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Hopefully only one more...
May. 29th, 2014 11:07 amI do want to post about my trip to Fermilab, but I have vowed to finish at least a major portion of my overdue homework before I do. In the meantime, as a followup to my browser-rantings, here is further reason why Chrome will not and cannot be a replacement for Firefox and an open-source non-commercial browser:
Google tackles 'malicious' Chrome extensions
Sounds like a good idea, right? Until you read: "The change means older extensions added outside the store will be disabled"... which means that Google will come into your house or business and change the way your computer works whether you like it or not. Not really what I want to happen when I use a web browser.
In further news, every school term I try to buy myself a little techno-treat. I have all the equipment I need for my home studio, so no more purchases there (there are plenty of "wants", but no more "needs"). However, I needed a new keyboard for one of my computers (I spilled a beverage on it and even after my attempts to clean it, it was still sticking, so I need to clean it again and it might just be borked), so I bought a nice keyboard for myself as a treat: a Ttesports Poseidon Z mechanical switch keyboard. This is the first mechanical switch keyboard I've had in decades and I *love* it (if you remember the original IBM "Type M" keyboards, this is the closest thing you'll find to it these days). My typing speed instantly went up and I make less mistakes typing because there is better feedback when I type. It's also backlit (more of a gimmick than anything), so I can work in the dark if I want (something I like to do at night: I don't like to need room lighting on top of everything else... hey, contrary to popular beliefs, troglodytism does not necessarily imply a low cultural level), but can easily turn the lighting off. One edumacational thing is the keyboard apparently has "blue switches". When I bought it, I was confused that it had something to do with the colour of the backlighting, which made no sense to me (yes, I'm a little embarrassed at the moment... I was unhip to the lingo apparently, heh). In fact, it has to do with a brand of keyswitch made by the company Cherry and used by many keyboard manufacturers now. There are blue, brown, red, and black switches apparently, so named for the colour of plastic used in their manufacture. Here's a good article describing the difference between mechanical and membrane (the most common type nowadays) keyboards, and between at least blue, brown, and black switches:
Mechanical Keyboard FAQ: Pick the Right Switch
Doing a little research, the "red switch" keyboards are like the black switch ones except they have a "lighter" travel:
Mechanical Keyboard Guide
(this link is cool because it talks about a whole bunch of other keyboard-related things besides the switches, including the shape of the keys, how the characters are put on the keys, etc.)
Edit: Just because I don't want to post it in its own post, I just did something quite interesting that I will recount here: I recovered a lost LibreOffice file on my Linux system. Specifically, I used a program called "scalpel" to scour my hard drive looking for anything that looked like a deleted LibreOffice Writer file. It found over 500 deleted chunks of information lying around on the hard drive that looked like that sort of file, including LibreOffice files left on there by the previous owner of the computer (definitely reason enough to make sure you wipe the crap out of your hard drives before throwing them out, selling them, or passing them on to someone else!). The instructions are here:
Recover accidently deleted Libreoffice document .odt files using Scalpel
What I specifically did (after I added the configuration lines specified in the article above, and commented everything out except for "odt" files) was create a directory on my USB stick and pointed scalpel at that, e.g. "scalpel /dev/sda5 -b -o /media/Kingston/recovered_files". As I said, it found many files that it recovered. To search through them, I used a word that I knew would be in the lost document (in this case, an author's last name) and the zipgrep utility (because LibreOffice save files are just a bunch of XML text files zip'ed into a single "odt" file), e.g. "for i in *.odt; do echo $i; zipgrep -li Floridi $i; done 2> /dev/null > search.out". Looking at "search.out", I just had to search for "context.xml" and the filename above that line had a reference to the author in question in it. I had 6 hits... 5 were earlier or later versions of the file (without the lost information), and 1 of them was the file I was looking for! It took quite a while to run scalpel on the whole hard drive partition, but it's good to know I have a way of recovering from momentary acts of carelessness or stupidity (in this case, it was an elaborate string of events, including a dead laptop battery, that allowed me to trash the recovery file I wanted to keep and keep the file I didn't need).
Google tackles 'malicious' Chrome extensions
Sounds like a good idea, right? Until you read: "The change means older extensions added outside the store will be disabled"... which means that Google will come into your house or business and change the way your computer works whether you like it or not. Not really what I want to happen when I use a web browser.
In further news, every school term I try to buy myself a little techno-treat. I have all the equipment I need for my home studio, so no more purchases there (there are plenty of "wants", but no more "needs"). However, I needed a new keyboard for one of my computers (I spilled a beverage on it and even after my attempts to clean it, it was still sticking, so I need to clean it again and it might just be borked), so I bought a nice keyboard for myself as a treat: a Ttesports Poseidon Z mechanical switch keyboard. This is the first mechanical switch keyboard I've had in decades and I *love* it (if you remember the original IBM "Type M" keyboards, this is the closest thing you'll find to it these days). My typing speed instantly went up and I make less mistakes typing because there is better feedback when I type. It's also backlit (more of a gimmick than anything), so I can work in the dark if I want (something I like to do at night: I don't like to need room lighting on top of everything else... hey, contrary to popular beliefs, troglodytism does not necessarily imply a low cultural level), but can easily turn the lighting off. One edumacational thing is the keyboard apparently has "blue switches". When I bought it, I was confused that it had something to do with the colour of the backlighting, which made no sense to me (yes, I'm a little embarrassed at the moment... I was unhip to the lingo apparently, heh). In fact, it has to do with a brand of keyswitch made by the company Cherry and used by many keyboard manufacturers now. There are blue, brown, red, and black switches apparently, so named for the colour of plastic used in their manufacture. Here's a good article describing the difference between mechanical and membrane (the most common type nowadays) keyboards, and between at least blue, brown, and black switches:
Mechanical Keyboard FAQ: Pick the Right Switch
Doing a little research, the "red switch" keyboards are like the black switch ones except they have a "lighter" travel:
Mechanical Keyboard Guide
(this link is cool because it talks about a whole bunch of other keyboard-related things besides the switches, including the shape of the keys, how the characters are put on the keys, etc.)
Edit: Just because I don't want to post it in its own post, I just did something quite interesting that I will recount here: I recovered a lost LibreOffice file on my Linux system. Specifically, I used a program called "scalpel" to scour my hard drive looking for anything that looked like a deleted LibreOffice Writer file. It found over 500 deleted chunks of information lying around on the hard drive that looked like that sort of file, including LibreOffice files left on there by the previous owner of the computer (definitely reason enough to make sure you wipe the crap out of your hard drives before throwing them out, selling them, or passing them on to someone else!). The instructions are here:
Recover accidently deleted Libreoffice document .odt files using Scalpel
What I specifically did (after I added the configuration lines specified in the article above, and commented everything out except for "odt" files) was create a directory on my USB stick and pointed scalpel at that, e.g. "scalpel /dev/sda5 -b -o /media/Kingston/recovered_files". As I said, it found many files that it recovered. To search through them, I used a word that I knew would be in the lost document (in this case, an author's last name) and the zipgrep utility (because LibreOffice save files are just a bunch of XML text files zip'ed into a single "odt" file), e.g. "for i in *.odt; do echo $i; zipgrep -li Floridi $i; done 2> /dev/null > search.out". Looking at "search.out", I just had to search for "context.xml" and the filename above that line had a reference to the author in question in it. I had 6 hits... 5 were earlier or later versions of the file (without the lost information), and 1 of them was the file I was looking for! It took quite a while to run scalpel on the whole hard drive partition, but it's good to know I have a way of recovering from momentary acts of carelessness or stupidity (in this case, it was an elaborate string of events, including a dead laptop battery, that allowed me to trash the recovery file I wanted to keep and keep the file I didn't need).
