vicarz | (no subject)

Domestic notes:

Roomba
It's the size of a simon machine, and beeps like simon, therefore it is a duck. Unfortunately, it picks up as much dirt from the rug as a simon as well. It's not doing well with the bare floor and rug makeup of my house. I think it's supposed to learn the pattern of the room and clean all spots, but when it keeps getting hung up with one wheel not running right as it gets stuck going onto the rug, it seems to get in cycles where it just cleans one corner over and over until the battery dies. The battery only lasts for 40 minutes so far, not quite the 2 hours promised. It does fit under the couch which makes me very happy...if only I felt it was likely it would clean while running around down there. The instructions are woefully inadequate - for instance, it does not state whether duct-taping a steak knife to the front of the machine is a good idea or a bad one. I'm thinking spin the bottle with a knife-weilding robot has higher stakes.

Firefox fail
Trying to use firefox and failing. Unlike chrome, firefox did import bookmarks. Adblock keeps kicking out all of my passwords - each time I refresh livejournal it wants me to re-sign in. If I got to a comment or any page from my f-list, it logs me out. I don't like cookies on my computer from places I don't invite, and the firefox interface for that issue is horrible. On ie you can just click the eye icon and see who was blocked, making it easy to pick who to let in. Firefox and ad block show you what loaded fine, but then make it annoying to try and accept this cookie, but not that one...I'm also not seeing any difference in number of ads. I am noticing many pages take longer to load in firefox. I'm probably not going to use it for long at all. One advantage is that it is spell checking my awful spelling, but I think ie does that and I just turned it off.

Laptop
I love my new laptop, love love love. For $350 the 2ghz dual core, 2gb ram (I just bought 4gb for it which will be $10 after the $40 mail-in rebate, even though it'll only read 3gb since...well shit, $10), 160 g hd, 14" 5.something lbs (even the power converter weighs less than the old one), wireless n...seems wonderful. Even with shared video It's lightning fast compared to the dell inspiron 1100 (is a 7 year old laptop steampunk? Not quite?) It seems like it cost and weighs as much as micro, but is equipped like a mid-15".

Workout crap
Today I did a different run - usually I can't help but run up to the max I possibly can, and keep just below hyperventilation. Today I just ran right at a comfortable pace where I was breathing heavy but not tired - like an old-man job. I ran 4 miles but could have gone much more. Running or doing cardio every day I'm finding my knees are a bit tired. Lost another lb and looking forward to that hot fudge brownie sundae - look out turbogrrrl! Was flattered that last night Rikk noticed the new definition in my lower back.

Gay dance club night fell through last night, but it was wonderful seeing so many people at spellbound for the show - plus Steve & Donna went more into the acoustic sounding electronic music which was nice. With the ice on the way I skipped out on Voltaire. Funs were had.

Yeah dull, but I'm kinda happy.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

FWIW, my Roomba seems to do pretty well on bare wood and on carpeting, but doesn't deal particularly well with wood to rug transitions, and also doesn't deal well with multi-room wandering. I've been happy (not estatic, but happy) with its vacuuming ability.

Honestly, there must be something messed up in your Firefox/Adblock install. I've been running that combo for several years now, and have never had any of those issues.

Do you let advertisers put their cookies on your computer or try to manage which ones? That seems to be a lot of the issue - I'm very fussy about adrotator.com or specificclick trying to download shelves of cookies to my computer.

I don't bother blocking cookies because there's honestly nothing they can put in them that I'm all that concerned about (sites only have access to their own data or any data you specifically give to them -- so an ad site's cookies probably only contain data about what ads they've shown you, which is a moot point if you're blocking the ads anyway).

Quote from here explains what cookies do:

"Cookies do not act maliciously on computer systems. They are merely text files that can be deleted at any time - they are not plug ins nor are they programs. Cookies cannot be used to spread viruses and they cannot access your hard drive. This does not mean that cookies are not relevant to a user's privacy and anonymity on the Internet. Cookies cannot read your hard drive to find out information about you; however, any personal information that you give to a Web site, including credit card information, will most likely be stored in a cookie unless you have turned off the cookie feature in your browser. In only this way are cookies a threat to privacy. The cookie will only contain information that you freely provide to a Web site."

But yeah, blocking cookies would be the reason why sites keep "kicking out" your passwords -- most sites these days use cookies to maintain your login, so if you block cookies, you're going to find yourself getting logged out at each new page. For this reason, blocking cookies is usually more hassle than it's worth.

For what it's worth, you can see what AdBlock Plus is blocking (and allow certain things through selectively) by clicking on the ABP logo (the stop sign). But it's not what's blocking your cookies, so it's not going to help with your particular issue.

If you really insist on blocking cookies, some of the info on this page might help to make it a more tolerable experience. In particular, look at the part about setting up exceptions, as you can set it to allow certain sites of your choosing to store cookies, but block all others.

Yup - been using exceptions but it doesn't always show - for instance a login site has a sub-site or a https extension you don't see if you fail, so what is shown when the screen settles down is only where you wound up.

Still playing around.

Another thing you can do that will help is run Spybot's "immunization". This will set up Firefox with a long list of specific sites (mostly ad sites) to block cookies from, and, in fact, also put them in your hosts file, so they'll be blocked from sending any data to your computer. It won't cover every site out there, but it'll keep a lot of them (particularly the worst offenders) out. (Just make sure you regularly update and re-immunize to block the latest sites.)

Already using spybot & adaware, but thanks - they're both good.