> get lamp

Dear Apple:

QUIT FUCKING TURNING BLUETOOTH BACK ON WHEN I UPDATE IPADOS. Every other existing setting you leave untouched, afaict. Why is THIS the one I have to frob every single time???

Not to be entitled white suburbanite on main but for the love of fuck could we ban gas leafblowers in this city? Or how about just ban running three of them simultaneously as the gardeners across the street appear to be doing at the moment?

(NB, the property is not large with lots of grounds or anything. Our lot sizes aren't big enough to be described as even fractions of an acre, unless you're being silly on purpose -- ours is about .17 acre.)

According to the Registrar of Voters website, my mail-in ballot was not counted; it was not even received. enotsola's was, and it was put in the same drop-off box one day after mine. I don't get how that could have happened. There was little so contested that my single vote could have made a difference (maybe the district members of the Democratic party committee, for which you could vote for 6 out of more than a dozen and some people were separated by only 20 votes last I looked), but it makes me wonder about every other ballot in that box on the same day, and really does not help my trust in the process -- this was the first time all voters received a mail-in ballot whether they were previously registered vote-by-mail or not, and the first time in my life I didn't go to the polling place to vote. Guess what I won't be doing again.

eta 3/7/20: They found me. Still, I'm not left feeling very good about the whole thing.

AUGH, Microsoft, whyfor you break my enlarged system font sizes with your latest update (1709), like you had already broken them once with Creators Update last year? Why do you think those tiny font sizes are at all reasonable to read at 1920x1080? Back to Advanced System Font Changer it is, then.

I was really confused by the full-moon-like whitish light spilling over the back fence into the yard just now. Isn't it near new moon, I thought? Maybe I got way off in my memory of the lunar cycle, somehow? ... nope. They've apparently just replaced those orangey sodium vapor streetlights with white LEDs. Normally I'd be in favor of LEDs as longer-lasting, drawing fewer watts, etc... but do they have to be THAT bright in that color? Why not dimmer and a bit warmer (even if not as orange as the sodium ones)? Really. If I was fooled at first into thinking it was moonlight, what about animals that respond to it? I mean, it's bright enough it might compete with, if not wash out, the actual #@*$^ing Moon, never mind the stars (AAAAUGFH--*?!), which were already not exactly bright in suburbia.

"I don’t always litter in the woods, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis."

pfeh.

(we picked up this and some other trash found around the creek and took it all to the garbage/recycling bins in the picnic area.)

Dear Blogspot:

I really hate how clicking in the (often significant amount of) blank space to the left or right of a picture in an RSS feed from you, like when I'm making sure focus is in the right place for when I'm about to scroll, ACTS AS THOUGH I HAD CLICKED THE PICTURE AND THEREFORE OPENS IT IN A NEW FOCUSED TAB. GO DIE IN A FIRE.

Anyone have suggestions for an RSS reading service or application other than Google Reader or Thunderbird? I've been using Reader for a long time and been very satisfied, but their new design doesn't play nice with the size I like to keep my font set to; a workaround that is OK for text feeds doesn't work with feeds where the content is images, and it's a pain in the butt to have to keep switching zoom levels and toggling my font size and blah. Thunderbird, on the other hand, won't display the contents of all feeds in a folder as a mixed stream (as Google will), which is a no-go with the number of feeds that I subscribe to (I group them by topic); when I sort them in folders it does not display the total unread in the folder and children; and I don't like how it actually ends up displaying each item's content ("summary" seems to give me plain text which is useless for webcomic feeds and the like; "as webpage/default" look like I just went to the page in my browser, so lots of extra mess and some HTML getting displayed raw for some reason). Basically I want something "Reader-like" which will not break when I crank up the font size.

There is http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/58577 apparently but ... that takes Greasemonkey, right? I hate installing entire extensions just to deal with ONE problem site. (although I had been doing just that with the Adblock Element Hiding Helper for ages until Google finally coded it such that you could collapse the sidebar on iGoogle.)

edit: for the moment the latter is just what I've done. I am thinking of trying a couple of the underdogs in Lifehacker's recent poll on top five RSS readers (Reader itself is the big gorilla, of course) but I don't have the patience at the moment.

Has anyone tried Thunderbird 5? Good, bad, ugly? I'm kind of annoyed that there's a new version out. Not that I haven't been on TB 3 for a while, but on my home desktop installation, while I had to patch some of its annoying quirks with extensions, the fact that it's the product of repeated upgrades on an ongoing installation mean that it's still got the old-style single-inbox folder structure, so I have not had to deal much (only a little on my laptop, which I don't use much) with the main thing I hate about TB 3: the insistence on giving every account you set up its own inbox and folder tree. (No, "Unified" folders does not solve this in the way I want it to be solved.) It's only since having to deal every day with the fresh install on my new work desktop that I've been having to cope with that for the past month, and I've only just gotten a bit settled with the best workarounds I can figure out and resigned myself to the tray icon for new email being all but useless (has to do with inbox focus; details are outside the scope of this post). Suffice it to say I am loath to have to start coping with an entirely new set of annoyances already.


P.S. Dunno that I'm keen on Firefox 5 either. I was still waiting for my can't-live-without extension to get upgraded to work with Firefox 4 (no, this isn't one that disabling compatibility checking can solve; it really honestly doesn't function) so that I could bite that bullet and look for skins that would make it look like 3.x again because dammit if I wanted to use Chrome I'd use Chrome, and now here they want me to use version 5?

On one of my three installs of Firefox (well, Pale Moon, but Firefox) - all the same version (3.6.16) - the "details" panel in the Bookmarks Library refuses to persist open session to session. This was a known bug a bunch of versions back and was supposedly fixed at some point. There was (is) an add-on called Patch for Library that fixed this and a few other quirks, but that doesn't do it anymore (versions have marched on and I think it actually breaks some things now). I've even tried uninstalling and reinstalling to no avail, which makes me wonder if it could possibly be something amiss in the profile. Any ideas?

(Upgrading to 4.x - something I hesitate to do anyway as I don't like its UI, although I think the Pale Moon guy has a theme that skins it back to 3.x-like - is not an option at this point, as my can't-do-without CookieSwap add-on doesn't work with 4 yet. And no, I don't want to switch to Multifox to have something that works with 4 right now, for reasons I won't bore you with.)