Darkoshi

If you have the ublock plugin:
https://github.com/aelipsi/WordleLowerCase/blob/main/WordleLowerCase.txt

Otherwise, if your browser lets you set a custom stylesheet*, the following works for making the letters in the top game section lowercase:

div[class^="Tile-module_tile__"]
{
	text-transform: lowercase !important;
}

This works for making the letters in the bottom keyboard lowercase:

button[class^="Key-module_key__"]
{
	text-transform: lowercase !important;
}

*If using Firefox, you can create a "userContent.css" file with the above content.
Then navigate to your Firefox profile folder. If it doesn't already has a "chrome" subfolder, create that folder.
Place the userContent.css file in the "chrome" folder.
Then open the about:config page and bring up the "toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets" setting. If it is false, change it to true.
Close and re-open the browser.

For about the last month, I've had an internet issue where the initial "connecting to [whatever URL]" step randomly takes a long time. Randomly as in not always, and not always the same sites. When I try to make it happen, it doesn't happen. The delay isn't always the same length. But it happens many times a day. Once past that initial delay, the page then loads quickly.

It has happened both at Qiao's house and my house; he's got a different ISP than me.
It has happened both on my personal laptop and work laptop, though I think I only noticed it a few times on the work laptop. Most of the time, the work laptop is connected to a VPN; it may have only happened when I wasn't on the VPN, but I'm not sure.
It has happened in various browsers (Waterfox, Firefox, not sure about the others)
Speedtest.net results show nothing unusual.

Do any of you know what could cause this or how to fix it?

Based on what I read on this page, I already tried turning off DNS over HTTPS but that did not fix the problem, so I re-enabled it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/qoc9ty/every_new_website_i_visit_in_a_new_session_takes/

... Found another post which might be related to my problem:
https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/r76qg8/httpsgoogleapiscom_weird_slow_connection_issue/

I'm in a standoff with my browser: I refuse to let it update as long as it keeps nagging me to update, and as long as I can't find a way to make it stop nagging.

It used to be when an update was available, it would pop up the message, and if I didn't choose to install it right away, it would remind me at a reasonable frequency, no more often than once a day. Now it is doing it multiple times a day. Suffice to say, I became very irritated and have dug my heels in deeper than ever. I don't want to completely disable updates, but... I haven't found any other solution so far. Maybe I'll need to downgrade to an older version. ::SNEER::
Bah.

.

One of my phones popped up a message saying that a COVID-19 Contact Tracing app was available (the first such message I recall having gotten). But it was an app for the state of North Carolina. I live in South Carolina.

.

Yesterday, my mom gave me leeks and a bunch of cilantro which she'd gotten from a friend.

I cut up and cooked the top dark green parts of the leeks separately from the rest. (I had read a webpage which said this part of the plant is inedible, but that is untrue. Perhaps on some plants the leaves are too tough to eat, but on these they certainly weren't.)

I stir-fried both parts in olive oil along with the cilantro. With the leek tops, I stirred in balsamic vinegar. It turned out quite good.

In the other pot, I added fresh ginger, a can of black-eye peas, and a package of potato gnocchi (after boiling it). It turned out quite good too.

.

Today was like a warm spring day. Upper 70s. Flowers are starting to bloom. Yellow flowers grew from the bulbs which I had thought were small onions.

.

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.

Lately whenever I open a link to a WashingtonPost.com article, I've been getting a sidebar message telling me to disable my ad blocker, with much of the page covered by the sidebar and scrolling disabled. Till now, I'd been closing the articles; not wanting to read them that badly.

But today, I started playing around with my uMatrix settings, trying to find out which domains I'd need to allow Javascript for, to get the message to go away. I'd be ok with allowing some advertising domains, if the ads weren't intrusive. I had to keep on enabling more and more domains, until the page finally worked. Then I started over from scratch, allowing only the last domain I had enabled, but that didn't work. Sigh. I started to wonder again if it was really worth it; I can live without WaPo articles.

I did some web searches to see if I could find info on which domains needed to be enabled. I didn't find that answer, but from what I read, WaPo has been doing this kind of ad-blocker blocking for several years already. I haven't had a problem reading WaPo articles until recently. So then it occurred to me that maybe to fix the problem, I need to *disable* Javascript for the WaPo domain. I did that, and ta-da, no more sidebar message and no more problem reading the articles.

The problem was because I had changed my global uMatrix settings a while back to allow Javascript for the main website's domain by default.

I feel somewhat bad about blocking ads, as I understand that websites need a source of revenue. My main reason for blocking JS and ads is to make it less likely to be exposed to malware. I remember some instances where ads were responsible for loading malware onto people's machines, even though I don't remember if that actually happened to me from any ads. I think my antivirus caught it before I was infected. My other reasons are because of how much slower enabling all Javascript makes some pages, and because I don't like it when audio and videos auto-play.

I also sometimes feel just a tiny slight bit wistful, wondering if maybe I had Javascript and cookies and all that enabled all the time, and if Google and everyone else had built up good profiles of me, maybe I'd be seeing interesting, useful and relevant ads that I'd want to click on.

I've bought subscriptions to some sites, and given others donations, to help them out financially. But that's a lot harder sometimes than it ought to be. I wrote a rant-post this morning about a problem with TheAtlantic site; this time it wasn't letting me update my credit card expiration date, even though their system had sent me an email asking me to. But I made that post private, because ::meh::.

I've been trying to learn how to use the uMatrix add-on in Firefox with scripts blocked by default for most pages.

For the most part, I think I understand how it works now, and I can get most pages to display ok. But it seems more frustrating than NoScript ever was for me.

A few days ago the links on a certain page weren't working, no matter what I allowed in the uMatrix grid. Even after disabling all matrix filtering, the links still didn't work. But in my other browser without uMatrix, they did work.

I found this info: About "the page is still broken after I created all necessary rules". It mentions that you may need to press the Shift button while reloading the page, to get it to work. I tried that, and it fixed that particular page.

Today I'm having a problem on this page: The 29 Stages Of A Twitterstorm In 2018.
No matter what I do, including shift-reload, including with matrix filtering disabled for both the buzzfeed domain *and* the global scope, the video in #18 does not display. In my other browser with NoScript, I only have to allow scripts for a few domains, and the video displays ok. The last domain I had to allow was "twimg.com". But "twimg.com" isn't even listed in the uMatrix grid. Do any of you use uMatrix? What am I doing wrong?

Update, 2018/01/21: In my testing this afternoon, twimg.com does get listed in the uMatrix grid, and the video does display. I did reinstall my browser and set up a new profile, but I think I'm using the same uMatrix settings as before, so I don't know what fixed it. Maybe I had Firefox's Tracking Protection turned on in my old profile (see my comment below).

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.

I was getting ready to install one of the Opera browsers on my phone, but I noticed that their Google Play pages say "contains ads" - even though the browser itself supposedly contains ad-blockers. So where do the ads get displayed? Do they block the normal ads and inject their own instead?

The app details mention: Opera Mini may show ads from Facebook. To learn more, see https://m.facebook.com/ads/ad_choices
But that link results in a Facebook page with message "The page you requested was not found."

I did a web search and didn't find more info on that, but found this (from July 2016): Opera browser sold to a Chinese consortium for $600 million.
That is news to me.

It reminded me of something else I read recently that surprised me too. I thought that Lenovo was a part of IBM, and that IBM was still a PC/laptop manufacturer. But IBM sold "off its personal computer (ThinkPad/ThinkCentre) and x86-based server businesses to Lenovo (2005 and 2014, respectively)". And Lenovo "is a Chinese multinational technology company with headquarters in Beijing, China."

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.

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.