Monica

Well that's disappointing

2023-08-29T02:42:04Z

Me: Opens help chat with Netflix (there is no email option).
Chatbot: Title?
Me: Accessibility options for choosing shows

Chatbot: Sends links to irrelevant articles I already had to click past to get to the contact link.
Me: Clicks "chat with an agent".

(Opening handshake.)

Agent: Can you elaborate the issue that you are facing?

Me: When browsing shows, either on my TV or on your web site, you only show graphics for the shows. I don't see very well and the art is often hard to see, particularly if the show uses small or fancy fonts. Is there a way to see a text list? You used to have that for the web site (but not the TV) but that's been gone for a while. I do not want to have to hover over or navigate into each thing when browsing -- too many to do that. I'm looking for a way to scan a list of titles I can actually see.

Agent: The list is not available anymore

Me: Is there some accessibility setting I can change? It's really frustrating to not be able to navigate your offerings.

Agent: I understand, but there is no setting

Me: Thank you. I understand. How can I escalate my concern? I know that you cannot fix it but somebody at Netflix should be concerned about ADA/accessibility. How do I reach that person?

Agent: There is no one that can resolve it. I can pass on the suggestion and the feedback to our team. And they will look into it.

I suspect I know how that will go. I have the impression that all the streaming services are anti-accessible like this, though I've only done cursory browsing. They probably all think it's ok because everybody else does it. Netflix has had this problem for a while; I don't often use the service because of that, and every time I go to watch something I am reminded of how hostile it is. (In case you're wondering, my Netflix subscription comes bundled with something else; otherwise I probably would have dropped it by now because of this.)

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Trope Trainer

2021-10-08T02:17:51Z

Trope Trainer is a software package for working with Hebrew cantillation (trope). You can use it to view, listen to, or print the weekly Torah reading (or parts thereof), weekday readings, holiday readings, etc. As the "trainer" in the name implies, one of its purposes is to teach the cantillation system -- or, I should say, systems, because there are regional and other variations.

I didn't use it for that because I already know (my community's) cantillation system; while occasional curiosity might lead me to ask it "hey, how does the Lithuanian tradition chant this?", in practice I haven't. No, what I use Trope Trainer for is to print legible copies with the vowel markers and trope markers. These are useful for practicing and, when I know in advance so I can print it, for checking the reader during the service, because the scroll used for readings does not have vowels and trope marks. (There is always somebody following along during a Torah reading to correct the reader in case of mistakes.)

Back in August, somebody in my minyan asked me to be his checker the following Shabbat, so I launched the program to print a copy. But the program was stuck at "checking for updates", a state that had previously passed so quickly that I wasn't used to seeing it. If I cancelled, the program crashed. Repeatedly. A little digging revealed the probable cause: the company went out of business and their domain isn't there any more. Presumably the software is checking a now-dead URL and the programmers didn't handle failures. (There are other reasons the service might not be available, so this isn't just "didn't consider the company might die".)

I asked on Judaism Codidact about alternatives and people made some useful suggestions, but cutting/pasting text from elsewhere into Google Docs, while it works, is inelegant and also produced some formatting glitches.

My too-clever hind-brain said to me: hey, if the software is trying to reach a particular URL, you could intercept it (edit the hosts file) and then try to figure out what to send back (though you would have to learn how to write a web service, but hey, that seems doable?). This is the point where people who know more than I do say things like "Wireshark", which I installed but couldn't figure out how to use to identify what it was trying to contact. I asked for clues on Power Users, where someone helpfully asked what the program does if it's not connected to the Internet. Bingo -- the programmers didn't anticipate "our site is down" but did anticipate "not connected", presumably because some in the observant world do avoid the Internet.

But this required pulling the network cable, because apparently there's no way on a Mac to say "yes I know you have an Ethernet cable right there, but please humor me and ignore it". I don't want to pull the cable every time I need Trope Trainer; that's too coarse a solution. This is a job for a firewall, but the firewall built into Mac OS only intercepts inbound traffic (or responses to it). I needed to block initiation of outbound traffic from one specific application. Power Users led me to Lulu, which does the job nicely -- and seems useful anyway as an additional layer of defense against malware that phones home (which is most of it, right?). Also, I don't mind having to authorize Java updates and stuff like that.

I didn't want to rely on a hobbled Trope Trainer forever, so I started working my way through the weekly portions, saving PDFs. In the future I can print from those, after all, and can let the software die.

And then I moved to a new machine that can't run the software, which dealt the final blow to Trope Trainer. But going through all this did lead me to that useful firewall, so I don't mind.

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Sierra to Big Sur in one step

2021-10-08T01:01:48Z

I have a new Mac Mini (yay!). My old one was running OS 10.12 (Sierra); the new one is running 11.6 (Big Sur). Some things are different and some parts of the transition were just bizarre,¹ but it wasn't as jarring as I thought it would be.

Except for installed applications. Back in Catalina (what was that, 10.15?), 32-bit applications stopped working. I don't know of a way to take inventory (one of several reasons I didn't update the OS on that machine). I used Migration Assistant to bring my existing stuff over to the new machine and then walked through the applications to see which ones would still run. Some, like Emacs and Paintbrush, I needed to download new copies of. Some I would need to buy new copies of (but nothing important enough to do so). Some are just plain dead -- no 64-bit version is available. In this last category are Trope Trainer, which I already had reasons to abandon that I should write about separately, and Encore, the music-typesetting program I use(d). The latter came as a surprise.

Solving the Encore problem isn't urgent but it is important. I'm not doing a lot of music composition and arrangement these days, but I have years' worth of files in Encore's native binary format, or in that of its predecessor, Rhapsody. (Encore reads both.) I would like to not lose those source files. Encore can export MIDI, but exporting MIDI and then importing it into something else produces poor results, plus you lose all the typesetting cleanup and text.

This is the problem with closed file formats. If only one program (or suite) can read a format and that product line goes away, you're stuck.

I already re-bought Encore once, when I moved from Windows to Mac ages ago. I reluctantly checked their site to see what it would cost to get a modern version, and found that they punted with Catalina -- their site says "don't upgrade to Catalina if you want to run our software", which was practical advice a few years ago but isn't now. So Encore is dead, it looks like.

(And this is one of the reasons I don't make major OS updates on machines I care about. Had I updated the old machine to Catalina back when everybody was pushed to do so, I'd have been left hanging with no rollback option short of a brute-force recovery from backup.)

I don't know what my recovery options are for not having to do a lot of typesetting by hand again. I will of course export those MIDI files on the old machine (better than nothing), but I hope I can find something else that reads Encore format and can then be saved as something more portable (MusicXML?).

I can, of course, continue to use the old machine. As with the last time I migrated to a new machine, I've set up the old one with remote desktop. As with the last time, I suspect that will work for a while but not forever.

Edited to add: I was wrong; Encore does export MusicXML, so that should give me a path forward. (I was looking in the wrong place.)

¹ For example, my browsers retained their state, including tabs, but Chrome-based browsers (Chrome and Brave) lost their extensions. I had to look them up and reinstall them and then reconfigure them (and reauthorize all my userscripts). Firefox, on the other hand, brought its extensions over with no problems. All of this is data on disk; does Chrome actively disable migrating with extensions?

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brain trust: talk to me about hosted content?

2021-05-04T23:59:52Z

I've written lots of stuff in a variety of places online -- (LJ to) Dreamwidth and Medium and SE and one-offs in handwritten HTML and (heaven help us) Twitter and probably some others. Some of it was transient, but some of it is stuff I'd like to keep available and together.

I have a domain and the hosting company offers what I gather are standard tools, of which Wordpress is the one that keeps coming up in searches about setting up simple web sites.

My domain isn't empty, but there's not a lot there. I have things with published URLs that need to not get disrupted, but I'd otherwise like to have a web site with some of the basics ("about" page, contact form) and, mainly, this collection of things I've written. I'm going to have to curate the things I've written anyway (I kind of gave up on the idea of bulk-importing 20 years' worth of Livejournal/Dreamwidth), so I don't mind if I have to post things one at a time. I'm going to be rereading them one at a time to decide their fates, after all.

I'd like it if whatever receives my words of (cough) wisdom spoke both HTML and Markdown. I will, of course, want to be able to tag those posts.

I need it to have a time-based archive (by month or whatever). I'd like tags to work as tags and not just visual labels -- that is, you should be able to click on a tag to see other things with that tag. I think all this is "blog 101" and tools generally do that stuff.

I need to be able to easily back up the content.

I don't know what other questions I should be asking myself.

I've read some of the "getting started with Wordpress" stuff on their site, but before I go much farther: will that meet my needs? (I can't tell about input formats and backups, in particular.) What else should I be looking at? What decisions should I be making before I install anything? What's the easiest path that would probably work for my (I think) modest needs?

Update: Thank you to the several people who pointed out that what I need (and the name for it) is static site generator. Further pointers still welcome.

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quarantine rambles

2020-04-23T02:11:50Z

Working from home seems to be mostly going ok for my company. We have several standing "coffee break" video chats each week for the human connection and are using video more for other meetings. We have learned how to add custom background images to Microsoft Teams and this is a source of amusement. (I would like to find some from Babylon 5, particularly images from (a) Minbar and (b) inside the station, but have had no luck so far.) My team has a new person who started a few weeks ago, so he started in quarantine and hasn't yet been to the office. I'm his mentor, so I'm trying to make sure he's getting all the support and human connection he needs. The situation seems roughest on the people who live alone, though the ones with small children at home have challenges too. I'm fortunate to have Dani and the cat.

I have read a little more fiction than usual, some of it made available for free by authors because of the quarantine. Thank you! One that I just finished is Dragon of Glass by Zoe Chant, a delightful, lightweight novel about a transplant from another world and the woman who released him; watching him try to fit into our world is a lot of fun. Tor is making the Murderbot novellas available this week for free (leading up to a novel release next month); I'd read the first a while back but hadn't read the others yet, so this is good timing. I also have a gift waiting from a Kickstarter for a different book (while you're waiting and stuck at home, here...). I also just read (not free) The Body in the Building, a novella by a friend and fellow SE refugee. The point-of-view character is an architect who discovers problems with a major project, and then discovers that those problems were only the tip of an iceberg of bigger problems... I figured out the mystery before the reveal but also fell for some misdirection, so neither too easy nor too hard.

I have been spending more time in the kitchen. Yes I'm cooking all our meals at home aside from very occasional takeout from local restaurants, but also: with the food supply being sometimes erratic, I've upped the produce deliveries and am doing some low-key preserving. I've never canned and don't have the equipment, but I'm pickling things (to refrigerate, not shelf-stable). So far I've pickled eggs, beets, cauliflower, and jalapenos, and will do some carrots next. I also plan to dry some fruit, dried fruit not requiring refrigeration. (I'm trying to keep the fridge full.) I haven't been able to get bread flour since Pesach ended, so I guess I'll try making bread with all-purpose flour. (Also haven't been able to get rye flour.) I would like to get some more seedlings for container gardening, but I don't know if I want to go to Home Depot for them and nobody delivers. (Insert rant about how Home Depot gets to sell plants because they sell stuff for home repair, but local nurseries had to close.)

Someone I know indirectly from Mi Yodeya suggested a book and a series of videos on Reb Nachman that look very personally relevant. (I've read one chapter of the book and seen one of the videos so far; more soon.) I joined an online talmud class (by R' Ethan Tucker of Hadar). A friend pointed out to me that since we're all stuck at home anyway, synagogues in other cities are just as available to me as my local ones. There's one in DC that seems like a good fit for me. Closer to home, my synagogue's two rabbis and cantor each hold a weekly open chat on Zoom, so I'll get to see my rabbi that way tomorrow.

Our choir director sends out daily music selections with accompanying (short) history essays. I'm enjoying these.

I have barely watched any TV.

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community-driven Q&A

2019-12-31T04:22:04Z

I've been spending some of my free time working with two open-source projects that are building new, community-driven Q&A platforms. (Yes, two. We're cooperating, including on common interfaces, but have some different goals. We didn't know about each other right off.) I don't have useful programming skills to contribute, but I'm helping with other aspects, including functional design, some feature design, and general cat-herding (on the larger one). Also, one of them asked me to serve as doc lead. :-)

Codidact is a platform for networks of sites on specific topics, much like Stack Exchange is a network of sites. Lots of (current and former) moderators and users from Stack Exchange are involved. (No I did not start this project; I was recruited after it had started.) We're talking about better management of comments/discussion/feedback, and about answer scoring that takes controversy into account, and tying user privileges not to a single "reputation" number but to related activity on the site. We're also talking about allowing more per-site customization, the trick there being to support customization while preserving the sense of an overall network. We have a wiki, a draft functional spec, a front-end design framework, and a forum where we're hashing out a lot of the details. I hope we'll see a database schema soon.

As you can infer from all that, we don't have running code yet. However, we have one community that has been pretty much destroyed on its previous platform, and the Codidact team lead had previously built a prototype Q&A platform, so Writing has a temporary site now, as a stopgap and to keep the community together, while waiting for Codidact to be ready. (Site introduction.)

The team building the Codidact platform will also run an instance (a network of sites). Others are free to take the software and run their own instances if they want to follow different policies or prefer to have full control.

TopAnswers is being built by a few people from the DBA site on SE. They are being much more agile than Codidact is; they have a running site already, which gets improvements on a near-daily basis. Chat is tightly integrated; they actually built chat first so they'd have a place to coordinate building Q&A. They have an interesting voting model where people who've gained more stars (reputation-equivalent) can cast multiple votes on a post, essentially giving experts (to the extent that stars = expertise) optional weighted votes. They also integrate both meta posts and blog posts into a site's main question list instead of isolating those types of content elsewhere. I find this idea intriguing and am advocating it for Codidact too. (The link I provided is to the network-wide meta site. If you choose "Databases" from the selector at the top, you'll see what a "regular" site would look like.)

TopAnswers has a blog post laying out its high-level goals. I wrote some stuff too, from a "consumer's" perspective.

When some sort of incorporation is needed, both projects are planning on going the non-profit route (a la WikiMedia), so that the communities, not profit-seeking, remain central. Right now I think both are running on donated hosting.

Both approaches look interesting to me, and I can see some communities preferring one over the other. I'll be interested in seeing how things work out -- what ends up getting implemented on each, what lessons both positive and negative we learn from past experience, what changes stick, and where individual communities end up being active.

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seeking tools help (Madcap Flare, git, Jenkins, HTML)

2019-03-29T21:34:13Z

Two of my recent tech-writing questions on Writing Stack Exchange currently have large bounties (from someone else). I'd really like answers to both of these, and if you're into that sort of thing and can answer in the next few days, you might be able to collect a bounty. I have some leads now on both, but not developed solutions.

Adding tags to documentation built in Flare? -- I want to be able to tag topics in our large doc set and have those tags show up on the individual pages, so that somebody could click on (say) "kerberos" and see all of the topics that we've tagged thus. Think of it like blog tags. I learned in a tweet this afternoon that Flare has something called "concept markers" that emit "see also" sections; that's on the right track, it sounds like, but I don't want see-also bloat so it'll need some modification.

How can I highlight changes in HTML output from Flare, based on branch diff? -- people can look at the source diff on BitBucket, but what I really want is for the built HTML to be marked where the diffs are somehow. It seems like there should be a way to take the git diffs, use them to locally modify the (XML) source to insert, I dunno, changebars or font color changes or something, and then do the build. So far I have a pointer to diff2html, which looks like it will produce an HTML report of the diffs separate from the built documentation.

Do any of my readers have relevant know-how?

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bad IT day :-(

2018-11-29T02:37:58Z

Because of corporate changes (spun off from one company and merged with another), we have to remove our last dependencies on the old company's IT infrastructure. In this last round, they move our email and our (Windows) login accounts to a new domain. My migration was today.

They've sent lots of email about this over the last few months, but they left out some important details. A coworker who's been through it alerted us that they would be uninstalling and reinstalling Office, for no particularly good reason that I can see. (I mean, there's a good reason if you were on the wrong version or something, but I moved from 2013 to 2013.) The only hint they gave was telling us that we'd need to update our email signatures. Yeah, a bit more than that... maybe most people don't customize Outlook much, but I have to for accessibility. So a couple weeks ago, after finding no way to export all my client settings, I walked through all the configuration panels taking screenshots. Today I reapplied them all -- and there's a critical thing that's still broken and I haven't found a solution. I started customizing the web interface instead to see if that can meet my needs, but am feeling the lack of keyboard shortcuts. Maybe that's userscriptable. Dammit, Outlook is a PITA sometimes but it was working and now it's not.

They also created new user profiles for us. They said they would move "your files" over, but coworkers warned that this was incomplete. My browsers are very important to me, so I did my best to save bookmarks (easy), tabs (reduces to bookmarks), and session state. Chrome came through just fine. I was quite surprised, when launching Firefox post-migration, to be staring at the default configuration -- it didn't occur to me that I might lose about:config settings, add-ons, and other UI customizations. Frantic, I dug around in Users/me/AppData, found a Mozilla directory under Local, and copied the profiles therein. No effect. Eventually I went to Google to find out how to put things back the way they were (and sighing deeply about the customizations that don't sync, which I'd have to reconstruct), when I found something that pointed out how to ask Firefox where it's reading profile data from. Aha! Under AppData there is also a directory named "Roaming" (WTF is that?), and it was under there. Once I copied that directory I had my old browser state back. Whew! (Also backed that up for safekeeping.)

The actual migration process (not counting email, which they moved overnight) took about six hours. A chunk of that time was spent blocked and waiting on hold with IT. (An hour on hold the first time, 1:15 the second. Sheesh.) Because I knew the hold times would be long, as soon as I smelled a potential problem the first time I placed the call while I continued to work on it. Alas, the second blockage was a surprise error from their tool. By the way, they helpfully offered links to the FAQ and "contact support", both dead. At least they also displayed a phone number (which I'd secured in advance so I didn't need, but some would).

They moved most Windows settings over; for example, my large fonts, desktop icons, custom colors, and classic taskbar styling were intact. But, I discovered, they didn't move environment variables -- and I have no idea how to get those, since I can no longer log in with the old profile. I discovered this when Emacs didn't read my configuration -- it depends on HOME. So I reset that one, but I wonder what else I've lost.

Tomorrow I get to find out what else broke. I know the main doc tool will need intervention; the domain change confuses the license. I haven't tried git yet.

My laptop is getting on in years. On the one hand, this would have been a good time to replace it, given that there's going to be a lot of disruption anyway. On the other hand, it would come with Windows 10, which hasn't been making friends on my team. Also, I brought in a Windows 10 tablet to use during the migration, and yesterday when I was testing some stuff it announced that it couldn't start and I would have to reinstall the OS (!). I hadn't done much on it so I didn't lose a lot (had to reinstall the VPN and the browsers), but...really? In all my years of computer use, I've never once gone from "works fine" to "start over" in a span of hours. I wonder if I accidentally picked up that ~~virus~~ latest OS update, the one that was damaging data because it didn't check to see if there's enough disk space before starting. Every time that tablet asks me if I want to install updates I say no, but maybe something slipped through?

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Google calendar can't grok holidays?

2018-11-14T03:47:16Z

When I use the Google calendar in a browser on my desktop, I can see the two sets of holidays I've selected (US and Jewish) just fine. I used to see them on my Android phone, too. In September I noticed that it wasn't showing me Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot, but I was busy and didn't investigate. I don't remember if it showed me Labor Day.

I pretty much only need this information on phone when I'm out somewhere trying to schedule something a few months out. In other words, when I'm at a doctor's or dentist's office trying to schedule the next appointment.

I had a dentist appointment last week so this annoyance is fresh in my mind again. I found lots of trails from other people trying to solve this problem (DenverCoder9, what did you see??), but no working answers. And then, in poking around on my phone more, I saw that it does have an entry for Black Friday -- but not for Thanksgiving the day before. I didn't put that there, so it must be coming from the US calendar.

Where the heck are my holidays? Why is this hard, and what happened a few months ago to mess them up?

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dear navigator app...

2018-04-04T00:48:55Z

Hello, save-me-from-trying-to-read-small-signs-in-traffic device, I really appreciate you. You have made a difference in helping me get around in unfamiliar locations. But there are a few things I'd like you to know.

1 - When you tell me to "stay left to stay left", I don't know what you're trying to communicate. "Take that not-very-obvious left-side ramp" would have been wonderful.

1a - It might have been more visible if it hadn't been raining heavily. I wonder how far we are from navigation apps responding to poor conditions by being more verbose?

2 - The desktop interface has a way to reroute, by dragging part of the path to another place on the map, but I could not figure out how to do that on my phone.

3 - But ok, the desktop interface has a "send to my phone" link. So I reasonably expected you to be pre-loaded with the route I'd carefully constructed.

4 - Instead, I got a list of directions that I guess I'm supposed to read while driving (nope!), but no "start" button to get the audio instructions that are the whole point of using the app.

5 - Playing "outsmart the app" by choosing destinations to force a particular route is not fun.

My group moved to a new office location last week. Today was my first time driving there from home. I helped with the move on Thursday, so I'd already driven home from there once and decided that the "best" path, while best in travel time, is not best for me, because of poor visibility in places. So I am very interested in finding an alternate route home. I found one via the desktop app but, well, getting my phone to implement it wasn't so straightforward. But tomorrow is another day.

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link round-up

2018-01-05T02:26:17Z

Some stuff has been accumulating in browser tabs. Some of it lost relevance because I waited too long (oops). Here's the rest.

This article explains the Intel problem that's going to slow your computer down soon. I don't know much about how kernels work and I understood it. I do have some computer-science background, though, so if somebody who doesn't wants to let me know if this is accessible or incoherent, please do. In terms of effects of the bug, you're going to get an OS update soon and then things will be slower because the real fix is to replace hardware, but you probably want to take the update anyway.

This infographic gives some current advice to avoid being spear-phished. It has one tip that was new to me but makes a lot of sense: if you have any doubt about an attachment but are going to open it anyway, drop it into Google Drive and open it in your browser. If it's malicious it'll attack Google's servers instead of your computer, and they have better defenses.

Sandra and Woo: what the public hears vs. what a software developer hears.

This account of one hospital's triage process for major incidents blew me away. I shared the link with someone I know in the medical profession and he said "oh, Sunrise -- they have their (stuff) together" -- they have a reputation, it appears. Link courtesy of metahacker and hakamadare.

I was one of the subject-matter experts interviewed for this study on Stack Overflow's documentation project. Horyun was an intern and was great to work with.

From siderea, the two worlds, or rubber-duck programming and modes of thinking.

The phatic and the anti-inductive doesn't summarize well, but I found it interesting. Also, I learned some new words. "Phatic" means talking for the sake of talking -- so small-talk, but not just that. Social lubricant fits in here too.

Rands on listening for managers.

From the same source as the "phatic" post, a story about zombies made me laugh a lot.

From Twitter:
Three logicians walk into a bar. The bartender says "Do you all want something to drink?"
The first logician says "I don't know."
The second logician says "I don't know."
The third logician says "Yes."

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oops

2017-11-19T23:15:41Z

My Mac has been bugging me to let it install some updates for several days now (requiring a reboot), so since I was going out for the afternoon anyway, I let it do so.

I completely forgot that this would cause Firefox to update to version 57. Oops. (At work I both turned off automatic updates and did some prep work to update to add-ons that will continue to work in 57. I hadn't gotten around to updating add-ons at home, and I forgot that I hadn't turned off browser auto-updates.)

I've lost my Stylish CSS overrides. Some I shared between home and work (or between Firefox and Chrome at home), so those ones I have, but some sites I only visit at home so I didn't have those at work. I found some stuff about how to find them on a Windows machine, but the filenames mentioned there don't exist on my Mac.

For the most part I'm going to just live without them and migrate more of my browsing activity to Chrome. The main reason I limit Chrome is that the tabs display is totally unreadable if you have too many tabs, unlike Firefox which sets a minimum size and gives you scrolling and a drop-down menu to see all of them. I just found a Chrome extension that provides that drop-down menu, so I can at least find stuff, though I haven't yet found a way to get Chrome to stop trying to show all of them anyway.

I also found these instructions for doing some of the things that Classic Theme Restorer did.

I've updated my earlier post about Firefox 57 with other workarounds I've found. For userscripts, I installed TamperMonkey, which I'm already familiar with from Chrome. For both scripts and CSS, I decided that at home I'll just do all my Stack Exchange stuff in Chrome -- I mostly was anyway, and now that it'd be actual work to get those scripts and styles back, time to just commit to it. Firefox is now almost exclusively for blog-reading (mainly Dreamwidth and those few people still on LJ), and everything else I do in Chrome. (That's at home; at work I do a lot more in Firefox.) I tend to have a lot of DW tabs open, so keeping that activity in the browser that handles tabs better makes sense.

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Firefox breaking many add-ons soon

2017-11-08T15:20:34Z

I found out today, via a notice provided by one of my add-ons (Stylish), that the next version of Firefox (57) is going to break most add-ons, which they are now designating "legacy". Firefox, like Chrome, automatically updates itself (I'm not sure that can be turned off any more), and these changes are coming "in November". I found this blog post from Mozilla from August, but I never received any sort of notification as a user and I don't make a habit of seeking out blog posts from vendors of software I use.

Why the hell didn't I get some sort of notification from Firefox? Is this news to you, too?

So now, the hunt for replacements commences. Gee thanks, guys.

Here's what I've found so far, untested unless otherwise noted:

Stylish replacement (notice pushed by Stylish, apparently): Stylus. Listed as beta. I don't know whether styles will just work (after being manually imported, it appears) or if changes will be needed. ETA: I needed to rework one style, which had several blocks applying to different sets of (related) sites. I had to break that up. The style I was using to make tooltips bigger doesn't work (not supported by Mozilla's new API), but I found a workaround. The day after I got all this migrated to Stylus, I got a Stylish update -- but it couldn't read my existing scripts either, so I would have had to migrate to it in exactly the same way I'd just migrated to Stylus. (The UI was even the same.) So I punted that; I've already got Stylus working.
Greasemonkey: Google led me to ViolentMonkey. Ditto about not knowing if things just work or require adjustments. ETA: ViolentMonkey is slow and times out about a third of the time for me, but TamperMonkey (which I already know from Chrome) exists and works fine. I had to manually add each of my scripts (to either), but I didn't need to modify them.
NoScript: it looks like they're migrating, but I don't know if I'll have to do anything. ETA:* Seems to be broken in 57; supposedly they're working on it.
Session Manager: is this built into Firefox now? It's very important that when I restart Firefox, I get the tabs and windows I had before. Can anybody who doesn't use an add-on for that confirm whether that works out of the box now?
AdBlock Plus: this is my one extension not listed as legacy, so I assume it will keep working.
Classic Theme Restorer: um, I found this github repository; haven't waded too far into the readme yet. ETA: this page explains how to move the tabs below the URL/extensions bar where they belong. The other look&feel stuff it did isn't as critical. (One could make a good argument that the URL bar belongs below the tabs, but all the other stuff the browser puts in that horizontal slice is more global, and having those reversed confuses me.)

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almost helpful

2017-07-19T00:59:26Z

My (Android) phone alerts me when traffic is bad near me. This can be handy at the end of the day because I work downtown. Except... it's telling me about traffic on roads I don't use to get home. Sure, there's spillover so it's not unhelpful, but it'd be great if I could tell it -- maybe by gesturing on a map -- what paths I care about, so it could tell me about those ones.

Does anybody reading this know of an app that does that, or a way to get Google Maps to do it? It needs to be fire and forget; I don't want to have to open the map app to look for red lines on it.

It feels like all the information is already there, if only my phone were making use of it.

(This would also let me know before I leave in the morning if traffic is still bad at the other end. At that time I don't really need extra information about traffic near my house; I need it 3-5 miles away.)

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