cimorene

When I was first introduced to the concept of Night Mode a few years ago, my phone had an experimental? Android system feature: a Night Mode toggle in the top toggle bar which would basically invert the values of everything on the screen, with some tweaking. It didn't do a pure inversion like you'd get from Photoshop, but tried to make things more legible and closer to their originals, so a white page background would turn to black, but dark reds like in the Dreamwidth logo became light reds.

This was really useful for reading at night, and when I switched to a OnePlus and found it it doesn't have that toggle, and I couldn't find one to download that would do anything similar, I was extremely disappointed. Ebook readers do it, and I've selected a dark site skin on AO3 to accomodate mostly visiting it at night even if it is just to download things (and the dark skin doesn't bother me on the desktop or during the day). ( Read more... )

I know I should get a move on about switching back to Firefox (the last time I switched from it to Chrome there was some kind of streaming video bug I think? It was a few years ago), but I've been putting it off because of the effort involved.

But I have an Android phone, where the Google AI runs voice-activated searches and other minor tasks; and there's an app called Google or Google Search which stores a whole list of 'things you're interested in' for you (and used to be called Google Now or something like that before it got phased out). In your settings it asks you to 'subscribe' to things and offers you weird categories with different topics which it wants you to indicate you are interested in.

What it uses this for is a list of suggested articles that display every time you open Chrome on mobile right under the icons of your most visited sites. I do see the occasional link I want to click on there, usually related to upcoming movies, but the vast majority of the articles on the subjects of genre movie and tv franchises are essentially contentless clickbait blurbs that turn out to simply be notifying you that one person related to a project made a single tweet about it or that Marvel has released some new teaser posters.

I did manage to remove a lot of confusing and random content from the helpfully Google-generated list of "other things you may be interested in" that it offered for my approval in the settings of the Google Search app, and the changes I made there did appear to affect my home screen...

...except that for some reason Google thinks I am interested in tabloid gossip about British royals, presumably because I googled Meghan Markle when she married the prince. Even though I explicitly told Google that I was NOT interested in Prince Philip (the only suggestion related to them that it gave me in the settings), it continues to offer links to the sleaziest and scummiest British tabloids about things like royals blowing their noses or what hairstyles they're wearing, sometimes more than one per day, even though I uniformly dismiss them and have done for months.

Nothing I do can convince Google that I don't want to know about British royals.

In the scheme of things I've had far worse problems with browsers before, but honestly.... this one is pissing me off more than most of them because it's just so maddeningly STUPID.

Atlas Obscura: Barbed Wire Telephone Lines Brought Isolated Homesteaders Together - And then let them snoop on each other, BY NATASHA FROST. Fascinating early telephone history from the 19th century via a viral tilthat post on Tumblr.

xkcd 806 "Tech Support" (please note alt text's "go get a computer and turn it on so I could restart it") via

vass.

Buzzfeed advice columnist roundtable from Jan 8 by Rachel Wilkerson Miller featuring Ask a Manager, Dear Prudence, Captain Awkward, Care and Feeding, Dr Nerdlove and Ask a Clean Person. They discuss favorite & weirdest letters and other phenomena of the trade. I lost several hours opening all the links. Also cried laughing. Via

agonyaunt.

Tumblr taught me of the existence of the Cayuga duck, a popular ornamental domesticated duck variety from New York state in the US, which are entirely black with iridescent green like the head of the male mallard. Apparently superior examples also lay an array of monochrome eggs varying from black to pale gray with the seasons. Then Wikipedia taught me (or well, Wax) that this is a 'breed' or variety of duck merely, not a species, and that species-wise all domesticated ducks are 'basically mallards' (says Wax). I am curious about ducks now.
cayuga duck

Surprisingly fun and engaging YouTube vid, Cheese Expert Guesses More Cheap vs Expensive Cheeses from Epicurious's "Price Points" where cheese expert Liz Thorpe guesses which of a pair of cheeses is more expensive, explaining her reasoning and providing little 'what to look for' lists for different types of cheese. From last summer.

Current Location: I'm Atlas Obscura's insane capitalization habits
Current Music: ducks... ducks... quack quack... quack quack

I don't usually do this, but I was browsing my quotes-of-the-month posts from the past and stumbled on one I did for 2011 which was enlightening to look back on. So I decided to hit the memorable bits again here.

( 2018 in review )

How Much of the Internet is Fake? Turns out, a Lot of It, Actually. by Max Read at NY Mag's Intelligencer, Dec 26.

(This article was full of links, including:)

The Follower Factory: Everyone wants to be popular online. Some even pay for it. Inside social media's black market. by Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel JX Dance, Richard Harris, Mark Hansen at the New York Times, Jan 2018. On the purchasing of fake followers, which are typically automated accounts enabled by identity theft.

The Flourishing Business of Fake YouTube Views by Michael H Keller, at the New York Times, August 2018. On the purchasing of fake YouTube views, which are created by so-called "click farms", or automated networks of devices such as cell phones.

The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots: Behind the artificial intelligence personal assistants and concierges are actual people, reading e-mails and ordering Chipotle. by Ellen Huet, at Bloomberg, April 2016. On the poorly-paid humans pretending to be AI assistants for paid apps/ services and even for Facebook.

Rising Instagram Stars Are Posting Fake Sponsored Content: "It's street cred--the more sponsors you have, the more credibility you have." by Taylor Lorenz, at the Atlantic, Dec 2018. On the "influencers" and would-be influencers who create fake ads in order to appear to have been hired by more brands.

The Strange Brands in Your Instagram Feed: A new breed of online retailer doesn't make or even touch products, but they've got a few other tricks for turning nothing into money. by Alexis C. Madrigal, at the Atlantic, Jan 2018. On the flourishing ecosystem of webstores that exist only as shopify-type storefronts selling a curated array of items from Alibaba, shipped directly from the manufacturers and depositing a cut in the creator's bank account.

A Business with No End by Jenny Odell of the Museum of Capitalism, Nov 2018. This is the one I posted the link to on Tumblr yesterday: a deep dive into an especially convoluted example of the previous type of stores, this time entangled with a number of lawsuits for fraud, a strange department store and chain of bookstores, an Evangelical university, and the zombie corpse of Newsweek.

Hello, new people and fellow rediscoverers of DW!

In light of Tumblr Exodus I thought I would point to the bio in my profile and the blanket permission statement there (though in short: comments from new people are welcome; feel free to follow me; feel free to introduce yourself if we don't know one another; almost nothing is access-locked). For anyone newly subscribing to this blog, you may be interested in the introduction post 10 Things I Assume You Know About Me If You Read My Journal (this was a meme that went around LJ in 2006. I've just had it pinned to my profile & periodically updated)(though in short: I'm 36 and have been in fandom since 2001;

waxjism is my wife).

I have been using Tumblr more than DW over the past few years, and am now making an active effort to increase my engagement here. (I need to look for more communities, I suppose.) I used to do 'what am I reading and what am I watching' sort of roundups here, and I haven't done one in ages; therefore, here's a hopefully comprehensive ( Survey of My Fannish and Non-Fandom Interests and Hobbies )

As indicated in my last post, I upgraded basically the whole inside of my PC: new motherboard and processor, new memory, and an SSD. So last night I turned to

waxjism and said,

"Hey, you wanna upgrade the hardware in the media server and try to install one of those headless media server OSes on it together? It'll be fun! It'll be like a date!"

(It's her summer vacation right now.)

Our "media server" is actually just a spare PC built out of the still-working hand-me-down components of our PCs and it has always run a regular Ubuntu-based Linux. There's a keyboard, a monitor, and a mouse attached to the box, although we leave them off 90% of the time and use it over the LAN. I knew about headless OSes for servers of course, but I didn't really realize there were free Linux-based distros designed specifically for the sort of cobbled-together media server we've got, but to be controlled with a web interface so we could actually put this tired old monitor into storage.

I found out about the existence of these distros a couple of weeks ago by accident - I can't remember how. Memorably, the computer-building nerds refer to these as NASes, which stands for Network Attached Storage, and I can't get over that because... Nas already means something and he's one of the 10 greatest hip hop artists of all time, according to most listicle-making judges?

But anyway, we plugged all our media hdds and the old old old old power source into the motherboard just retired from my former PC and set about installing one of these distros. And we immediately ran into complications.

( Read more... )

So eventually, after breaking my install, opening browsers for issues related to the project on both our desktops and Raja the chromebook as well as my phone, booting up the old laptop just to check the USBs were in fact bootable, opening the media server's box twice and mine once, and watching two cats jump down from a shelf and land on Raja's keyboard, we gave up...

... after midnight, though, which made that a very long date. We succeeded in none of our aims, though we learned a fair amount about the confusing world of free NAS distros. We did have fun at the beginning, so it wasn't a failure, per se.

And today we walked to Jimm's PC Store and got a new basic model power source, and Wax insisted on getting a 60-gig SSD as well simply because she wanted to play with one. With these mods in place, we installed openmediavault successfully and got through the stages of setup with no wrinkles so far. Operation over the network is working okay too, and after a few missteps I got the Samba shares working and we're currently moving files around in preparation for some reformatting and creating persistent drive labels with a new bootable stick of gparted.

So I NOW have built a new PC and it's up and running the freshest version of Ubuntu, but the saga was quite fraught for a while there. The phrase "For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, the parts got sent to Helsinki" was used quite a few times in the last few weeks.

Wax & my MIL in front of the shop in Heikinlaakso displaying a big advertising poster that says in Finnish "EVERYTHING GOOD IS NEARBY".

You might remember the difficulties we have already had with postal deliveries ever since our postal service was outsourced and the store that holds the delivery contract for our neighborhood is doing a shitty job.

Well, they also installed a Smartpost automat in our development. A Smartpost automat is a bank of electronically-locked lockers attached to a touchscreen which can now be found in nearly every corner grocery in the country and allow you to receive packages. The postal service delivers the package to a locker and you get a unique code by text message which you use to pick it up. The success of Smartposts has allowed them to expand to private automats for big businesses and apartment houses, for example, which can only be used by the residents with access to the automat. The source of all this trouble is the implementation of the Smartpost system:

How Smartpost automat deliveries work: Smartpost delivery costs slightly more than regular postal delivery and has to be offered by the store you're ordering from. You select Smartpost as the delivery method, and the webstore then loads a database of potential Smartpost locations. You search by city/zipcode/map and select the store to which it will be delivered.

The solution Smartpost chose to implement: To use a private Smartpost automat, you have to log into the postal service website (as it's government official, identifying yourself against your social security number) and enter the private automat as your desired destination for packages only in their mail redirect system, which is also used for things like moving/summer residences. When you place an order (from a store that offers Smartpost, due to the cost issue) and choose Smartpost from the delivery methods, the webstore will continue to offer you the same database of public pickup points as ever. Instead of using this, you have to manually change your address in the store's address field (which usually still displays your name and address when you use a pickup-point delivery method: it enters the pickup point address as "c/o").

Each Smartpost automat has a completely unique address from every other place and from each other, which they achieved by inventing an entire new class of nonexistent zipcodes. Each automat has its OWN zip, which to the informed eye offers a clue to its location: our zipcode is 20210 and our automat is "20214"; the next nearest one is "20215". So, for example, my order confirmation from the store now states that my delivery address is "Cim 'n' Wax, Street Address of Laundry Building, Turku, Finland, 20214." Whereas our real street address is elsewhere in the development and that isn't its zipcode, while the laundry building's actual zipcode is 20210 - if anybody lived there, their regular mail would go to "Dr Laundromat, Laundry Building, Turku, FI, 20210".

Essentially, then, we're tricking the webstore. We've told it that our address is the not-actually-extant address of the Smartpost automat, and the zipcode, when read by the postal service's sorting machines, will route it into the Smartpost system instead, where they will send it to the correct automat. The webstore doesn't know anything about that, though. Their computer is happy as long as each field is filled out: the address field (with our fake address), the delivery method (with Smartpost), and - here comes the next problem -

- the pickup point selection menu with the database of public Smartpost automats. This field can't be left unselected, because the checkout process will say "ERROR! Required field" or something like that. The first few times I successfully ordered to our new private automat, I selected the nearest public automat here, but since the package doesn't go there it's sort of beside the point.

What actually happened to my package: it hinged on the website I ordered from and their order form. Usually the checkout process has a row of big icons for all the services they use: the credit cards they accept and Paypal, DHL and whatever other delivery services they offer. This website didn't have a list like that, but when I opened up the payment dropdown menu my bank appeared in the list and when I opened up the delivery methods dropdown "pickup point delivery" appeared in the dropdown menu. When I selected "pickup point", it automatically selected the grocery that houses the nearest public Smartpost automat on the basis of my home address (which was already in their system because you have to give them your billing address). I absent-mindedly, I now understand, assumed this meant Smartpost, which is what it usually means in Finland. I proceeded to change my address in their system - they had a handy tickbox for "change for this order only". When I entered the automat's fake address in the field, it immediately auto-updated the page and stuck a green checkmark next to the zipcode and autofilled the "city" blank further down with "Smartpost". So I was like, "Aha, it's working! Perfect!"

However, when I scrolled down, the formerly irrelevant pickup point-dropdown had repopulated. The nearby corner store was no longer selected. Instead it had automatically selected a corner store in Heikinlaakso (Henriksdal), a small township in the Helsinki urban area right next to Vantaa, the suburb that houses the Helsinki airport and the 2nd oldest Ikea in Finland. We opened the dropdown and all the other options were also in the Helsinki area. "I guess it thinks all the Smartposts in the country are in Helsinki," I said. But since I had ordered to the private automat successfully twice and both times the pickup point field had indicated the irrelevant nearby store, we just shrugged and submitted the order.

And then I failed to open and actually read through the information in the confirmation mail and the shipment message - I just got the popup notifications on my phone and read the subject lines out from the notification bubbles - "Oh, my PC parts shipped now!"

So four business days later I got two text messages from PostNord that my package was available for the next 2 weeks at this corner store in Heikinlaakso and it was a signed delivery, government-issued ID required, thanks! (I've never before gotten a signed delivery without paying extra for it??? PostNord is weirdly cheap about that for some reason and I definitely didn't select it, nor did it say anything about it on the order page!) Oops: PostNord is a private delivery company, like DHL or UPS, that operates only in the Nordic region. They don't use the Finnish postal service's sorting machines at all, obviously - they get the packages directly from the store and deliver them to their contracted pickup points. They have one at the same corner shop that has the nearest public Smartpost automat, which was why it was initially the suggested location when I selected pickup point delivery. There's two other pickup point delivery carriers operating in Finland, Matkahuolto (they travel in the cargo portion of long-distance busses) and MyPack (used by Zalando), so I should have remembered, but I forgot that "pickup point" could mean any of these. However, I've never encountered a checkout process that didn't proudly and explicitly display the logo of whichever of these services you're purchasing, because they're well-known and trusted services.

I politely emailed their customer service, and I needed like four paragraphs to explain how I had gotten confused because nobody who didn't already know would believe that private Smartpost automats work the way they do. She replied that they never use Smartpost and have no contract with them at all, and that their only pickup point carrier is PostNord, and that she would check with PostNord to see if they could redirect the package for me.

(I was quite baffled about the green checkmark and the "city:Smartpost" incident at first, but I've concluded that the postal service database must be served to all webstores, regardless of whether they use Smartpost, perhaps to check that the addresses are valid for delivery or to autofill missing zipcodes. There's definitely no reason for "Smartpost" to be in the database that is sent out externally to clients who don't use Smartpost, but that's the postal service's fault, not the shop's.)

Then the next day she sent another message that, unfortunately, the package had already been delivered and locked up in Heikinlaakso, and they didn't have the ability to redirect it after that point. Now only I with my government ID or someone else with an ID and a signed slip from me allowing them to pick the stuff up on my behalf would do. She apologized for the inconvenience and said that the stuff would be automatically returned to them in 2 weeks' time if nobody picked it up, and at that point they would refund the purchase and I could place a new order for the same components.

We don't have any friends or family living in Helsinki rn - at least, not ones close enough that we have their phone numbers or email addresses - so we briefly considered asking Wax's brother if he knew someone there whom we could pay to get the packages and then mail them to us. But as we looked into the possibility, the amount of hassle for them in going out to Heikinlaakso to do this, plus the fact that we'd have to fax (?) the signature to enable this stranger to do it, started seeming just as expensive as going there ourselves.

So ultimately, since Wax had the day off, we ended up calling her mom and asking if she and/or her car were free. We made a day of it - 2½ hours in the car each way, left the car in Tikkurila (Dickursby), took the train to downtown Helsinki and had lunch, and then her mom went to visit her 90-year-old aunt in a nursing home while Wax took me to the Kiasma museum of modern art (which I've been wanting to see since forever - it's famous!!! - but this was my first visit). It was a nice day. We especially enjoyed the animatronic muppets in The Aalto Natives by Nathaniel Mellors & Erkka Nissinen and we were introduced to the beautiful tapestries and pottery of Brit Grayson Perry. We still intend to look up some more interviews and documentaries with him on Youtube.

The computer assembly went pretty smoothly after that - we even had spare sata cables - except that I forgot to attach the secondary power supply cable the first time and had to take the case back off and remove the power source to reach the port. Minor hiccups, really. Gold stars to the people in customer service who corresponded with me, and I just hope my emails were more entertaining than exhausting.

I thought that for once a distro upgrade had gone entirely seamlessly and I was settling in nicely to Ubuntu 18.04... until I discovered...

Ubuntu 18.04 cannot discover samba hosts.

"@Morbius1: Bionic Beaver can not discover samba hosts - netbios.

[...]Ubuntu 18.04 contains version 4.7.4 of the samba client libraries which brings with it a lot of improvements but it changes one parameter that will cause this forum nothing but grief. It changes the upper default smb dialect that the samba client uses to SMBv3.11 from the earlier default of NT1 (Samba speak for SMBv1).

Conceptually it should not make any difference to host browsing but what that does is disable host browsing (netbios host discovery). If you go to Files>Other Locations>Windows Network this will be the result:smb3-bug.png

The only way out of this is to edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and override the default by adding a line in the [global] section setting it back to the old default[...]."

It can still connect to them, if you know their names, but it can't see them, so you have to either, in the words of the dude above, edit the configuration file back to an old protocol or "connect to it explicitly by that name .. as in ... smb://hostname or use Connect to Server in Nautilus."

The problem only appears when connecting to Windows boxes or older versions of Ubuntu: if all the machines on the LAN were running 18.04 it would work seamlessly, I hear. (

waxjism hasn't got around to upgrading, and our media server is also still on 16.04.) (And I did the fix, but having to manually edit conf files before you can see your file shares no longer qualifies as 'seamless', obviously.)

Unlike the majority of the Ubuntu user population, I preferred the Gnome 3 desktop from the beginning. I'm really attached to it and have gone through a bunch of different distros trying to find one that works correctly in all the ways I care about. I couldn't get everything I needed to work with Debian.

Now

waxjism is running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and I'm running Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 LTS, and the differences are more apparent:

+ Ubuntu Gnome:

Panel indicators show up in a single integrated menu for the most part in Gnome.

The Calendar widget displays events from my Google calendar.

There's a new, native calendar app that does the same, and is more convenient than the web interface or the previous Linux apps. (The new native world clock/clock/timer is useful too, if a bit rough around the edges, and there's a new to-do app which could display google tasks and provide an indicator applet, but is neat.)

The top panel is easily themed with CSS and a variety of extensions let you add applications and places menus and a number of useful toggles and indicators. You can't do anything about it in Unity but adjust the opacity, where you also can't do much about how hideously ugly and unthemeable the application launcher has always been and remains.

The application menus display seamlessly in the top panel and native gnome programs integrate title and menubar. The corresponding function under Unity looks stupid and takes extra screen real estate.

Gedit is my favorite editor and it's streamlined but just as functional now, which I love (an older version is packaged with Ubuntu Unity).

waxjism is having some kind of driver issue with Unity that makes some flash videos, depending on what the site is running (eg HBO Nordic and Viaplay - so: hockey - but not Netflix), crash the entire computer so it suddenly and without warning shuts down. I had this for a while about a year ago under Gnome 3 on Debian, but apparently not anymore. Wouldn't want to switch and suddenly have this problem start back up again, though.

+ Ubuntu Unity:

The standard Ubuntu & Gnome file manager - Nautilus - packaged in Ubuntu Gnome is so slow it's basically unusable. A lot of changes have happened under the hood with the new versions of Nautilus apparently? Whatever, it doesn't matter how much better it would work if it never finishes doing it. Alternative file manager Nemo, forked by and for Linux Mint, mostly works in Ubuntu Gnome, but for example, it doesn't handle symlinks to folders correctly under Ubuntu Gnome (a functionality that's been perfectly fine in every Linux I've tried since like 2007), it set up Samba but not without giving me some trouble, and it doesn't look right because it's designed for another distro that has its own themes (it works flawlessly in Mint, as far as I've ever noticed). - Meanwhile Nautilus is fine under Unity, although complaints about functionality that's been removed are still germane.

The greeter/login/lockscreen (LightDM) is better in Unity.

The quicklists, which add extra indicators and right click functionalities to running apps in the launcher under Unity, can be legitimately useful. There's nothing like that in the Gnome shell dock.

Terminal refuses to remember my preference to not display the menu bar under Ubuntu Gnome, another thing I've never had a problem with before.

OK whenever an electrician comes & they see our media server (which is just a spare computer running Kubuntu that is hooked up to our LAN and houses backups of our files and old media files that we leave on all the time), which means they see a spare computer tower humming in the corner hooked up to a mouse, keyboard and LCD monitor all stored on the floor in the corner behind the armchair...

... they always make a really similar reaction face/noise, which, because they are Finnish salts of the earth, is very "Jaha!"-based.

And I always feel this strong urge to EXPLAIN that we're not weirdos who have a mysterious HIDDEN FLOOR COMPUTER, it's not like THAT, it's our MEDIA SERVER and it's only in this room so the network cables don't have to cross the floor! -- but anything I can think of to say I can only imagine making their bemusement worse. So instead I just shove it out of the way without saying anything - still humming away, monitor still off, mouse and keyboard still balanced on top of a big Tupperware literally overflowing with about 30' of extension cord.

I wonder if these guys HAVE the concept of media server, and are actually just thinking "Lol these noobs don't even have a wireless card for their media server?" or if later they remember and are like "Oh you'll never guess what was in front of the electrical box in one of those apartments today."

Yesterday my wireless keyboard and mouse stopped working and I got them started again by vigorous jiggling (of the USB wireless receiver: my current theory is that some tea spilled on the top of the computer case dripped down onto it) but in the process I got distracted cleaning the fuzz from the keyboard with a card between the keys.

Only then when they started working again the keyboard was... on and off. It stopped and then started about 6 times last night and today. Also the green battery power LED on the keyboard which had gone out months ago came back and then went away... about three times.

It probably needs replacing :(. It's already lasted a lot longer than the cheap ones I was buying before it, but it's still a drag that the wireless kind is like 4-5x the cost. And that I apparently accidentally broke it (by poking it between the keys I guess?!).

We've been having trouble with the networked printer, so I put the laptop next to the printer and plugged it directly in to print.

Then I booted Windows...

...and a few minutes later at 4:30 my phone alarm went off with a check email reminder...

and 10 minutes after that it was 4:40 and Windows was still thinking. Chrome was blank, informing me that Gmail failed to load on the first try, and notification bubbles were informing me that the antivirus software had updated itself, that Windows had updated itself, and that to complete further 'critical' updates it wanted to restart. I reloaded Gmail, went to Google Drive, grabbed the top document in the list and clicked 'print'.

At 4:43, it still hadn't printed.

In contrast, when I wake up in the morning I hit the power button on my computer, go in the kitchen and put the kettle on and go to the bathroom, then pour the water in the teapot and put it by my computer to brew. In the time it takes the kettle to boil my computer has produced its login screen. I sign in and go back to the kitchen to make a bowl of oatmeal, and when I return in under 2 minutes, my desktop is all loaded and glowing peacefully. I click on Twitter and Firefox and they both open immediately, the latter with all 15ish of my saved tabs ready and waiting.

If I were using the Windows 7 laptop for my primary computer, I could hit the power button first thing and still not be past the "Welcome" screen when I got back with my oatmeal. And once I logged in, I'd have time to eat the whole bowl before I got to see my tabs.

Last time I had to upgrade my mom's operating system,

waxjism and I talked her through the installation disc/BIOS and other parts before she could install a remote control app via Skype, using her tablet to see the screen. But this involved the tablet trembling a lot and us saying "Left, no, other left, up, up, what does it say under that?"

I tried to do a package upgrade instead of a clean install so we wouldn't have to do that this time, but it didn't work (there's a problem with the Nvidia drivers, but it might not have been the only problem). So I have had to assume remote control of my dad's elderly Frankencomputer which is running Windows 7 (a computer that old should NEVER be running Windows 7 *shudder*, but it's a work computer and connects to their internal network, so it has to be) in order to create a bootable USB stick. Which I've done 2.5x now, the first attempt having failed.

This means we've attempted to boot from USB, and navigated the boot menu, several times, and it's going a lot more smoothly now that my mom has a smartphone. She takes a couple of snapshots of the screen and sends them to me with WhatsApp and then I can tell her what to do.

And Team Viewer is still really great. Highly recommended for long-distance troubleshooting and other within-operating-system technical support.

I thought I might try something Debian-based, instead of Ubuntu-based, so I downloaded an iso of Crunchbang. The livecd looked workable, but then it wouldn't install. I mean, I haven't given up on it yet, but if it consistently says it can't install Grub I am going to have to.

Anyone else have extra trouble with Debian systems?

I know almost nothing about Grub. Grub is complicated and the task of learning more about it looks pretty intimidating from here.

Every now and then I think, "Surely all the major Ubuntu-based distributions will have a default music player stable enough to not constantly crash by now, right? I mean, the overall user experience in all the main flavors is so smooth and mostly crash-free in other areas, so maybe I can switch away from Quod Libet now, since everyone is always so slow to include widget and menu integration for it and it lacks a good compact display mode. Some of the other ones have really sweet-looking widgets and stuff."

So then I try one.

And okay, to be fair, Amarok under the newest KDE is no longer crashing constantly on my system, but the browser's complete lack of multi-pane sorting and the inconvenient playlist management was enough to drive me away anyway.

But Rhythmbox! STILL crashing more than once per day... on the system it came pre-installed in!

I've been using Quod Libet for at least 4 years under Unity, Gnome Shell, KDE, Xfce, and LXDE, and it's never crashed or sucked up all the memory.

Ugh.

My mom is a 56-year-old public school art teacher. She has numerous volunteer commitments and home projects, as well as a young lab-mix dog (and two cats!). She has her own computer at home (not shared with anyone except occasional houseguests) for casual use and basic tasks:

scanner and digital camera management with online Picasa integration

checking her Gmail once a month or so, without, however, ever clearing her inbox

Appearing on Twitter to reblog 2-4 social justice links and then leave again every few weeks

Occasional word processing, like simple letters

Reading my blog and my photoblog

Occasionally watching Youtube videos, at my or my sister's instigation

Frequent transfer of image and document files via USB to/from Windows computers she is required to use at work

So, unlike us, she doesn't need:

Any but the most basic video and music playback, for very infrequent use (e.g. no codecs or converters needed)

Gimp or any other drawing/image manipulation (although they are default components of modern Mint)

Twitter, chat, BitTorrent, or email clients

Google calendar integration or Samba filesharing

Several years ago I built her a simple system and installed Linux Mint on it, which I judged the most friendly Linux OS for her needs. Mint 10, based on Ubuntu Jaunty, was a long-term support release supported until April 2012. When I set up the system for her, I created a separate partition for her files and set it to auto-mount on system boot, creating a link. I explained that she should save her personal files that she wanted to keep on it so that they could be kept separate from the OS files for upgrading.

Well, I've been trying to encourage her to upgrade with increasing urgency for a year and a half now, but it didn't happen until yesterday, week 2 of her having her new tablet at home so we could use it for skyping through the process. We also installed Team Viewer, a desktop sharing program, and Wax (because I couldn't install it as quickly on my newer system) used it to create the install disk.

But when we got Team Viewer up, we found her desktop covered with files and folders. Wax dug into the computer and found out that:

The data partition I set up was empty and unused

All the files had been saved to her home directory and many to her desktop, with no organization. Folders with names like "New hair March 2012" (containing 3 files) were mixed with empty folders and folders like "architecture" and "[music album]".

At some point someone had installed Windows on the computer. She did not know about this, or didn't remember, and had no idea who could have done it. The partition was still there.

Fortunately I had made her home 20 GB, because she'd used 17 of it (contrast this to the empty data partition's 400 GB).

Ultimately, Wax simply preserved the home partition untouched, formatted the 400 GB partition, and then, after install, copied the old folders to the larger partition, providing numerous links to them from the desktop and file manager.

She can't touch-type and is confused by right-click menus, but she isn't a novice at computers: my parents have owned a computer since they were in college, first a Commodore 64 and later a Windows 3.0 machine. They used a dot-matrix printer for years and my mom was competent at DOS and an expert at the pre-desktop-OS word processor WordStar, which she used while working as a managing editor in a scientific journal for several years when I was a kid. Unfortunately, she's got a distractable personality and finds it difficult to follow computer-related directions exactly, so Team Viewer was a real life saver here. Trying to direct her what to do over Skype was difficult. Fortunately being yelled at didn't make her mad.

All in all, via Team Viewer on both systems and verbally on Skype in between, Wax and I were occupied ~ 5 hours last night with this. This system set up involved several restarts after boot, all but the first few of which Wax controlled via Team Viewer. But when I got up at noon (4 am their time), there were messages waiting for me from both parents via email, as well as by Twitter and Facebook, that my mom's computer "won't boot Linux". Apparently she "was editing" (what?) when it froze and she restarted via the power button, after which it they claim it froze in a black screen and wouldn't boot. I suspect it was just checking the disks, which can be time-consuming and modern Ubuntu-based systems use quiet boot by default, which means you can't see any sign that it's doing things. That can cause anxiety. But by then they'd gone to bed, so now I have another tech support session to look forward to. Hopefully it won't involve reinstalling.

Although looking at it in retrospect, given how little mom requires of her system, I think perhaps we should have gone with an Xfce desktop. It's more lightweight and I think more easily tweakable, and it's not like she needs widgets, applets, web apps, or any of the other things that make me reluctant to use the lightweight desktops. My personal biggest quibbles in Xfce are things like lack of built-in Samba support (unnecessary, in her case) and fewer file browser features (but she isn't aware of those anyway). On the other hand, generally you're more on your own if you have a problem in a lightweight desktop. The main edition of Mint has the most built-in support and direction, I think.

A counterweight to the trouble I went to in order to get my computer working again was that at the same time I checked out Firefox more thoroughly and for the first time in years I'm no longer dependent on Opera!

I've used Firefox for various periods of my life, but eventually I've always gone back to Opera. Opera is faster and uses less system resources, and round about 2005, the first time I got fed up and moved back to it, it was because Firefox was consuming all the memory and not just crashing a lot, but also causing X to crash, requiring me to logout and back in. Other reasons for reverse pilgrimage, or failed attempts to use Firefox, have included:

Opera's mouse gestures, the original reason, but a Firefox add-on duplicated that years ago.

At one time it was impossible to keep my Firefox bookmarks in a side pane and edit them easily via dragging and dropping. This is now accomplished by the All-in-One Sidebar extension, which also allows downloads, history, and add-ons to be managed from the side pane, much like in Opera.

Opera's customizeable Speed Dial is better than the Chrome and FF default behaviors. You can manually enter the addresses of the bookmarks you want to show there. The last time I tried to go back to Firefox - because several sites I needed to use frequently wouldn't work in Opera - this was the stumbling block. A few years ago there were a couple of Firefox add-ons for this functionality but none of them would work correctly for me. Constant crashing, very slow loading times, etc. But the add-on New Tab Plus suffers from none of those problems.

Opera's tab groups are actually still more convenient than Firefox's tab stacks, but it's not the end of the world. I don't mind the group view page, but I would like to be able to view each group as a stack the size of one tab in my tab bar, to allow switching between groups via the tab bar. In opera you can also mouseover a tab bundle and get a preview pane showing thumbnails and titles of every tab in the group. You can then click on the tumbnail to open that tab even if it's not the top one in the stack. It's not unlikely that a Firefox add-on duplicates this functionality but I haven't found it yet.

Opera Dragonfly was way more useful than the Firefox alternatives for some time. It's most useful when saving images as it allows you to highlight CSS elements and objects by hovering and click on them to view their selectors in the code pane. That made it quite simple to find the address to the image, usually. It was also quite nice for trying to do CSS yourself of course. However, I was pleased to find that the clickable element selection is now available in Firefox too.

FF still doesn't have its own open closed tabs button, but the Undo Closed Tabs Button add-on takes care of that. Tumblr savior also works more easily in Firefox.

Unfortunately, the one thing I couldn't figure out how to replace are Opera's view buttons, 'viewer/author style' (disables the style sheet) and 'fit page to width'. You can disable the stylesheet in Firefox but I don't know of a toolbar button that will do it with one click; and I wasn't able to figure out how to duplicate Fit Page to Width, which is really, really useful. I found an add-on that sounded like it might do some of the same stuff, but it was part of a broader zoom control widget and, unfortunately, it broke NoSquint. I needed NoSquint.

There's also Extended Statusbar, which gives more information during page loading, like Opera's does. I also like Tile Tabs, which will automatically resize several tabs within the window for you, side by side or in other configurations. Share This didn't work for some reason, but I don't use it that often anymore anyway, since most of the places I might want it now have their own Tweet This buttons.

Anyone else got any add-ons or user script recs?

The great thing about Linux is that you can pick and choose and customize anything you want to, as long as you're willing to work at it. The problem is, sometimes the cost-benefit analysis doesn't work out once you know enough to understand how much work would be required. Another problem is that once you get attached to (and adapted to) a feature, it's sometimes a really big deal when it's taken away.

This has led, at least for me, to a kind of Goldilocks experience in the world of Linux, trying out different desktops, giving them time to start to sink in, and each time there's something wrong - sometimes an actual bug, sometimes just a feature from another desktop environment that I can't duplicate.

When Gnome 3 was first introduced I was fascinated by a lot of things about it. There were a lot of things that I liked, but at the end of the 11.04 cycle my install was crashing way too frequently, even after a clean install, so I decided to give Unity another go as the blogs were saying it had become much more stable since Natty, when Compiz was essentially non-functional on my machine.

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. It was still ugly, the top bar was still black, but it was possible to render the top panel transparent and the launcher now respected the system icon theme, which, yes, was non-negotiable for me. As far as I remember, it contained no major bugs, but I wanted to upgrade when Quantal came out because the new features sounded cool.

And then the problems began.

Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzel: VLC was broken by an update shortly after install and it never worked again. The bug was reported at various spots online, so it was a common one, but it was never fixed. I tried several other media players and all were way less convient for screencapping. I got tired of it and had been increasingly fed up with Ubuntu's ongoing campaign to remove features from the install in order to 'streamline' everything so it can be identical to the eventual user experience on the future phone OS.

At this point 13.04 was not yet out, so to get a working VLC I had to go backwards. I installed Kubuntu 12.04. I was happy with the new KDE for the most part, but when I installed Caffeine - a popular applet that automatically keeps the monitor from going to sleep whenever a media player is open or a flash video is playing - it failed to work. It installed all right; it just wouldn't launch. I crawled all over the internet, but there was no replacement app for KDE. Various users more leet than me had put various hacks in place to replace Caffeine, but this was a disappointing lack.

I upgraded to Kubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail thinking it might fix that problem, but it didn't. I was quite happy with KDE otherwise - its customizability suited what I wanted almost exactly.¹ There's also an icon-only task manager - another of my OS requirements - similar to Dockbar X that can be installed to the main panel straight from the repositories. The functionality, though, is less robust than in Dockbar X, Unity launcher, or Cairo/AWN.

The main problem with 13.04, though, was Peer Guardian Linux. It had started crashing every time I booted the computer, requiring a manual restart. This only took thirty seconds or so, but it was quite irritating, especially since Google seemed to indicate it was a years-old bug that had been gotten rid of several cycles ago. I even reinstalled the same OS from scratch just in case, but the problem remained.

So I downloaded an image of PCLinuxOS on a whim, on the basis of a really positive review. Now, the reviewer was right, it DID work right out of the box. The problem was that I had completely failed to notice in my airheaded rush that it was not an Ubuntu-based system, and when I decided to install it to a smaller partition to play around with in the long-term, I didn't know that that would be a problem. Not knowing what the hell I was doing, or that there was anything I needed to check out first, I accidentally destroyed my previous grub entries in the install process and was unable to boot to my previous KDE install. I wasn't even able to back up my bookmarks and I wasn't able to recover them from the other OS or the liveCD I then tried. My need to have my bookmarks back was growing urgent and I didn't have the time to teach myself to install Opera manually in PCLinuxOS just to get at them, but the native format can't be read by other browsers. I tried to install Opera, then open it for the purpose of exporting the files, on the liveCD, but that didn't work either, so I had to install a new OS to the harddrive anyway to get my bookmarks. Therefore I decided to make it one that did not so far as I know suffer from any major problems, hence my choosing Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail.

I did that on... Tuesday I think. Yesterday afternoon I finally had (almost) everything set up to my liking.

By default Nautilus, the filebrowser, has lost tons of functionality. Not only is the split pane button missing, a pretty trivial feature but one I use a lot, several way more important things are missing, like ANY ACCESS WHATSOEVER TO THE TOOLBAR OR MENU ITEMS, or the ability to in any way alter the display in the sidebar. Like, I couldn't bookmark my own folders. There's a fix for that, though. I installed a patch found on Webupd8. ( There were a bunch of other things I did and some of them are not all a fog... )

One of our Finnish teachers uses IE. And she's the more computer-skilled of them. (Neither one of them can remember how to scale up text size, either on webpages or in Word. Literally every time somebody in our class asks someone to enlarge text, whoever is teaching has to be told how to do it. Several times.)

Anyway, so the teacher who hates computers was trying to show us how to walk from the bus stop to the public ice rink, and she was in Google maps dragging the little point of view figure who opens street view. She kept dragging the little person in different directions, quite far away from the destination, and zooming in and out in map view without any appreciable effect, for like five minutes. Various people were shouting out theories for why it wouldn't work, and suggestions like restart the computer, or the browser, or maybe the mouse is broken, when suddenly and apparently miraculously a photo of the ice rink appeared!

"OH!" gasped the teacher. "You have to DOUBLE-click!"

(I teared up with laughter and had trouble gasping, "All that time you weren't double-clicking?")

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Cimorene

July 2025

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Page Summary

Night Mode: phones, websites, (my blog)
google's artificial intelligence efforts in chrome on mobile
an exceedingly aesthetic duck, cheese, barbed wiring, cleaning advice is surprisingly hilarious
2018 in review
the hilaribble cyberpunk dystopia rabbithole I accidentally lost half of yesterday in
new beginnings stock-taking & introduction + what i'm watching/reading/thinking/caring about
upgrading the media server
I sent my PC components to somebody else's little corner grocery in Heikinlaakso
"bionic beaver" is a great distro name though.
Computer stuff: Linux: Ubuntu vs Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 LTS
Oh that? That's just our perfectly normal secret floor computer
Alas, wireless keyboard
I used the computer closest to the printer for convenience, forgetting that it boots like molasses.
Long-distance tech support
Venturing out of the Ubuntu kiddie pool
a very specific ubuntu-based linux music player rant
Making a Computer Setup for Parents and other Computer Dependents
No longer dependent on Opera
Wandering in the user-friendly linux OS desert
Honestly, she's way worse than my mom and Wax's put together. Subtracted?

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multi-fannish American queer cat & bunny owner in Finland

Entries tagged with tech: computers

Night Mode: phones, websites, (my blog)

google's artificial intelligence efforts in chrome on mobile

an exceedingly aesthetic duck, cheese, barbed wiring, cleaning advice is surprisingly hilarious

2018 in review

the hilaribble cyberpunk dystopia rabbithole I accidentally lost half of yesterday in

new beginnings stock-taking & introduction + what i'm watching/reading/thinking/caring about

upgrading the media server

I sent my PC components to somebody else's little corner grocery in Heikinlaakso

"bionic beaver" is a great distro name though.

Computer stuff: Linux: Ubuntu vs Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 LTS

Oh that? That's just our perfectly normal secret floor computer

Alas, wireless keyboard

I used the computer closest to the printer for convenience, forgetting that it boots like molasses.

Long-distance tech support

Venturing out of the Ubuntu kiddie pool

a very specific ubuntu-based linux music player rant

Making a Computer Setup for Parents and other Computer Dependents

No longer dependent on Opera

Wandering in the user-friendly linux OS desert

Honestly, she's way worse than my mom and Wax's put together. Subtracted?