Software: On & Off the Web

[Laurie Stearn]

No better way to kick this off with Ublock Origin mentioned here, of immediate interest is how it handles Microsoft Solitaire ads. Not much success in playing the challenges with various blocking techniques as discussed over at AutoHotKey, perhaps this breaks new ground?

[Bob Marley]

Excellent. This topic will be handy!

Ublock Origin is mostly for web browsers but it does have things like hosts files that may be handy. 🙂

As we now have this topic, here are some good software lists for finding something specific:

https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications

Very handy!

[Laurie Stearn]

Indeed, awesome actually! 🙂
Something going on with the Facebook account over here – probably hack of the email address. It isn’t easy to determine via Google what methods are exactly constituent to Facebook security, no doubt they have hived it off to a lo-cost OEM. One capable of capturing hack events very much on statistical inference.
(A fun alternative could be a brightly themed, chatty, free-for-all open source Github project: FakeSec, with the Issues tab replaced with Tissues, and the Security tab replaced with Jokes & Humour. Might turn a few eyebrows! 😛 )

[Laurie Stearn]

Use Clipgrab for youtube, which has undergone some criticism in the past – for me it is not problematic, mind you the ~100 mb d/l size does not account for relatively simple and uncluttered user interface. Clipgrab relies on this yt-dlp, an enormous project with no other purpose but to download stuff from youtube.
Signed up with PlayOK around 4 or 5 years ago, where I built up passable stats and rep, and after a recent enquiry about account accessibility, the reply was:

Yes, this is a normal practice to remove unused accounts
We are not able to restore accounts that were auto-deleted

A better way for a site like that to avoid excessive user hair pulling, is to automate emails to recipients deemed as inactive after a time, requesting them to sign in if their desire is to hold on to the account.

[Bob Marley]

Sorry, been rather distracted lately working on the theme so I’ve been a bit slow

Yuck and yuck!

😛

Yeah, it’d be nice to get an automatic message when getting close to the inactivity limit but few sites do that in my experience. Really not sure why. There are times when you sign up for a site but stop visiting for a few years before deciding to take it up again. Would be nice to be able to keep the account active if you wish.

In the past, I’ve used Down Them all to grab videos for offline viewing but that was years ago and only supported on Firefox at the time. Was pretty handy as my connection would crap out regularly and I had trouble watching videos from sites like YouTube. Had a few custom filters set up to also grab wallpaper images without having to download each one manually. Was quite useful!

[Bob Marley]

Oh! Here are some helpful Windows bits:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

[Laurie Stearn]

Ah yes, thanks, do have an account with the old SysInternals, but what happened to the old forums?

[Bob Marley]

Always sad when they just do away with the content instead of archiving it or migrating it 🙁

A few years back, I found a copy of The 7th Guest in a box of discs that came from my dad’s place. It wasn’t something I ever got and he never got into games so I honestly have no idea where they came from. They don’t even appear to have been taken out of the disc sleeves.

[Laurie Stearn]

Yes, from Virgin Interactive (Prince of Persia, Earthworm Jim, Resident Evil, Flight Unlimited)!
Played it back then, it was pretty good. Now, there’s the re-issue, just extract the files into a directory like C:\Guest and run. If that doesn’t work, try it from Old Games, for extra options try it with an MS-DOS conf file and run it through PrgLnch.

[Bob Marley]

Oh, it’s for DOS then? Definitely won’t be playing it on the laptop, then. Even YouTube videos cause it to rev up! 😛 I’d also need to get an external disc drive. I really miss computers having disc drives built in. Makes it very hard to listen to my music CDs while I work 🙁

Thanks! Will make a note of those links!

[Laurie Stearn]

Problem with streaming app.
To facilitate troubleshooting, here’s a wish: include in Task Manager option (or Sysinternals?) to prioritize a specific browser tab internet quota, so that other internet consuming processes are (semi) suspended. At the time of last check, there were scripts in AHK that have come close, else Nirsoft might have something – more research required!

[Bob Marley]

There’s this page in the Chrome settings that may be useful: chrome://settings/performance

But, yeah, that would be a handy feature to have to help prioritize things when doing work. For example, you’d be able to disable the playlist you were listening to when it comes time to upload the project without losing your place.

[Laurie Stearn]

Had any experience with kmail-lists at KDE? Years ago I purchased some cat collars from BirdsBeSafe which were fine, (the cat back then always found a way to offload them).
Just got an email update from their site about some new designs (genuine), funny they still had this email address as there is no record here of an account registered with them. In case there was, the “Forgot Password” never triggered the activation email. So clicked the “unsubscribe” button, and it got me this!

Although the font is great, it seems something got mixed up! 😛

[Bob Marley]

I haven’t really used KDE all that much, to be honest. Each time I’ve tried, I’ve had a variety of issues with it such as freezing, application crashes, and sluggish behavior. I really want to be able to use it as it’s gorgeous so I may give it another go soon. With all the developments with *nix GPU support, perhaps it’ll work much better 🙂

Weird! About all I can think of is a potential phishing attempt unless the folks over at the NYT bought them. They do have an interesting list of products (including former ownership of sports teams) but that doesn’t appear to be one of them. It’s also possible the system they use for emails got its wires crossed

[Laurie Stearn]

Interesting list, like to play Wordle sometime. 🙂
Sorry, missed something, or some kind of clue has now cropped up on their web page. There is at top “as seen in … BIRDSBESAFE® CAT COLLAR COVER” and this comes up as the first image:

The mystery continues, and definitely looks like crossed wires. 😛

[Laurie Stearn]

The only way to login to Gravatar these days is to have your email “associated” with WordPress.com. Something must have changed since the last time I logged into Gravatar, for it was a long time ago, and there is no record (or memory) of any WordPress.com account on the books here. So, logging in the your email address, there is no password prompt, but an email sent from WordPress.com entitled Log in to WordPress.com and containing a jump link to log in, along with the obligatory link timeout warning. Clicking the link, and voila, the user is logged in, with no password verification prompting at all.
But, they must have a password of mine on record, because there exists a reset password link page. Hope of all hopes it will not, as is can be the case, be requiring the old password in order to change it. 😛

[Bob Marley]

There should be a way to reset the orphaned accounts. Had that happen to me a time or two on other sites. I think they used to automatically create a dummy account for users way back when just to sync up avatars before official registration but I’m not sure about that.

[Laurie Stearn]

It’s going back to the day of signup to SO (March 2013) when it copied over the Gravatar profile as it were. Cannot recall using Gravatar before then, must have done it through some WP website then.
There’s an AutoHotkey for X11 based on the earliest AHK V1 (2004). It seems Windows has changed so much, it would be a gargantuan effort to make a Linux AHK with the same capabilities of the latest AHK V1 or V2.
Should they be PM’d regarding the issue?

[Bob Marley]

Some sites set it up so Gravatar is the default but I don’t know if that automatically sets up an account or not

Cool! Yeah, I remember using V1 for Dwarf Fortress back then. Was quite useful to set up the generic layouts! Will keep an eye on it! Having V2 support would be nice even if I don’t use it much these days myself 🙂

Speaking of Dwarf Fortress, I really should play it again! It’s a blast!

Probably wouldn’t hurt to drop them a line 🙂

Looking for a circuit designer to help get going on some of my project planning and I’ve been looking at the list here and in the following section (really don’t know the difference between the two categories). Any suggestions as to which one to give a whirl to? There are so many! Looks like a lot of them have fancy visuals and things when I really only need (at least, I think I do) the basics for diagraming and value calculation (could do it manually but it takes a while 😛 ).

[Laurie Stearn]

I’d start off with Fritz, they have a good bunch of tutorials to get started with, and the pages are nicely put together, and things are well explained. The others are great as well, the GEDA is really impressive.

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