Monica

For the past couple weeks -- but not before then -- both Firefox and Chrome have been randomly seizing up on me on my Mac at home (running Snow Leopard). When this happens, first that application and then (about 10-15 seconds later) the entire machine become unresponsive, presenting the spinning beachball of doom. After a minute or so, but occasionally longer, things go back to normal. Sometimes I see a Chrome pop-up about an unresponsive site flash by. When this happens and I can watch in the Activity Monitor, neither CPU nor memory is pegged. Sometimes this happens once a day; sometimes it happens a couple times in an hour. It's becoming a pretty big usability problem.

All browsers are up to date (and not beta versions). This doesn't happen on my work machine (Win7). Dani says this happens to him on his brand-new iMac with maxed-out memory, but only with Firefox. (So he uses Chrome -- problem solved.) For me on my dusty old Mac Mini, it's happening with both browsers. I can't figure out what changed -- why is this happening now?

Googling told me that disabling the Flash player extension/addon/plugin/whatever could fix this, but it didn't. I've also looked through extensions and disabled anything I'm not actively using; it's pretty bare-bones. I do have several userscripts, none written by me, but I don't see anything glaringly suspicious in their code. I've already disabled the ones I can live without at least for a while, but a couple of them really are critical. I'm not finding any help on the Apple forums.

I've been thinking about upgrading my hardware anyway, as even before this started my Mac was starting to get sluggish sometimes. I bought it in something like 2009, so that's not too surprising. But the Mini hasn't been updated since October 2014, so this is the wrong time to buy -- something better should be coming before too much longer.

Meanwhile, I'd like to diagnose and fix this problem. But I'm out of ideas. :-(

I've been thinking about updating my streaming. You can help. :-)

Apple TV (forthcoming) and Roku are both attractive and are clearly competitors. Both offer voice input, and "hey Siri, find $movie_title" would be way, way easier than using a remote control or phone to type a search, perhaps multiple times (once per channel/app). How well it works, and whether Siri will make it hard to find free alternatives to things in the Apple store, are open questions. I do not care one whit about playing games on my TV.

I have a first-edition Roku ("Roku 1", except it was just "Roku" then) and its user interface is pretty good, though I haven't gotten software updates for a year or two now (no longer supported) so I don't know what the modern UI looks like. One thing that I find annoying on my Roku is that you can only rewind or fast-forward in "steps" that are about 10-15 seconds apart, and when you jump it pauses to contemplate its navel before resuming (at which point you find out if you hit the spot you meant). So advancing to the end of the opening credits or backing up to hear that dialogue again is tedious and should be seamless. I much prefer the conventional rewind/fast-forward of my DVD and TiVo, where you see sped-up video as it goes by.

I mentioned TiVo, which streams. But TiVo's UI for streaming is really bad for people with less-than-stellar vision and measly little 42" TVs. If I can't read the titles from my chair, it's not very useful.

I also have a (new) Chromecast, an inexpensive experiment to see if that would do the job. I like it in principle, and you can't beat either the price or the footprint, but I've run into two issues. One is that it needs my phone's WiFi to be on and that sucks battery. That's probably livable because I keep a spare battery charged. The other is that Chromecast is only as good as the phone apps that drive it, and I really, really need a better Netflix app and haven't been able to find it.

The Netflix Android app is all about the eye candy. When viewing either my queue or search results, it shows me the cover art for each title -- but not the names in plain old text. Consider cover art, three to the row, scaled for a phone. I can't see that, and the app doesn't support zoom. I've found no setting to toggle between cover art and a text list. I've searched the app store for "Netflix" hoping to find third-party apps, but no luck so far. (By the way, the Crackle app has the same problem.)

Also, rewinding or fast-forwarding by moving a YouTube-style pointer really, really stinks. Netflix, where are the rewind/fast-forward buttons?

I'm mentioning Netflix a lot because that's really the only thing I stream from now. Roku has hundreds of channels but you have to interact with them individually, so I never do -- a unified search, on the other hand, would provide an entry to that. Since I'm already paying for Netflix I'm otherwise only interested in the free ones; I had thought that included Hulu but the phone app suggests that it's all paid now.

Dear readers who are technologically way ahead of me, any input?

We sometimes hear about mandatory evacuations because of storms (hurricanes, winter storms, etc). Hearing about one a couple of years ago that was announced on a Saturday morning prompted me to ask this question about evacuations on Shabbat. Now the question of timing has come up.

I've been fortunate to never have to evacuate my home or city. (Buildings yes, but that's different.) I have this impression, perhaps informed by Hollywood rather than reality, that announcements get broadcast far and wide and then police or National Guard or whoever start going through the area making sure people clear out, and you maybe have an hour or two to get underway at best. But then I thought about the logistics of that, and I'm wondering if you really have several hours, maybe the better part of a day, to do your prep and get out.

I'm not talking about cases where the problem is immediate (there's just been an earthquake, the missile will strike in half an hour, etc), but about other cases where the threat is dire enough that there is an evacuation but it might not be "drop everything and go right now" -- the storm is making landfall tonight, cases where you have (or think you have) time to get everybody home from work/school so you can leave together, pack your car, contact people outside the affected area to arrange for shelter, etc. I realize it's a good idea to get out as soon as you can, if nothing else because of traffic, but we know people don't always do that (and can't always, if not everybody is together to start with).

So for those of you who've been through these kinds of evacuations, or who know more about it than I do, what's the timeline usually like? How long do people take to clear out?

For the past few years I've used Beer Advocate, and specifically its rating system, to keep track of beers I've sampled. I am not an expert; one number for an overall rating is just my speed. I'm not interested in breaking that down by look, smell, mouth feel, and so on. (Frankly, I don't care what it looks like anyway, only how it tastes.)

They've now changed their system to take away that one-number rating, requiring breakdowns. I can just use the same number for all of them, but that's hacky and more work, especially if I decide to change a rating later. (I suppose it could be userscripted.)

The value of a site like Beer Advocate, rather than just keeping a file, is having access to the descriptions (including categories like "winter warmer" and "amber ale" and suchlike), other items from those breweries, and, out of curiosity, the variance between my rating and the average for people who rated that beer. Also, I want to be able to see and add ratings from multiple locations, so if I just used a file it would have to live in the cloud I guess.

An Android app would be an acceptable alternative, if one exists.

Any suggestions?

(And yes, I would have left this feedback for Beer Advocate if there were any visible means of doing so. Apparently I haven't contributed enough to the site to be allowed to comment.)

Dear LJ Brain Trust,

A member of our minyan has a degenerative vision problem and can no longer use even a very-large-print prayer book. (She was absent for a while and returned this week with a guide dog.) She realized that she didn't know as many of the prayers by heart as she thought she did, so I'm spending some time with her to teach her by ear and we'll scare up some recordings for her, but memorization isn't really the ideal solution. Sure, people can and do memorize the core, common prayers, but it's hard to memorize everything, and sometimes there are seasonal changes, so you really want to be able to read the prayer book.

I once saw somebody who used a Braille prayer book, but at the time I didn't ask him how that worked and he's since passed away. Braille is, as I understand it, a letter-by-letter notation system with an extra layer (called "condensed", I've heard) where common words have their own symbols instead of being spelled out. (Like American Sign Language, except I have the impression that the balance between spelled-out and condensed is different. I may be wrong about that.) But -- all of that kind of assumes a particular alphabet, right? So how would Hebrew be rendered in Braille -- do they transliterate it and then Braille-encode that, or does the reader have to learn a different Braille language to match the different alphabet, or what?

I'd like to be able to help her get a prayer book she can read. I don't think she's ready to learn a second Braille language (she's still working on the first).

And a related question: she has an iPad; are there Braille peripherals for that like (I understand) there are for desktop computers? Is "digital copy of the book + iPad + peripheral" a practical alternative to the massive paper tome? (She would use technology on Shabbat for that purpose.)

I have published authors among my readers; can any of you answer this question about how publishers view prior self-publishing? If you self-publish on Amazon and then later seek a conventional publication contract, are you out of luck because of the prior publication? (If you can provide a supported answer, rather than speculation, I encourage you to do it there. And if you do it in the next few days you might pick up a bounty, if you care about Stack Exchange reputation.)

So, LJ seems to have rolled out some fugly new design, but I immediately clicked on "go back to old version" and that fixed at least most of it. (I haven't tried my reading page yet, nor posting comments; both of those are things they've broken in the past.) But the text in the form on the "post entry" page is now light gray instead of black, and I can't figure out from the page source what CSS I need to adjust to fix that. Has anybody already solved this? This is barely legible for me. I don't post here as much as I used to, but I still do some, assuming accessibility doesn't drive me out.

Often when (or after :-( ) shoveling snow I notice that, despite my best posture efforts, the shovel's handle is just too darn short. Bending at the waist invites lower-back complaints later, but sometimes I just can't do it all by bending at the knees. Sometimes I can "shovel" by (mostly) pushing snow around, but when I've got to lift and move snow, I become quite aware of the shortcomings of the tool. This has been true for every snow shovel I have ever used.

I'm 5'3". This has to be an even bigger problem for people who are much taller than me, right? So... what's the secret? Are there long-handled shovels out there? Do tall people just crouch more when shoveling? Inquiring minds want to know.

Dear LazyWeb, please guide me gently into the 21st century.

As part of another blog project, I need to be able to host a handful of images (for use in <img> tags in posts) in a way that's not clearly tied to my identity. (This blog is separate.) I'm doing the blog on Dreamwidth, which doesn't offer image hosting. I don't really trust LJ's long-term reliability, so setting up another account here just to use the scrapbook doesn't seem ideal. G+ is tied to my name, as is my personal web space. I don't do Facebook.

What I don't want is "photo albums" and "browse all our hosted images" and stuff like that. It looks like Flickr really wants to be a browsable photo album. I just want a place to stick a few images in an otherwise-ignored corner of the internet, for deep-linking in some blog posts. They're not secret or anything; they're just uninteresting to most people.

Where do I do that these days?

Dear LJ brain trust,

What is the current wisdom about special-purpose email forwarding? I need an email address that is not my own main one, whose purpose in life is just to forward email to me (I don't need outbound anything), for which traffic will be very low and probably infrequent -- maybe a message every month or two, maybe less. Because of that last I don't want to set it up on some service where I have to go check the email, hence the forwarding. I could define a pobox alias (I already use pobox), but I'd prefer an extra degree of separation. I do not have my own domain name or mail server. Free is good; cheap is possible.

Thanks.

When one cat in a household spends time at the vet it's not unusual for the other cat(s) to react badly when that cat comes home. I assume the cat picks up foreign smells ("you've been with other animals, aiieeee!") or something. Erik, Baldur, and Embla grew out of this (presumably as the frequency of such visits increased), but I vaguely recall that the snarling and hissing would last a few hours.

Giovanni is still distressed this morning over Orlando's trip to the vet yesterday. How long does this last for other people's cats?

My trusty iBook has died and the Apple Genius declared a hard-drive failure. Apple no longer sells those, though I could go looking for a third-party solution and that's not off the table yet. But maybe it's time to move to a machine that can support an OS newer than 10.4 and a Firefox newer than 3.6, so I'm considering other options too.

This is very much a secondary machine, for traveling, going to a class or meeting where I want computing power and not just paper, using in parts of the house other than my desk, and occasionally for taking to work if I need access to personal computing during the work day. I don't do a lot of that last, but it's happened. The iBook was also useful to me during a multi-day DSL outage; I could at least take the laptop to the library or bookstore for access. So I use the machine sporadically, but when I do use it it's important enough that I don't want to do without.

Apple's current laptop offerings are too pricy for me -- I'm sure they'd be great machines if I used my laptop all the time, but that's not my use case. It looks like used or refurbished Macbooks (just plain Macbook, the laptop Apple sold until 2010) could be an option; if you have experience with those, please tell me what gotchas lurk there.

I'm talking about Macs because that's what I have on my desk at home and some consistency of user experience (and software) is useful. (Among things, having the Soncino talmud/etc collection on my hard disk is useful. I bought that for Mac; I don't want to rebuy for Windows.) I'm willing to consider Windows options but I don't know that space yet.

Alternatively, tablets are appealing -- more portable and "instant-on" and just generally more convenient. I've used Dani's iPad and it's very nice. Just one problem: they don't seem to be designed for composing text documents and that's an important use case for me. For example, I often compose blog posts or other documents offline and then post/email/share them later. This calls for a text editor and access to the file system. If one is internet-connected then solutions might exist (SSH to a Unix shell was suggested to me recently), but we can't assume a network connection. (I actually don't know if there's an SSH application for the iPad.)

(The other problem with tablets is the keyboard, but there exist add-ons for that. And ok, a third problem is that everything these days seems to have a glossy display and I much prefer matte, but I think I'm doomed there.)

Dani commented that what I really want is a Linux tablet. Yeah, now that you mention it... is anybody working on that? Can Android tablets meet my needs? Which ones should I be paying attention to? (~10" screen rather than 7" required.)

So I'll be doing my Google research, but I'm also interested in hearing opinions from y'all. Thanks.

Edit: I think I've got something adequate now. The indentation of comments in threads isn't quite as clear as I'd like, but it'll do. It's the price I have to pay for a legible font. Thanks everyone! Suggestions for ways to improve this are still welcome, but it's not as urgent as it was. (This wasn't how I wanted to spend my evening. Thanks LJ...) End edit.

Thanks for all the comments on the previous entry. I've read them and tried the suggested changes and for some reason I can't view my journal in other styles using the standard URL settings. Bizarre. Also, I tried posting what follows by email and it didn't show up; if it does later, please ignore it.

I chose the style for my journal and reading page because it has two important properties. First, it maximizes the space spent on actual content, omitting stuff like sidebar links, calendars, indented text with outdented userpics, and so on. I don't care about that and I don't want to give up the real-estate. Second, it isolates individual entries, so one humongous picture or ultra-long link doesn't hose the entire page, only that entry on it. (I think the relevant implementation detail here is the use of tables. Not sure.) Anyway, it actually took some digging to accomplish those two simple goals, many years ago; most of the styles available at the time I did this were "artistic" and IMO unusable.

That style's handling of individual-entry pages is poor. It doesn't show nesting for comments (essential!), and if I recall correctly it doesn't show userpics (also pretty important). So while I use a custom style for my journal, I've checked the "use the site default" option for individual entries to get around those problems. That doesn't give me the colors I want, but it'll do.

Now that style is broken. :-(

So far as I'm aware, I cannot set one style for journal/reading pages and another one for individual entries. So if the site default no longer works I need a single style that works everywhere. There may well now be such a style; it'll take many hours crawling through the gazillions of LJ styles to try to find out.

Does anybody happen to know a style that meets all of the following requirements?

For journal and reading pages:

• Uses most of the browser width for entry content (no sidebars/multi-column layouts).
• Prevents one wide entry from messing up the whole page.
• Shows poster userpics.
• Has, or can be configured with, a reasonable font size and face. My current style is fine.
• Lets me change colors (I think they all do?).

For individual-entry pages:

• Has, or can be configured with, a reasonable font size and face. The old site default is fine.
• Threads comments.
• Shows poster and commenter userpics.
• Makes all the functionality you'd expect (like editing comments) available.

I don't care about S1 versus S2; I just want something that works, ideally without spending a bazillion hours learning the LJ style system and hacking something to fit. Any ideas?

Many thanks!