. Apparently for quite a while already, "Reload" was only available when pressing "Alt+V" to view the menu. But now it's no longer there at all. I wonder why the Firefox designers feel the need to remove functionality from the menus, when the menus aren't even visible by default anymore.

Why do little changes like this bother me so much? Because it's like coming home to find that all your door handles have been removed and replaced by knobs, and furthermore, the knobs are on the top of the doors rather than in their hitherto-normal positions. Then you find out that for the last 10 years, 98% of other people have been using wireless mobilephone apps to remotely open all their doors, rather than using the door handles.

Now I have to remember to use either F5 or Ctrl+R to refresh the page when I don't have my hand on the mouse. I feel like I'm too old to learn new mnemonics. I can never even remember that Ctrl+Tab is for switching between tabs, even though I constantly use Alt+Tab for switching between windows. (I also can never remember the hotkeys for indenting or outdenting a block of text, in my email program at work).

Hmm. To press either F5 or a Control key combination, I have to look at the keyboard. Maybe that's why I find the menu mnemonics using the Alt keys easier to learn/remember. If I need to copy/paste something while typing, I still tend to use the Alt-Edit-Copy and Alt-Edit-Paste keys. My fingers however, know that Ctrl+Ins, Shift+Ins,and Ctrl-C can also be used.... but I don't use Ctrl-V much because how am I supposed to remember that V is for Paste?

Hmm. When editing text (as opposed to typing), my left hand is in the normal position, but my right hand is centered on the arrow keys. That lets me scroll through the text with my right hand, and also lets me do copy/paste/delete operations using the keys on that side.

.

I've found that it is much easier to iron clothes while they are still damp from the washer. No need to first let them dry. No need to put water into the iron, nor to drain it out afterwards. Ironing damp clothes makes them dry faster too.

This makes me more likely to iron clothes right after I've washed them, avoiding an ever-increasing accumulation of wrinkled clothes waiting to be ironed. If I know that I won't have time to iron right after washing, I may not even put those particular items into the wash.

.

I've been noticing a recent tendency to bite my lower lip while washing dishes, especially if I'm in a hurry. It's an odd subconscious thing; as if biting my lip will somehow make me get done faster. I have to consciously put effort into not doing it, as it's not a habit I want to have.

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add-ons

2012-08-11T05:38:24Z

A nice thing about open source software and add-ons:

Realizing there's a feature missing which would be useful for you,
and then realizing that you could possibly implement that feature yourself,
and then realizing that someone else might have already implemented it,
and then finding that yes indeed, someone else has implemented and made it available,
and all you need to do is install it.

.

Launchy, an add-on for Thunderbird and Firefox, which provides configurable context submenu options for opening links in your choice of browser or other application.

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Referring URLs, NoScript, Google, Firefox, Opera...

2012-03-26T03:21:46Z

Yesterday I encountered this problem again, where the wrong search term was passed in the Referring URL, when I clicked a result in Google's search results. I narrowed down that the problem only happened when NoScript was enabled.

More info can be found on this thread that I posted to the NoScript forum.

Other things that I've discovered in the last 24 hours:

If NoScript is set to block JavaScript for google.com, then on the Google page, you don't get the drop-down with search suggestions, as you type. (But the Firefox Search Bar does still provide search suggestions.)
When you open the main Google page, the focus won't automatically be set to the search box.
Most of the search functionality is still there even with JavaScript disabled, but small niceties like those are missing.

This page has info on using either "https://www.google.com" or "https://encrypted.google.com" for encrypting your searches. It also mentions some of the differences between them.

Using https google.com prevents referring URLs being sent, except for ad links.
Using encrypted google.com prevents referring URLs being sent, including ad links.

You can configure NoScript to force connections to google.com to use HTTPS:
Options - Advanced - HTTPS - Behavior - add *.google.com in the box for "Force the following sites to use secure (HTTPS) connections".

For certain pages to work, the following also need to be configured in the "Never force" box:
www.google.com/imgres
translate.google.com

With NoScript forcing HTTPS for *.google.com, it appears that no referring URL is sent, even when you click on ad links in the Google search results.

There's no simple/obvious way to update the Firefox Search Manager settings to customize the URL/parameters that get used for each search engine. But with the above "Force HTTPS" NoScript configuration for google.com, any Google searches initiated via Firefox's search bar or the "Search Google for..." context menu item will get sent to the encrypted https://www.google.com site rather than the default non-encrypted http://www.google.com site.

Changing the search engine which is selected in the Firefox Search bar also controls the search engine that is included in the context menu item "Search ... for ...". (It always struck me as preferential treatment that only a Google search entry was included in the Context menu; I didn't realize that it was controlled by the Search bar selection).

In Opera, it is easy to update the URL/parameters used for each search engine. Simply click the Search drop-down, select "Manage Search Engines", and click the "Add..." or "Edit..." button.

This page lets you manually add a search provider for IE7. I didn't test it. It might not work in IE9. There isn't any other obvious way of manually entering your own search provider in IE9.

In Firefox, you can configure whether or not referring URLs are passed (for all sites) via the network.http.sendRefererHeader setting on the about:config page.

In Opera, you can configure whether or not referring URLs are passed (for all sites) via:
Tools - Preferences - Network - Send Referrer information
or
Tools - Quick Preferences - Send Referrer information

Info on configuring ABE in NoScript. (need to whitelist the domain first)

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