[Fri May 17 11:59:35 CDT 2019]

The past couple of days I have been using the text-based browser w3m to read long articles and, to be honest, it's a breath of fresh air in a Web as polluted by ads and meaningless pictures as we see today (here is a good introduction to the app). However, since I still use Firefox for most of my browsing (as opposed to reading long articles), I wondered if perhaps there is an add-on that blocks all pictures. As it happens, there is. Enter Easy Image Blocker. As far as I can see, it works fine, and it definitely speeds up loading the pages. Also, it makes it very easy to temporarily turn it off when you truly need to see the pictures. Speaking of w3m and images. Believe it or not, although the browser is text-based it still manages to show the pictures embedded in your terminal (assuming the terminal supports it, of course). So, should you need to disable that functionality on w3m, the solution can be found here. {link to this entry}

[Tue May 14 13:29:44 CDT 2019]

Just a couple of tips. First of all, here is a document with info on how to search effectively in mutt. It comes in handy when one needs to perform something other than the most basic searches (e.g., a search that also includes the body of messages). Second, since I have been playing lately with SQLite, here is some info on how to use the correct data type to automatically insert the current timestamp into a column. {link to this entry}

[Wed May 8 15:36:14 CDT 2019]

I suppose that most people are just used to it, but to anybody not used to running Microsoft Windows the experience truly is nerve-wrecking. Worse yet, it's an obstacle to anyone's productivity. When the company I worked for was acquired by another one that uses Microsoft products, I had little choice but to install Windows on a virtual machine. Most of my daily work (thank goodness!) is still done on Linux, but I need to keep the VM around, even if it's mainly do run Skype for Business only. In any case, knowing that Windows has always been extremely hungry when it comes to disk space (and, of course, memory), I allocated a total of 80GB of disk space to the VM. Yes, even though my root partition in Linux only has 46GB and, as I said, I use Windows to run Skype only. Well, today I run (yet again) into a problem because Windows couldn't download and install the latest OS update... in spite of the fact that I'm only using 74.4GB out of 80GB! How much space does Windows need to download and install its updates, for crying out loud? How come they didn't implement something more sane like the Linux approach, where the updates for each software package are installed separately? Worse yet, if Microsoft has to wait until they have a bunch of these updates available so they can release an update pack... how many days are these systems running with a security hole? And, to top it all off, when I try to remove the Microsoft Edge browser, I discover that it is not possible to remove it without risking some major breakage (?!) Who thinks this is even acceptable in the year 2019, honestly? It truly is an unnerving experience, especially for an "enterprise-ready operating system". But, like I said, I suppose most people are just used to and, to them, this is just how "computers" work. {link to this entry}

[Tue May 7 11:15:35 CDT 2019]

Well, that was a nice screw-up. Yesterday, I couldn't run any of my add-ons on Firefox. Worse yet, when I checked the preferences, they all showed as disabled by the browser and, when I tried to reinstall a couple of them, they still wouldn't work. As it turned out, it is a known problem. A security certificate used by Mozilla to sign add-ons expired, causing the problem. The workaround documented in that page (i.e., temporarily enabling studies (you will have to scroll down a bit until you see the first screenshot) worked. However, I had to wait for a while before it installed the hotfix-update-xpi-signing-intermediate-bug-v1.0.3-1548973, which took care of the issue. {link to this entry}