It's been nearly two years since I have posted anything here. I don't really have anything exciting to share with you today. That's OK. I don't think there are very many (if any!) people reading this.
If by some chance you are a person who is reading this, maybe you'd care to leave a comment? Suggest something that I ought to write about?
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.)
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'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.
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.)
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!
