No, the Ad Blocker Stays On

Web sites whose operators think that my use of an adblocker is in any way negotiable are absolutely adorable. (In case you're unsure, the use of "adorable" is extreme sarcasm.) It's not.

Hassle me too much, by which I mean "at all", and guess what? If getting very heavy handed with element blocking won't do it...see ya!

There's a special place in Hell for web pages with automatic video playback, and doubly so when the video starts following you down the page. Just don't ever. (I bring this up because on my Groanbooks, Manifest v3 killed the add-on I was using to put a stop to the automatic playback.)

The Scourge of "Got It" Buttons

 Any time a programmer or UI designer thinks they'll put in a dialog box with a button that says "got it", an enormous mallet should emerge from the top of their monitor and smite them.

If you're not a student driver, or don't have one in your family (and probably even if they aren't actually driving at the moment)...take that sticker off of your vehicle.

Finding Misleading Advertising

If you've looked at the title of this blog entry and said to yourself something like "why would anyone ever want to do that?" ... this isn't the blog entry for you. Rather than subjecting yourself to something you aren't interested in and then feeling terribly compelled to tell me all about it...do me a favor and just don't. Go find something else that's more in line with your interests.

Still here?

It's summer time here in the northern hemisphere and the Seedy Advertisers of the Web(tm) are out in full force with wireless cameras in case someone steals your stuff, portable "air conditioners" to help you keep cool and "power misers" if you need to run your central air conditioning anyway and happen to find yourself blindsided by your next utility bill. I would hope that everyone reading this realizes all of these products are of dubious repute to varying degrees. (In case you're unaware: the little cameras are junk, those portable "air conditioners" are nothing of the sort and the power misers are the worst offenders, being nothing less than a complete scam. Any other products you'll see being advertised in this way are also dubious. If you must buy any of them, at least try to find out what the actual product is, and buy it from somewhere more reputable so you don't overpay.)

In addition to their dubious utility, these products all have one thing in common: they're all advertised with breathless ad copy that goes on for pages and pages. (Some might say it's the kind of thing I'd write, but I have standards.) I've wasted some time reading the sensational garbage on these pages, and soon noticed that just about all of them have the following phrase in common:

"Don’t get stuck with some ancient prototype!"

I don't know if these advertisers are all part of the same organization or if they have just ripped that line off from one another to the point where the true author has been lost to time. (If you really want to know, I'd guess it's the latter.) Intended to induce a sense of urgency, the real meaning here is "don't even think -- just buy this product at a grossly inflated price from us or someone we have an affiliation with".

I decided for no very good reason at all to run this phrase through a web search. I was not disappointed at all by the results. Page after page of scammy "advertorials", often with highly questionable grammar, abound for all manner of products that are likely subpar at best and unlikely to work for the claimed purpose at all.

Extra reading: out of all the products mentioned in this posting, the only one that could actually work is the portable "air conditioner". However, it's nothing of the sort. It's little more than an evaporative cooler, often also known as a "swamp cooler". These are used to great effect in parts of the world where humidity is low and the temperature high. In those places, the evaporative action of the water as air is moved over it really does produce a cooling effect. For a large system, this effect can be substantial. If you live in a place where it is both of hot and humid, no evaporative cooler can help you. You'll just be adding humidity to the air and making the problem worse.

With regard to "power misers", while it is true that highly inductive (or capacitive) loads can distort the AC waveform, residential utility customers are not assessed a fee for doing so and your electric meter's accuracy is not impacted by this taking place. Nor is your electrical utility "benefiting" in any way from this. Some commercial and industrial utility customers may be assessed a fee for operating low power factor loads and causing this distortion, though many install large capacitor or inductor banks to offset the source of the distortion.

Even if you did need to worry about this taking place, a small capacitor placed across the hot and neutral lines feeding an outlet in your home is not going to accomplish anything. Many of these devices are nothing more than a small LED fed by a circuit known as a capacitive dropper. Ironically, this means that they might actually introduce the very distortion they claim to prevent. Safety is another concern: the power line is a nasty place and these devices are unlikely to have been vetted by any reputable electrical safety agency.

Will Youtube ever fix this bug?

For quite some time now, I've noticed that the user profile icons and video thumbnails eventually get mixed up in Youtube studio.

As with so many other Youtube bugs, I don't hold out much hope that it'll ever be fixed. At least it seems to be mostly cosmetic. (You'll also notice that it's not reliably broken. One of the video thumbnails in the screen capture is correct, while the other isn't.)

How many times does one have to turn a setting off before it stays off?

Somewhere in recent history, Google added autocorrect to ChromeOS devices. Like most annoying software features, they defaulted it to on because as we all know, nobody would ever think to go looking for a feature and turn it on if they wanted that capability to be active.

I, of course, don't care in the slightest for software that thinks it knows better than I. So, as soon as I figured out where the toggle was, I turned it off.

Since that time, it has randomly come back on again after some ChromeOS updates.

Of course, he who admits to running beta software probably gets exactly what he deserves.

I think one of the dictums of good software development should be that even when you add new features to a program, the user's preferences are sacrosanct. That should be true even when some or all of them are the defaults. Don't screw with them when someone upgrades, even if you think your new feature is the best thing ever. Let the user determine that for themselves -- if and when they want to!

Welcome To The Unexpected Blog

Hello everyone...

Way back in 2017 I did something I never thought I'd do. I joined Twitter. I couldn't tell you why I decided to do so then, if I ever had a reason any better than "it seemed like a good idea at the time". I don't think that I did.

So many things seem like good ideas at the time. In truth, though, I did enjoy my tenure there.

Then it changed hands. A while later it changed to a new name. Along the way, its new owner seemed content to drive Twitter right into the ground by doing many stupid, rude, offensive, and just plain dumb things. Although it's been a while since what used to be Twitter has been in the news for anything like that, this is a change I've been planning to make for a while. Given the [increasingly] unhinged behavior of Twitter's new owner, I haven't wanted anything to do with the site for a while now.

The question, of course, is what comes next.

That was much harder to answer.

I don't really understand Mastodon. I don't really want to understand it. When I get home from work, after having done IT related stuff all day long, the last thing I want to do is even more of it. You may say that coming to understand Mastodon doesn't really qualify as "IT stuff". If so, we have a difference of opinion. It's close enough.

Years ago, I set up a self-hosted Wordpress-based blog that was never made public. (Gee, I hope I won't get in trouble for mentioning a competing blogging system here!) This actually worked pretty well, but I took it down because Wordpress has an awful security track record and I just didn't need or want to complicate my life in that way.

I thought a hosted Wordpress site would be the way to go, and so I dutifully set one up a few months ago through its developer, Automattic. (Actually, as I often do, I thought about it from time to time for several months if not a year or more before I did anything.) I had no problem with the idea of setting up a paid account to gain added features and capacity.

This was a disaster.

When I hosted it myself as a test all those years ago, Wordpress was easy to set up and use. I had it running in, oh, about thirty minutes or so. Most of that was simply getting the files in place on my server. Things have apparently gotten worse in the years that have followed. Wordpress in its hosted form struck me as needlessly opaque, difficult to use and far less comprehensible than it should have been. Even though I was paying for an upgraded account, I couldn't use any of the various extensions, including those that might keep spammers out..

(We'll see if that's a problem here. I hope it isn't.)

Gaining access to those extensions would have required paying a ridiculous amount of money. Indeed, within minutes of that blog having gone live, it was already suffering from comment spam. (It's here I will admit that I probably should have researched other hosting companies offering Wordpress. Perhaps they would have been more competitive.)

It doesn't really matter, though. What really killed it was the abysmal performance of their blog posting system. Typing up a post on a low end Chromebook was painful. Each character took an age to appear. As someone who can type steady-state around 70 WPM and up to 100 or more WPM if I'm really cranking along, this was an intolerable state of affairs. Not having the feedback of seeing typed letters appear immediately was really messing with me.

So I canned that whole experiment, deleted that blog, got a refund of the money paid and pondered what might be next. A couple of months later, here I am. Google's Blogger service seems to work very well. No doubt there are things I will have to learn about using and maintaining it. Those will come with time.

Those of you who have watched my Youtube videos over the years will know that brevity isn't my strong suit. It never has been. Twitter basically forced my hand in that regard, since you can't type the Great American Novel in a single tweet. Posts here are likely to be longer, maybe even ridiculously so.

I welcome comments, even those with dissenting viewpoints from my own. I'm pretty easygoing and so the ground rules are simple: don't spam, don't talk politics (nor other "hot button" subjects) and BE NICE. I won't tolerate harassment of myself or others and comments are subject to moderation for any reason or no reason at all.