pebblerocker

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...

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

The new one pleases me greatly.

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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.

I'm just trying to write and stupid computer keeps underlining words which is really distracting, and I keep on telling it, I tell it over and over I'm not American, I've told it so enough times that when a friend tried to use my computer to register a new hotmail.com email address it refused point blank to give him anything but a hotmail.co.uk one no matter what we did to it, but it's STILL having conniptions about "fibre".

*pants with rage*

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I've been using the same plain old Microsoft optical mouse for five or six years, when I got this computer. It has finally begun to lose its click, so I'm in the market for a replacement.
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How can I disable the space bar behaving as a second "page down" key? It's the one key most likely to be lain on by a cat, and it's getting frustrating when I'm reading long pages. Leading experts (my personal geek) have tried and failed to answer this. It's built into Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera, so it seems there's no simple way of getting away from it.

Moving the cat off the desk has been tried repeatedly. Standing the keyboard up on its end beside the monitor is one solution, but rather inconvenient.