Coffee heat rising

Computers

News in the Age of Ad-blocker Blockers

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Have you noticed that more and more news outlets are using software that blocks ad-blockers? I happen to hate pop-ups and babbling panes and things that flicker and flash at me, so as soon as a reliable ad-blocker came available for Firefox, I installed it. Works pretty well: 99.9% of ads are squelched, even on YouTube.

But of course, news media make their money by selling you, so it’s not in their interest to allow any ad-blocking shenanigans. At first just a few news organizations had ad-block killer — notably Forbes. Now at least 30% to 50% of them do — and they’re signing on in increasing numbers. Washington Post, one of my stand-by news sources, now makes itself unreadable to people who don’t care to be subjected to distracting ads.

You can install an anti-adblock killer. But there’s a limit. How many counter-counter-counter nuisances do I have to load into my computer? A lot can go wrong with these things…and when it does, what a time-suck! Consider the degree of farting around required to cope with this mess:

  • Check if you have only one Adblocker enabled. (Adblock, Adblock Plus or uBlock Origin)
  • Check if the script manager is enabled (Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey, NinjaKit, etc…).
  • Check if you have installed the latest version of Anti-Adblock Killer Script (Step 3).
  • Check if you have subscribed to Anti-Adblock Killer List (Step 2).
  • Check if Anti-Adblock Killer Script is enabled.
  • Check if Anti-Adblock Killer List is enabled.
  • Try update or re-install Anti-Adblock Killer Script.
  • Try update or re-subscribe Anti-Adblock Killer List.
  • Check if you have another userscript that might interfere with Anti-Adblock Killer.
  • Check if one of these extensions is problematic (Disable Anti-Adblock, Ghostery, Online Security Avast, Donotrackme, Privacy Badger, Disconnect, Blur, TrackerBlock, Kaspersky Anti-Banner, Freebox (Anti-pub), No Script, YesScript, HTTPS Everywhere).
  • Check if, your JavaScript is enabled Test.
  • Remove duplicates Anti-Adblock Killer (Script/List).
  • Remove or disable personal filters.
  • Enable only the filter lists you need, too many can make your browser unresponsive.
  • Force an update Adblocker lists
  • Force an update Script Manager
  • Check if the site is in “Supported Sites” or in “Changelog”.
    • If the site is not in it, please report it here.
    • If it exists, but the script does not work, it probably means that the antiadblocker has changed, please report it here
  • Try with another Browser.
  • Try with another Script Manager.
  • How to disable the update check Settings
  • How to disable the list check Settings
  • How write Adblock filters here
  • Where can report an advertisement here
  • Consult Discussions or Issues

So…no, guys. I don’t think so.

I’m not turning off the ad-blocker: I refuse to subject myself to advertisers’ garbage or allow it to soak up bandwidth that I have to pay for. There’s an easy alternative: don’t go to sites that block your ad-blocker.

Since more and more sites are doing that, what that means basically is I read less and less news.

And y’know what? That’s a good thing! Cruising news sites is one of my worst habits: I waste hour after hour after uncountable hour reading the news in its many Web-based iterations.

Fewer functional news sites = more time for living

The trick to getting the news, then, is simply to go to PBS, NPR, and BBC. I’m willing to donate to PBS and NPR. But I cannot afford to pay to read every news outlet that is required to get a full, reasonably balanced view of what’s going on in the world, nor am I going to subject myself to endless, intrusive nuisance advertising.

NPR’s national website has a news section that covers the nation, the world, politics, business, technology, science, health, and race & culture. Separately, you can go to your local NPR station’s site, and also to local NPR stations in other parts of the country. These often provide superior news coverage — of course, it’s not hard to get superior to a local news station’s play-nooz, but…just sayin’. Just Google NPR plus the local city of your choice; click on the “news” tab at the station’s website.

The daily update of PBS Newshour comes on at the PBS website late in the day — hereabouts, it appears around 5:00 or 5:30. And it’s a yakathon — I personally don’t have a lot of time to listen to talking heads. I can read a news report two or three times faster than a pretty woman or studly man can yap it at me. PBS publishes some transcripts of the Newshour’s content, which is useful.

BBC News is excellent. Coverage is superb, and you can get US and Canadian news at their website, as well as other international reporting.

Of course, this lets out reportage on the talking cows and the two-headed babies. But, alas, truth to tell, we can do without those lurid time-sucks. If you want lurid and freakish, try your local “news” stations, which are usually full of fluff and time-waste. By and large local news outlets do not report news well, but it’s more or less sort of better than nothing.

Heh. Maybe it is nothing. Maybe “nothing” is better than that stuff.

What you get in a blackout…

Computers: Ya love ’em…

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By noon yesterday, I was feeling very smug. After dragging my heels for years, I finally forced my self to figure out how to download data for two credit union accounts, three credit cards, and a PayPal account in such a way as to make sense of the entries. Not just “make sense” to my eccentric and overheated little mind, but actually to make sense to an accountant.

Miraculously, it wasn’t near as hard as expected. I hate doing this kind of thing, because there’s always, invariably, inevitably some kind of fuck-up that will require hours of frustration to figure out, decode, and reconstruct before it’s right. But to my great surprise, it wasn’t very difficult at all. Data downloaded smoothly into Excel — backwards, of course, so I had to sort by “Date” in order to make entries run from January through October rather than, clumsily, the other way around. But that’s not difficult. The only PITA was PayPal, but PayPal is always a PITA, so…there being no surprise there, I managed to cope adequately.

So, yes, smug: No more the hours spent entering data from snail-mail statements. No more the time suck of figuring out what check no. 2489 paid for, and to whom. No more the annoyance of calling AMEX to find out who some mystery retailer might be. It’s all there in little glowing letters.

This was good. Very, very good. WonderAccountant will be pleased, and I will no longer have to rely on her reports from the inscrutable, user-hostile Quickbooks to extract the answer to this, that, or the other budgetary question. She will be even more pleased to learn that AMEX will upload data to QB, which she prefers to use because she can generate tax reports from that endlessly annoying program and because it will engross transaction data from your bank accounts.

These are features I would prefer to do without, but will allow as to how anything that saves her time saves me money.

…or ya hate ’em!

Pleased as punch — or as bourbon and water, which I find much more pleasing than punch, thank you — I went back to working on my client’s ongoing project. She has been uploading it a chunk at a time, as she writes. I’d sent her a piece in the morning, and forthwith she sent me back an afternoon piece.

So I set to work on that, and after a couple of hours come out on the other end. And I’m very pleased, yea verily, about that: a major piece of work, out of the way and in impressively short order.

Go to save the thing, and…

…oh, what do you suppose happened next?

• Angels flew into my office, gathered around the desk and began to sing?

• The dog began to speak in English, offering advice on what stocks to buy?

• Donald Trump announced he was stepping down from office to spend the next 10 years golfing in Barbados?

No. ‘Fraid not. Oh, indeed, you DO know what happened: Effing Word hung.

And hung big time. I couldn’t crash out of it. I couldn’t even switch to a different program. Ultimately the only way I could shake it loose was to SHUT DOWN THE EFFING COMPUTER.

And this, of course, causes everything I’m working on to crash.

I figure that will be a fucking annoyance but not the end of the world, because everything is saved. I know I saved all the Excel files that were still sitting open on the computer, and even if they didn’t save, I’d emailed them to WonderAccountant and so those could be retrieved from “Sent” mail.

I knew I’d saved the chapter of the current noveloid I’m working on — and was feeling extremely proud of: this day’s little inspiration having proven…well, inspired — and even if I didn’t, Wyrd is set to save every three minutes.

Wyrd is set to save every three minutes because of its propensity to generate random catastrophic crashes.

But nevertheless I’m pissed, because I know this is going to be another time suck.

And I’m right. It is another time suck.

Manage to get the system back up and find that probably the Excel files are OK.

The client’s file, thank God, saved itself in several iterations as it was diving in flames into the Pacific Ocean, one of which miraculously contained the latest changes and comments I’d made.

But my file? The one I felt so happy with because it’s the first decent creative work I’ve done in freaking WEEKS? Not so much.

The whole day’s new work is gone. Gone, gone, gone! Wyrd tells me it has autosaved nothing, no back up, please go away and stop bothering me…

Well, by now of course I’m in a screaming rage.

I search and search and bang around and whack around and try every trick I can think of. Finally, as I’m about to give up, I manage to find some autosaved files under the suspect filename. And in there what should I discover but an .asd file that was apparently was saved late in the Timeframe of Desperation.

Hm.

An .asd file is a type of Wyrd recovery file. Wyrd and the Mac, of course, had told me they hadn’t saved anything within living memory: that the latest save had failed to keep most of the day’s scribbling.

Interesting.

So I try to open this thing, but as you can imagine, Wyrd refuses to open it.

I look up “how to open an .asd” file on the Font of All Wisdom and do indeed find such a thing. Unfortunately it’s written in Techese and so is utterly incomprehensible to the likes of moi. I cannot even begin to understand what the author is trying to say, except that he’s offering some indecipherable hope that this file can be broken into.

What the fuck to do?

Finally I decide to try to hack into it using TextEdit.

And lo and behold…it WORKS.

Angels do not sing at my house. At best, they laugh. Peals of angelic laughter now erupt around the desk.

Of course, you can’t edit a TextEdit file. But…you can copy it.

Highlighted the passages that had been disappeared from the working Wyrd file, reopened said file, and pasted. And HALLELUJAH! It worked! More angelic laughter.

So I saved the creative work I’d done that afternoon, at the expense of damn near giving myself a nervous breakdown.

One of the Excel files had corrupted. There’s an easy fix for that: change the extension from .xlsb or .xlsx to .xls. Wasn’t very worried, because I knew I could retrieve the one I’d sent to WonderAccountant, but tried the trick anyway. It worked.

You realize, of course, that had I stayed true to my resolve to draft creative work with pen on ink on, you know, paper, this wouldn’t have happened…

How do I hate computers? Let me count the ways…

Effin’ Brave New World…

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Please. I want my covered wagon and my smoke signals back…  Seriously: SDXB was just over here and remarked that we live in the kind of dystopia that was science fiction and horror fiction when we were kids. We are so ensnared with our effing “conveniences” that they now dictate our lives and spy on us for any number of unknown and unknowable parties.

Anyway, I found out why, after a gangbuster spring, editorial business abruptly fell off to zero at the start of the summer. Google, it develops, arbitrarily brands various incoming messages as “spam,” whether you ask for that or not. In addition, Google has infiltrated my Apple mail, apparently picking up “trash” classifications and deeming them “spam.”

Now, here’s the problem. I have a G-mail address with my company brand. That is, it says “@mycompany.com,” not “@gmail.com” or “@mac.com” or worse yet, “@me.com.” This looks much more professional, and for several years it’s been all over my business cards, all over my stationery, all over my email, and enshrined in the “contact” pages at my business websites. A lot of people email me at that company address. In fact, I’d venture to say most people do.

Meanwhile, though, I do not care for Google’s email interface. Miraculous though it may be, I find it clumsy and annoying to work with. Also, I have other things to do than sign in, several times a day, to a G-mail account. Nor do I want to have to sign in to two accounts every day. So I have all the @mycompany.com email forwarded to my Apple email.

Yesterday, a particularly august friend (let’s call her Friend¹) emailed and asked if I had received a message (copied and pasted into her email) from someone to whom she had referred me. The potential client never heard back, and she let Friend know it.

Well. No. I hadn’t received it.

So I go over to the G-mail account, shoof around, and find this woman’s message in Spam. Along with Friend’s message. Google has decided an inquiry about my editing and indexing services is spam. And it also has decided Friend is a spammer; it decided that some time ago, because a number of her messages resided in Google’s spam folder. Come to think of it, so did messages from several friends. Including Friend², a raft of whose recent emails were sitting there unanswered.

I can’t find any lost messages from dozens and dozens of imagined would-be clients, but since there are only 80 spam messages in that account today (most of them solicitations for sex services by women with fake Russian-sounding names), I assume Google sets up the spam box to auto-delete every month or so. Indeed, the earliest message in that folder is dated September 27, so it must hold only about a week or two of back messages. Presumably, then, any messages that went in there over the Long Dry Summer are already gone.

To give you a clue what this means: the woman whose email was rescued by Friend¹ had a project worth somewhere between $1,200 and $2,000.

It appears that Google has shimmied its sticky tentacles into my Apple system. It’s not enough that this mega-monster corporation spies on you at every turn on the Web.  Somehow G-mail has gained access to Apple mail so that, in order for me to get into my MacMail account, I first have to sign into my gmail account!!!!!!!

This occurs whenever one of my Macs is turned off and rebooted. To get back into MacMail, I have to fire up the iMac, look up the complicated password, go to Gmail, paste in the password, and be online there.

I am sorry, but I DO NOT LIKE THAT ONE LITTLE FUCKING BIT!

I don’t know how this came about, but I’m pretty damn sure I didn’t ask for it because I hardly ever go to the gmail.com accounts because I’m not interested in Russian whores from Moscow. Not knowing how it came about, I can’t cancel it because I can’t find any function to make that happen. In fact, I’m pretty sure this is something that was installed unilaterally by Big Brother.

When I discovered this, I killed a couple of hours trying to convince Google that Friend¹ and Friend² are not spam artists, but in the meanwhile realized that there’s no way I can stop it from derailing messages from prospective clients. Didn’t do any good: a day later, everything I’d installed was un-installed, and it was back to intercepting and throwing out messages from the same people.

It looks like the only way I can make this stop is to delete my business’s Google account. That is NOT good, because as I’ve said, every piece of business-related correspondence and marketing has that address on it!

And the time suck! My GOD!!!!

To advise correspondents to use a different address, you have to get EVERY contact into a message’s address line. That’s not so hard — you can send an email to “All Contacts.” BUT…you can’t make Google automatically stick those ±200 addresses into the bcc line. To put all those private addresses into the bcc line, you have to cut them, a few at a time, and paste them into “bcc.” It won’t let you highlight all > cut all > paste all. Nooooo way! You have to select a few at a time to move them over.

Apple’s procedure is even more time-sucky. In MacMail, you have to put every contact in your address book into a “Group.” Then you have to sift through to delete duplications and out-of-date addresses. THEN you can send a message to tell them not to use the old address.

So I was on the phone to an Apple tech at 7:30 this morning when SDXB showed up at the front door and the dogs went screaming BATSH!T and he kept banging at them, driving them MORE batsh!t. No coffee. No breakfast. Not even a minute to clear my mind. She was trying to figure out the simplest way to get 200 Apple contacts into a single e-mail. I finally had to get off the phone to let SDXB in; she said she’d send the instructions, which I can download and try to figure out myself.

Good luck with that.

So it looks to me like the only way to disconnect Google from my private e-mail service is to go online and delete every. single. gmail. account owned now and in the past by me and my various businesses. This includes several accounts I set up for students in freshman comp courses, so there’s an eng101 account, an eng102 account, an eng104 account, an eng235 account, an eng315 account, and on and on and freaking ON. There are accounts for business enterprises that never flew and fell to the earth, stillborn in the nest, YEARS ago.

This is going to take hours. Maybe DAYS. And since Google presumably is already into my Macmail, there’s really no guarantee that deleting those accounts will take Google OUT of my MacMail. In fact, I do not know what will happen if I delete the gmail account that Google thinks I should sign into in order to have access to MacMail. It may simply block me from MacMail permanently…because, of course, you can’t sign into an account that no longer exists.

You know, I think all this stuff, taken together, defines dystopia. We are already living in Hell.

I Knew Better…

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ohhh boyoboy yes indeed I certainly did know better than to take on the job of cleaning up the 19 single-spaced pages of coded passwords and secret instructions about this or that techno-headache.

But those passwords get changed. The websites get out-dated. One’s own sites get moved to new servers or closed down or changed in some strange way. New permutations of social media come online. And after a few years, the whole damn secret-code mess needs to be overhauled.

It’s almost two in the afternoon. I don’t know how many hours I’ve been working on this obnoxious task: several, is all I can say. Several boring, tedious, miserable, frustrating, HAIR-TEARING hours.

It’s a wonder I have any hair left at all, considering the number of boring, tedious, miserable, frustrating, and hair-tearing hours I spend in front of a computer.

The password conundrum is just one of the many indications that he who imagines the computer makes our lives better should get his head examined.

Yes. I do know that I could use one of those password generators to emanate random, supposedly unguessable passwords. But…y’know…if a hacker can’t guess or break into a randomly generated code…neither can you or I. If you lose the master password, if you have a stroke or an accident and you forget the master password, if you croak over…then YOU CAN’T GET INTO YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS. Neither can your heirs, should you shuffle off this mortal coil.

Knowing my own propensities for loss and for forgetfulness, there is noooo way I’m handing over the keys to all my bank accounts to some random password generator.

The problem is that WHEREAS I should’ve had enough sense to have put this vast table of websites and secret codes into an Excel file, I started out with it in a Word table.

Word’s behavior with tables is the main reason we call Word Wyrd. The program is OK with short tables, and with tables that aren’t very complicated, and with tables that have no Asian characters in them, and with tables that have no math symbols…as long as they’re short. That’s the operative term: “short.”

Let your data set grow to, say…oh, 19 pages, and you drive Wyrd berserkers.

Word has a lot in common with a cat. It will purr along, seemingly calm and cooperative, for the longest time. Then when you get about four-fifths of the way through whatever you think you’re doing, WHAKOLA! It will give you such a smack upside your head you’ll never forget that cat.

Twice I had to redo page after page of mind-numbing trash the thing deleted and would not “undo.”

The job would’ve taken enough hours without having to redo and reformat whole sections.

Welp, I managed to get rid of a lot of out-dated and redundant blather. We’re now down from 19 single-spaced pages to…yes…18 single-spaced pages.

 

The Miracles of Connectivity

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So I’ve figured out why it appeared I was ostracized from the current Churchly function’s planning activities.

The folks who were sending out notices had my business gmail address. That thing is set to forward to my ME.com address.

Apple does not have a “spam” function. Instead it presents you with three folders: an inbox, a “trash” folder, and a “junk” folder. What exactly is the point of TWO folders for unwelcome mail? That escapes logic of any kind.

WhatEVER. Apparently there’s a difference between “trash” and “junk,” but I don’t know what it is. I use the “rules” function to derail incoming that I don’t want to look at right this minute or that I wish never to see into “trash.”

During the most recent rash of MacHeadaches, one of the telephone techs noted that when you see incoming that’s obviously an ad, you don’t even have to open it: all you have to do is highlight and click “junk”…and forevermore, every incoming from that address is disappeared into the “junk” file.

Okay. So some piece of advertising garbage comes in, and that’s what I do.

BUT…apparently this piece of advertising garbage had been sent to the business address and forwarded from there. So MacMail picks up the CE Desk address and derails EVERY PIECE OF INCOMING that is addressed to that gmail account!!!!!!!

AND…that explains where all the business went this summer… It did seem odd that not ONE current or prospective client got in touch.

It’s taken almost two hours to undo that mess.

At least I’m not suicidally depressed anymore. Now I’m just mad as a cat.

Day 1: De-Computerizing Regime

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So today I took it upon myself to try to break the not-so-benign computer habit. This is easier said than done: apparently I’m constitutionally incapable of not checking the email first thing in the morning.

My son is almost out of minutes on his phone, so that’s my excuse: if he has something to say about the dog crisis, he’ll say it by email. And he did: more about which under separate cover.

I regard this de-computerizing scheme as akin to decluttering: when too much junk accrues, you need to shovel out your life. Get rid of STUFF.

LOL! Just think in terms of “digital stuff” throughout this spiel…

At any rate, by not turning on the computer but instead getting off my duff, I got a lot of STUFF done…and done by noon, believe it or not:

• Clean pool
• Swim
• Deposit check
• Send receipt
• Update spreadsheet
• Drive to pool store

Explain to DIFFERENT pool store clerk that an orange reading on the pH test means the water is too HIGH on acid, not too low on acid. Today’s pool guy manages to grasp that concept. Why the regular guy did not escapes me, since it’s the most basic of all possible basic concepts. He agrees the water needs a base added to it; peddles some soda ash to me. I also buy a case of shock-treat packets.

• Onward to the paint store: buy a gallon of primer, a gallon of gray paint, and a quart of white semigloss for the trim I inevitably will butch up when I repaint the hall
• Onward to Total Wine: buy a small bottle of bourbon, which should last another two or three months
• Dump half the package of soda ash into the pool; reflect on how much I dislike working with soda ash
• Finish writing the present scene of the noveloid; reflect on how to get the only fully likeable character out of the predicament he’s about to fall into
• Eat myself stupid with broiled open-face sandwiches chased by a bowl of ice cream

All of this, accomplished by noon. Of late, what I’ve gotten done by noon has been…

• Browse several news sites
• Write a blog post, maybe (maybe not)
• Play several online games, over and over obsessively
• Fart around with the email
• Write a post on Quora
• Write post or comments on NextDoor
• Fart around on FaceBook…

So at least something got done today. For a change.

Whenever I can get to it, my plan is to paint the hallway and touch up the interior trim. Some years ago, I got the bright idea of painting the hall this kind of rusted-pumpkin orange color. It’s not as hideous as it sounds: matter of fact, I’ve liked it quite a lot. The north hallway wall runs up into the dining room, so that wall serves as an accent wall in there, and then the wall on the south side matches it. And you can see the color through the archway from the living room, where it serves as a kind of accent in there.

But whereas the other colors in the house have stood the test of time handsomely, this orange business hasn’t held up as well. I’m really pretty tired of it. And it’s dark.

There’s a (very expensive!) red-orange light in there: orange light just gets soaked up by orange paint, so really that light just barely makes the hallway navigable. My son wants the light, and so he can have that; we’ll replace mine with one that emits a nice white glow..

Gray is the new orange… Permutations of gray are the height of style these days. Amazingly, my taste was way ahead of its time when I painted this house: the bedroom and the accent wall in the office are matte gray; the fireplace brickwork and hearth are semigloss gray, a very pretty soft color called “silver” by the now-defunct designer Alexander Julian — who apparently also was well ahead of his time.

When you look at the various designer magazines, you see a whole bunch of colors that are not even faintly gray dubbed “gray”: hues that I call “cream” and “taupe” and even “beige.” And lo! There’s the subtle, smokey green of the living room: “gray.” Hilarious!

One thing is clear: replace the orange hall with Alexander Julian’s “silver,” and presto-changeo: the house will be at the forefront of interior fashion. 😀

Besides the fact that I’ve grown weary of the orange hallway and the orange wall up the north end of the dining/family room, I want to update the place a bit because I’m beginning to think about selling. The influx of bums, drugs, and crime is causing a lot of unrest among the residents. Latest news is a large apartment complex for “homeless families” is going in about a mile down Conduit of Blight. That’s in addition to the three- or four-story homeless apartment complex Catholic Social Services is installing right next door to a soon-to-be-formerly upscale infill development.

Supposedly these will get people off the streets. One surely does hope so. They’re better than the shelters we used to have around the Encanto District, which would put up transients at night and then throw them out at dawn, leaving them to wander around our neighborhood, ride the buses, and doze in the library until such time as the flop opened again that night.

The National Law Center for Homelessness and Poverty says the main causes of homelessness in America are insufficient income and lack of affordable housing.

According to the most recent annual survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, major cities across the country report that top causes of homelessness among families were: (1) lack of affordable housing, (2) unemployment, (3) poverty, and (4) low wages, in that order. The same report found that the top four causes of homelessness among unaccompanied individuals were (1) lack of affordable housing, (2) unemployment, (3) poverty, (4) mental illness and the lack of needed services, and (5) substance abuse and the lack of needed services.

Presumably, then, these housing developments will address one (1) of the four or five leading causes of US homelessness. But…we still have the remaining issues. What is to be done about the corrosive state of poverty, about the right-to-work-for-nothing laws in Arizona, about the lack of mental health care, and about the drug abuse?

My expectation? Nothing.

What will be done about the fundamental issues is nothing. The practical consequences of those terrible societal problems will be dropped in our laps, where they can remain invisible to our city fathers who live on the side of Camelback Mountain, in the balmy reaches of Paradise Valley, in the high-rent environs of Arcadia, or even out in Scottsdale.

{sigh} I love my home and its spacious yard and the friendly neighbors. And I can’t afford to buy anything comparable in a safer part of the city. But…I’m afraid it’s time to think about moving to a smaller, lesser house, or else moving out to Sun City — which, because no one wants to live there, is a lot cheaper than central city areas and newer, fancier outlying developments. At a certain age, you’re really too old to cope with drug addicts and bums in the alleys, thieves watching your home for an opportunity to break in, and the inevitable German shepherd.

Still…how d’you like Chloe?

Think I should adopt her?

Or maybe Chance? As a male, he’d probably get along with the bossy corgis a little better than Chloe…

Heh heh…just what I need: three dogs to have to take care of! 😀