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: SecFace, 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?

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