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Minor things that bother you

Started by planxtymcgillicuddy, November 27, 2019, 12:15:11 AM

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webny99

#2675
Quote from: jakeroot on September 10, 2021, 06:26:58 PM
Quote from: webny99 on September 10, 2021, 06:11:20 PM
Or maybe a revised phrasing... "Do you ever brush your teeth without showering?" ... might have been more along the lines of what you were actually wondering based on the context.

I'm perfectly happy with my original question. But sure, that's fine too.

Sorry, I wasn't very clear. You can scratch the second half of that sentence. My thought was that making the teeth brushing the subject would have been less likely to elicit "not a question I need the answer to" as a response.

Either way I think your point is that one shower to one teeth brushing is kind of an odd ratio?


SSOWorld

Quote from: jakeroot on September 10, 2021, 07:37:00 PM
Quote from: webny99 on September 10, 2021, 07:16:36 PM
Sorry, I wasn't very clear. You can scratch the second half of that sentence. My thought was that making the teeth brushing the subject would have been less likely to elicit "not a question I need the answer to" as a response.

Either way I think your point is that one shower to one teeth brushing is kind of an odd ratio?

Gotcha, no worries. My question was designed to elicit a response from HB along the lines of "no, I brush without showering as well" or something like that. Because, yes, I am secretly hoping that wasn't code for "I only brush once a day" since, although that's a common habit, it's not one I think many people admit to :-D.
Let's not go trolling people please.
Scott O.

Not all who wander are lost...
Ah, the open skies, wind at my back, warm sun on my... wait, where the hell am I?!
As a matter of fact, I do own the road.
Raise your what?

Wisconsin - out-multiplexing your state since 1918.

webny99

Quote from: jakeroot on September 10, 2021, 07:37:00 PM
I am secretly hoping that wasn't code for "I only brush once a day" since, although that's a common habit, it's not one I think many people admit to :-D.

Personally although I do usually brush more than once a day (usually twice), it varies, and I feel like it has gotten more variable since the start of the pandemic for some reason.

Come to think of it, however, I am with HB in that I often brush my teeth before getting dressed or changed (OK, now this is starting to seem more like "strange habits you have"...  :-D)

jakeroot

Quote from: webny99 on September 10, 2021, 08:44:43 PM
Come to think of it, however, I am with HB in that I often brush my teeth before getting dressed or changed (OK, now this is starting to seem more like "strange habits you have"...  :-D)

Truthfully, same here as well. While I'm waiting for hair to dry I often brush my teeth.

hbelkins

My daily average number of brushings would be somewhere between 1 and 2. When I do brush without having previously showered as part of my start-of-the-day grooming routine, I'm usually home for the evening and either don't have a shirt on, or have an old beat-around-the-house T-shirt on and it wouldn't matter if I got toothpaste on it or not.

Maybe we should split part of this discussion off to a "How often do you brush your teeth" thread?


Government would be tolerable if not for politicians and bureaucrats.

webny99

Quote from: hbelkins on September 10, 2021, 09:22:35 PM
Maybe we should split part of this discussion off to a "How often do you brush your teeth" thread?

Or, in the light of how it came up originally, how about "Toothpaste stain management"?  :-D

kurumi

I use command-click (or control-click depending on OS) to open a link in a new tab all the time.

A number of websites see fit to fuck with this functionality, and have command-click open a new link in the same page, or not at all. May those developers step on a wet lego, after having their cargo shorts pocket and headphone cord snag on a doorknob.
My first SF/horror short story collection is available: "Young Man, Open Your Winter Eye"

Scott5114

Quote from: kurumi on September 18, 2021, 09:27:13 PM
I use command-click (or control-click depending on OS) to open a link in a new tab all the time.

A number of websites see fit to fuck with this functionality, and have command-click open a new link in the same page, or not at all. May those developers step on a wet lego, after having their cargo shorts pocket and headphone cord snag on a doorknob.

100% agreed (though in my case it's middle-click). I've actually considered posting that very same thing myself, but never gotten around to it.

In general, whenever I do development my philosophy is to leave as much of the defaults of the OS, toolkit, and/or browser in place as possible. It's less work for me, and it means that if the user has a setting set the way they want it I'm not going to step on it.
uncontrollable freak sardine salad chef

roadman65

One specific forum user who can get away with posting incoherent remarks that other users would get in trouble for.
Every day is a winding road, you just got to get used to it.

Sheryl Crowe

J N Winkler

Quote from: Scott5114 on September 18, 2021, 10:03:54 PM
Quote from: kurumi on September 18, 2021, 09:27:13 PMI use command-click (or control-click depending on OS) to open a link in a new tab all the time.

A number of websites see fit to fuck with this functionality, and have command-click open a new link in the same page, or not at all. May those developers step on a wet lego, after having their cargo shorts pocket and headphone cord snag on a doorknob.

100% agreed (though in my case it's middle-click). I've actually considered posting that very same thing myself, but never gotten around to it.

In general, whenever I do development my philosophy is to leave as much of the defaults of the OS, toolkit, and/or browser in place as possible. It's less work for me, and it means that if the user has a setting set the way they want it I'm not going to step on it.

I use control-click heavily too, and have come to realize that there is a hierarchy of annoyance involved.  In addition to sites that force the new page to open in the same tab, there are also sites that suppress URL/postback trigger display on mouseover (making it impossible to predict what the behavior will be on simple click, let alone control-click), prevent the mouse cursor from changing from an arrow to an index finger so the active area can be seen, or force the browser to expire pages with every click so that the back and forward buttons don't work without an intermediate "repost form data" step.

It doesn't take too many of these antipatterns to incentivize me to write a wget/curl wrapper script so I can extract the information I want from a given site without wasting eyeball time on it in the browser.  Web Developer Tools has been a lifesaver.
"It is necessary to spend a hundred lire now to save a thousand lire later."--Piero Puricelli, explaining the need for a first-class road system to Benito Mussolini

JayhawkCO

Speaking of tabs, one huge thing that annoys me is the grouped tabs on Google Chrome - mobile version (at least Android).  I don't want to have subsets of stuff; I just want to have x amount of total windows available.  No easy way to turn off either.

Chris

Scott5114

Quote from: J N Winkler on September 20, 2021, 02:49:16 PM
I use control-click heavily too, and have come to realize that there is a hierarchy of annoyance involved.  In addition to sites that force the new page to open in the same tab, there are also sites that suppress URL/postback trigger display on mouseover (making it impossible to predict what the behavior will be on simple click, let alone control-click), prevent the mouse cursor from changing from an arrow to an index finger so the active area can be seen, or force the browser to expire pages with every click so that the back and forward buttons don't work without an intermediate "repost form data" step.

It doesn't take too many of these antipatterns to incentivize me to write a wget/curl wrapper script so I can extract the information I want from a given site without wasting eyeball time on it in the browser.  Web Developer Tools has been a lifesaver.

You're fortunate you haven't had to deal with a site that redirects attempts to grab a single file or page in such a way that it thoroughly confuses wget, then. (I've found a few of those. Fortunately very few.)

In a similar vein, websites that go out of their way to obstruct the saving of images, either by disabling right-click context menus or displaying a transparent PNG over top of them to cause the browser to save the wrong file. I understand the site owner's desire to deter copyright violation, but normally I am saving a file for personal use (e.g. for future use as a reference image for artwork, or to make a MapTool D&D token out of it which will be shown to exactly 3 friends). With Firefox, this can be worked around by hitting Ctrl+I (I as in India) and selecting the image from the Media list, but that is annoying to have to resort to.

Quote from: jayhawkco on September 20, 2021, 03:00:01 PM
Speaking of tabs, one huge thing that annoys me is the grouped tabs on Google Chrome - mobile version (at least Android).  I don't want to have subsets of stuff; I just want to have x amount of total windows available.  No easy way to turn off either.

Chris

Tab grouping used to bother me too, until I got an extension for Firefox that shows the tabs down the left side of the window in a tree view. Now at least the visual relationship between tab groups is much more explicit, and as a bonus, I can collapse the tabs and close an entire group in one click. Very handy for when I have, e.g. five tabs from the same site open to perform a task of some kind and I finish with them all at once.
uncontrollable freak sardine salad chef

J N Winkler

Quote from: Scott5114 on September 20, 2021, 03:41:29 PMYou're fortunate you haven't had to deal with a site that redirects attempts to grab a single file or page in such a way that it thoroughly confuses wget, then. (I've found a few of those. Fortunately very few.)

I've run into those and had to familiarize myself with wget and curl's switches for managing redirect behavior.  (Curl doesn't follow 302s by default, while wget does.)  I've also run into sites that use user-agent checking (no goodies for you unless you fool them into thinking you're using a popular browser), HTTP referer checking, and even one or two that check the Accept-Language and Accept-Encoding headers.

I've had generally good luck writing scripts to automate download of the information I want, even if this means writing ten or more subroutines just to confect postdata for HTTP POST requests.  But there are a couple of big caveats.  The sites I've worked with are generally designed to serve data to their users for local retention, even if it's made slightly difficult to get--it's just that their designers assume that the users will tolerate sitting at their computers and clicking like monkeys to initiate downloads.  And nothing I've devised gets around CAPTCHA mechanisms like Google ReCaptcha.  SIMAP (the Swiss tendering platform) is one example:  in order to download documentation for a highway construction project, I have to register a formal expression of interest, and to do that I need to solve a CAPTCHA.  I've thus had to write two scripts:  one that generates a webpage with links to the CAPTCHA pages for new projects of interest, and one that downloads documentation after I've solved the CAPTCHAs.

Quote from: Scott5114 on September 20, 2021, 03:41:29 PMIn a similar vein, websites that go out of their way to obstruct the saving of images, either by disabling right-click context menus or displaying a transparent PNG over top of them to cause the browser to save the wrong file. I understand the site owner's desire to deter copyright violation, but normally I am saving a file for personal use (e.g. for future use as a reference image for artwork, or to make a MapTool D&D token out of it which will be shown to exactly 3 friends). With Firefox, this can be worked around by hitting Ctrl+I (I as in India) and selecting the image from the Media list, but that is annoying to have to resort to.

I've run into this as well.  I've also run into construction plan providers (such as QuestCDN) that generate low-resolution raster copies of the actual plans sets for previewing purposes as an anti-leeching measure.  (The DOTs in four states currently use QuestCDN as their provider for letting plans:  WY, ID, NV, and MN.  Fortunately NV and MN make plans available on an EDMS after contract award, but there is no such workaround for WY or ID.)

The other day I was doing Web research on real-estate prospectors (mostly to confirm a long-held intuition that they are creeps looking to profit from others' misfortune), and ran across a PDF primer for which local saving had been disabled.  When I looked under the hood, I realized this was done by downloading JavaScript for PDF decryption and display to the browser, and then sending each PDF page one at a time in Base64 encoding.
"It is necessary to spend a hundred lire now to save a thousand lire later."--Piero Puricelli, explaining the need for a first-class road system to Benito Mussolini

Scott5114

Quote from: J N Winkler on September 20, 2021, 04:18:10 PM
The other day I was doing Web research on real-estate prospectors (mostly to confirm a long-held intuition that they are creeps looking to profit from others' misfortune), and ran across a PDF primer for which local saving had been disabled.  When I looked under the hood, I realized this was done by downloading JavaScript for PDF decryption and display to the browser, and then sending each PDF page one at a time in Base64 encoding.

This is a fantastic example of bogus web developer chicanery that probably cost the site owner more money in labor than was lost to piracy. Presumably the JavaScript had to download the data from somewhere to display it in the browser though–was it pulling from a source PDF file and merely breaking it up for display purposes, or was the site emitting the Base64 with PHP/Perl upon the JavaScript routine requesting it?
uncontrollable freak sardine salad chef

J N Winkler

Quote from: Scott5114 on September 20, 2021, 05:02:18 PMThis is a fantastic example of bogus web developer chicanery that probably cost the site owner more money in labor than was lost to piracy. Presumably the JavaScript had to download the data from somewhere to display it in the browser though–was it pulling from a source PDF file and merely breaking it up for display purposes, or was the site emitting the Base64 with PHP/Perl upon the JavaScript routine requesting it?

The latter--scrolling across a page boundary results in a request to the server for the next page's worth of Base64-encoded content.  The original PDF is nowhere exposed in a URL for direct download.  (First-generation tantalus mechanisms did used to expose a file URL, but these days nearly all content providers have closed that backdoor.)

I suspect the original PDF could be reconstructed by downloading all the pages in Base64, decoding each Base64 snippet to get the corresponding segment of the PDF, and using a binary-capable concatenate tool to put them all together in order.  But this assumes there isn't an additional encryption layer underneath the Base64; if there is, then finding where and how the necessary decryption key is passed to the browser would likely mean looking at the JavaScript code.
"It is necessary to spend a hundred lire now to save a thousand lire later."--Piero Puricelli, explaining the need for a first-class road system to Benito Mussolini

Scott5114

The above also presupposes that the Base64 being emitted is itself PDF-compatible; the Base64 could very well represent data in a proprietary format designed to be interpreted and displayed only by the JavaScript display routine (which would mean that there would be no need to transmit whatever headers, etc. PDF requires, as the equivalent could be baked into the JS).

Such could be reverse engineered by looking at the JS source code, of course. It could also be archived by simply saving all the Base64 code somewhere and modifying the JS to draw from a local source rather than a remote one. But at that point you're sinking enough time into it that unless the PDF represents very critical information that must be archived, you are guaranteed to come out behind on the time-sink factor alone.
uncontrollable freak sardine salad chef

hbelkins

#2691
My wife constantly remarks about she hates the phrase "It is what it is."

A couple of my disliked phrases are "living my best life" and "living the dream."

[Removed gratuitous politics. -S.]


Government would be tolerable if not for politicians and bureaucrats.

SSOWorld

Quote from: hbelkins on September 26, 2021, 09:19:56 PM
My wife constantly remarks about she hates the phrase "It is what it is."
Well, It is what is is.
Scott O.

Not all who wander are lost...
Ah, the open skies, wind at my back, warm sun on my... wait, where the hell am I?!
As a matter of fact, I do own the road.
Raise your what?

Wisconsin - out-multiplexing your state since 1918.

US71

Quote from: SSOWorld on September 26, 2021, 10:07:30 PM
Quote from: hbelkins on September 26, 2021, 09:19:56 PM
My wife constantly remarks about she hates the phrase "It is what it is."
Well, It is what is is.

My friend Baron Liam used that for his box business.
Like Alice I Try To Believe Three Impossible Things Before Breakfast

CNGL-Leudimin

#2694
Quote from: Scott5114 on September 26, 2021, 11:47:42 PM
[Removed gratuitous politics. -S.]

This. Both the original post and the edit were made while I was asleep, so I had no chance to read what this said originally.
Supporter of the construction of several running gags, including I-366 with a speed limit of 85 mph (137 km/h) and the Hypotenuse.

Please note that I may mention "invalid" FM channels, i.e. ending in an even number or down to 87.5. These are valid in Europe.

Scott5114

Quote from: CNGL-Leudimin on September 27, 2021, 04:26:41 AM
Quote from: Scott5114 on September 26, 2021, 11:47:42 PM
[Removed gratuitous politics. -S.]

This. Both the original post and the edit were made while I was asleep, so I had no chance to read what this said originally.

The whole point of a moderator removing something is so that nobody can read it. :rolleyes:
uncontrollable freak sardine salad chef

hbelkins

Quote from: Scott5114 on September 27, 2021, 09:30:47 AM
Quote from: CNGL-Leudimin on September 27, 2021, 04:26:41 AM
Quote from: Scott5114 on September 26, 2021, 11:47:42 PM
[Removed gratuitous politics. -S.]

This. Both the original post and the edit were made while I was asleep, so I had no chance to read what this said originally.

The whole point of a moderator removing something is so that nobody can read it. :rolleyes:

OK, I'll rephrase to remove any reference to politics.

I don't like the term "progressive."


Government would be tolerable if not for politicians and bureaucrats.

abefroman329

Quote from: hbelkins on September 26, 2021, 09:19:56 PM
My wife constantly remarks about she hates the phrase "It is what it is."

She might like this song, then:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb5L9mnq88s

SSOWorld

Quote from: hbelkins on September 27, 2021, 12:13:18 PM
Quote from: Scott5114 on September 27, 2021, 09:30:47 AM
Quote from: CNGL-Leudimin on September 27, 2021, 04:26:41 AM
Quote from: Scott5114 on September 26, 2021, 11:47:42 PM
[Removed gratuitous politics. -S.]

This. Both the original post and the edit were made while I was asleep, so I had no chance to read what this said originally.

The whole point of a moderator removing something is so that nobody can read it. :rolleyes:

OK, I'll rephrase to remove any reference to politics.

I don't like the term "progressive."
fine, but you don't have to impose it on us or insist that we should not either. Keep politics off the board unless it involves roads
Scott O.

Not all who wander are lost...
Ah, the open skies, wind at my back, warm sun on my... wait, where the hell am I?!
As a matter of fact, I do own the road.
Raise your what?

Wisconsin - out-multiplexing your state since 1918.

webny99

Quote from: Scott5114 on September 27, 2021, 09:30:47 AM
Quote from: CNGL-Leudimin on September 27, 2021, 04:26:41 AM
Quote from: Scott5114 on September 26, 2021, 11:47:42 PM
[Removed gratuitous politics. -S.]

This. Both the original post and the edit were made while I was asleep, so I had no chance to read what this said originally.

The whole point of a moderator removing something is so that nobody can read respond to it. :rolleyes:

FTFY (?)  :-P



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