pebblerocker

I hate change

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 03:15:42 GMT

UGH, Firefox has changed and everything is in a different place and all my extensions are gone again. Apparently they are using a completely new system for extensions which means they will no longer break every six weeks and won't have to be updated constantly! Which is good! But my gif stopper has gone, not updated to the new architecture, and that has made whole websites impossible to use.

It was such a good gif stopper, it loaded gifs by default but I could freeze them instantly with a hotkey I chose myself. So I could go and look at pages of funny cat gifs without having to right-click on anything or disable the extension, but if someone had an animated icon blinking next to the text I was trying to read I could make it stop just like that. Or I could watch someone's reaction gif loop once, so I knew what they were communicating, and then stop it so I could read the rest of the comments. The only option to replace it is a gif blocker, which is either on or off for the whole browser (not per tab like the old one) and you have to reload the page to get rid of the gifs after turning it on, and you have to right-click each gif individually if you want to unblock them. Ugh. [Edit: the placeholder image for any gif is the full width of the browser page and as high as it is wide. Yes, even if the gif it's replacing is a non-animated 16x16-pixel forum smiley. I think I have to learn to make browser extensions myself from scratch, using my very limited knowledge of BASIC from 1989.]

The other most crucial thing broken is Clearly, which I used to reload stupid pages in a readable format. It let me pick a nice muted background colour and big sans-serif text for comfortable reading, and got rid of all sidebar rubbish. It also often managed to get around websites with stupid lightboxes asking for your email address or telling you not to read any more of their articles this month. I have installed an extension called Reader which appears to do a similar thing. But despite its vaunted selection of 16 million colours, it doesn't appear to offer any way of opening up options to change the colours away from the default stark black-on-white...

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Mon, 31 Oct 2016 08:49:34 GMT

How do other people do bookmarks? I may have bookmarked so many things that Firefox can't cope any more and now it's very erratic whether I can make a new bookmark or not. My partner is no help because he only bookmarks things like the internet banking website and Youtube and the weather website, whereas I think bookmarks are for things I don't already know how to type in myself.

Of course all fanfic on AO3 is bookmarked inside AO3, but not all fic is on Ao3 and not all my bookmarks are fic. I often bookmark an article I read that seems likely to give me thinky thoughts later on, so I can come back to it and do some more learning and thinking. Sometimes that system doesn't work because the most unexpected things can make me thinky weeks later when my history isn't much help.

I had heard of people using Delicious for bookmarks; I thought it had been bought and shut down years ago, but apparently it still exists. Maybe that's worth a go. Or there's zillions of bookmark add-ons, but I don't know which are any good for my purposes. Someone tried to tell me how great Evernote was and I signed up, but it turns out you can only take 500 notes before it gets full, which makes it a very temporary usefulness.

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Fri, 18 Mar 2016 08:09:41 GMT

My mouse broke and I had to get a new one.

The new one pleases me greatly.

( Read more... )

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Wed, 12 Dec 2012 10:31:33 GMT

There are plenty of words I expect a spellchecker to underline; they haven't heard of a lot of foods I eat, like "tahini". Spellcheckers seem to have trouble with contractions other than the very most common, ones like "everything'd" freak them out. I expect spellcheckers on any computer other than mine to object to "travelled" or "fibre", but mine has strange quirks about recognising "online" as a word.

Now and then I come across a word that surprises me when the computer decides to underline it, because it's so obviously a word to me and I've never had it drawn to my attention that anyone would think otherwise. Tonight's disputed word is "earbashed". (Used about myself, of course. I'm aware that I have strong opinions and go on about them in certain circumstances.)

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Fri, 12 Aug 2011 08:49:13 GMT

Yuck. Basic programming concept FAIL. Web accessibility FAIL. I was going to sign up for Skype as new instant messenger of choice, because MSN messenger has gone somewhat downhill over the last decade and because you have to be on the IM network your friends use, so off I went to the Skype website to sign up. Filled in all my details (first and last name are required fields, I LIED), put in my desired user name -- "Username Pebblerocker not available." Right, I've never ever seen my username unavailable and am mightily annoyed by the scum-sucker who snagged it, but I'll just put Pebble instead since that's what gaming friends call me. Unticked the "Please spam my provided email address" box, made an attempt at the captcha, submitted the form: page reloads with the message "Please review the details you provided". Nothing obvious to show what's gone wrong; the "Enter username" text above the field is red instead of black, so I figure that must be what's wrong, but nothing's highlighted and there's no message next to it. Tried a variation on username, it appeared to be accepted, no "Username unavailable" message like the first time, so I deciphered the new captcha and tried again. Page reloads, same result. With nothing to go on, I tried a few other things and kept getting the same page reloading with the same "Please review details" message. Five or six bloody captchas I had to put in, none of which were real words. Eventually closed the tab in frustration; I may try getting Skype one day when I'm feeling really mentally resilient, but it's not going to happen tonight.

Obviously they have some way of checking whether a username's available before you submit the form, it rejected Pebblerocker straight off, but then it gave up checking for availability and gave up telling me anything was wrong and left me to guess. Bad design there. Very bad with the new captcha on every attempt. Very bad not having the problem area of the form highlighted so I could go straight to that and change the problem input. I have a lot of problems signing up for new services; there's a lot of very bad form design out there and there are heaps I've been completely unable to fill out because there IS NO ANSWER to the questions they're asking. Photobucket, for example: I was going to sign up for that and didn't because I couldn't answer which US state I live in. Going in with the intention of filling out sensible information that the service could plausibly require (username, password, email) takes a different mindset to going in and making shit up and lying about questions that don't even apply. Lying about my real name isn't the same thing; I consider that to be information nobody on the internet EVER has the right to know and if they ask for it they're going to get Pebblerocker Pebblerocker and they'll just have to suck on it.

Huh -- I wonder if my Skype thing was rejected because I didn't choose a gender? There was nothing to say that that was why it didn't go through or that it was a required field -- but there was nothing to say it wasn't.

As a person who just uses the damn internet from time to time I reckon I have a far better grasp of web accessibility and usability than anyone who actually gets paid to do it.

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