Monica

for want of a nail, the kingdom was...delayed

Sun, 15 Aug 2021 23:05:25 GMT

I have an open-source project I am very enthusiastic about (Codidact). Mostly my role does not involve the code directly: I'm the community lead (i.e. primary talker-with-people-who-use-it and triager of feature requests), and I do some design of features, workflows, wireframes, internal documentation, and stuff like that. And I beat up on the test server a lot when there's work in progress to poke at. We have infrastructure to support all that.

But sometimes I'd like to get a little closer to the code, mostly for my own education and partly so I can maybe help do smaller things because our team is pretty small still. And there was that one time that I really wanted to fix a front-end bug that I admitted was limited in scope; it was bothering me, but not something to drag a developer off of something else for. And it was in the Javascript code, which I can bumble my way through, so ok, I figured, I can do this. (And there was that weird thing about dates in Javascript, but I digress.) But I didn't have a dev environment to test it with, and ended up putting it in a userscript to test and then asking somebody else to plug it in for real, which meant I needed help from one of the developers after all, and I shouldn't be that lame.

My Mac with its older operating system is not compatible with some library or other that we use (details forgotten; I just remember the long setup sequence that ultimately failed). And people said "why not update your OS?" and I said "ha ha no" -- not going to break what's working on a machine I depend on. Clearly, what I need is an inexpensive dev environment somewhere, maybe something I could connect to remotely or maybe outdated-but-more-current-than-mine hardware that would be good enough for this purpose.

I went to the elves for counsel, and one suggestion was a cheap AWS instance (considered it), and then our team lead said "a Raspberry Pi would be fine". And lo, Raspberry Pis are cheap, but they're also aimed at the do-it-yourselfers, and to say that I am not a hardware tinkerer would be an understatement. I am not at al enamored of the "ooh, let's take a bunch of parts and build a fabulous machine!" project; I just want a working machine. I will spend money to keep more of my hair attached to my head. I said this to our lead, who said "here's a place that'll sell you all the stuff including a pre-loaded operating system, but you have to put it into the case yourself", and I said "deal".

My box of Pi stuff came, but did not include any assembly documentation and there were a few things I was mystified about. (I had a package of heat sinks but no clue what to do with them, for instance. They were three different sizes, so I thought it was a general package from which I was supposed to choose one. Got that sorted.) With some further help from the elves I was able to sort out what goes where, and this afternoon I assembled it all, pulled out a spare monitor that I knew spoke HDMI because it still had an HDMI cable dangling from it... and found that the other end of that cable was not HDMI but some older fatter connector type with pins (yeah I've lost track of video-connector history), and I do not in fact have a spare monitor with an HDMI port.

But wait, I said. Surely in the vast world of gadgets and connectors and adapters, there is a thingie that lets you plug in two HDMI cables, maybe because you need a longer cable (extension-cord style). And lo, this is a thing, and when my $5 part arrives I will be able to set all this up and see if it works.

It's always something, isn't it?

(I believe that, longer-term, I will be able to set this up so that I can connect to it remotely, from a few feet away, and it won't need its own monitor, keyboard, and mouse, at least most of the time. But for now, it can have a corner of the desk to get up and running until I learn how to do that.)

I see one more benefit to doing all this, one that's not about Codidact. Someday I will need to replace my primary machine, as all hardware goes the way of dinosaurs eventually, and I'm not sure I want to keep buying into the Mac ecosystem. I moved from Windows to Mac some time back (the Windows option at the time was Vista), and maybe I will move from Mac to Linux next time. I'm comfortable on the Linux command line, but am unfamiliar with the Linux GUI setup. This seems a way for me to explore that world some.

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Google security question

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 20:06:00 GMT

Dear brain trust,

I have an Android tablet. As with my phone, I use it with my Google account. My account confirms new sign-ins or other access grants by sending a confirmation to my phone (so I have to say "yes it was me" there before the sign-in completes on another device). This is all good.

Google also sends that confirmation to the tablet. How do I disable that part, while still remaining signed in on the tablet? I want to use it, but I don't want it to be a source of trust. I've been through the Google security settings and I don't see a way to do this -- a way to say "trust it to be signed in but don't trust it to grant trust".

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Dear Lazyweb: docks, USB, and ethernet?

Thu, 19 Mar 2020 16:17:15 GMT

I am using an HP docking station (I think it's this one) with my laptop. I actually have two of these docks, one at the office and one at home.

At the office, everything works correctly.

At home, the dock successfully handles video (external monitor) and power, but it does not "see" the USB ports or the ethernet port. I've been working around this by plugging USB directly into the laptop and using Wifi, but I'd like to actually solve the problem. Any ideas?

Everything I've found on Google leads to suggestions to update Thunderbolt drivers or change BIOS settings, but I repeat: it works at the office. That tells me the problem is not with the laptop but with the dock.

Does the dock need software updates of its own? I tried asking Google about that but kept ending up at instructions to update Thunderbolt drivers on the laptop.

I don't want to do anything to the laptop. I don't want to get back to the office (I assume that will happen someday) and find out I've broken things there. I can use these workarounds at home.

But it seems like I ought to be able to fix this so I don't have to?

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hardware upgrade

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 01:47:07 GMT

I finally emerged from analysis paralysis and things being out of stock and did I say analysis paralysis? and bought a mechanical keyboard. It came today, so I haven't done much typing on it yet, but ooh, first impressions are very positive!

I bought the WASD V3, with Cherry Silent Red switches and no dampeners. (I asked; they said with Silent you don't also add dampeners.) I made one small modification (see if you can spot it in the picture), and otherwise played it straight. (Part of the analysis paralysis was ooh, colors! but how does what I see on the screen compare to reality? should I ask for samples?. Ok, I guess technically I made two modifications, because I did change the color scheme.)

(Not great lighting, I know. I should have taken the picture elsewhere before plugging it in.)

No mechanical keyboard is silent, not even a Silent Red, but the noise on this one is solidly within acceptable parameters. I mean, my previous keyboards weren't silent either, though granted I type too "hard" (something I hope a better keyboard will help me to improve).

A factor that I already really appreciate, though I didn't think about it that much in shopping, is the weight. This keyboard has some heft to it, which means it stays where I put it. Those generic Logitech keyboards are lightweight and slide around on my desktop if not pushed against something. (My monitor stand, until tonight.) That was often on the edge of annoying.

The WASD people were easy to deal with. You can design your own keyboard, and if you look through the gallery you can see some pretty elaborate stuff. I didn't need elaborate, but I did want one change. I asked about it, and instead of making me figure out how to produce the layout file they needed, they sent me an image and said "like this?". Nice.

I did compromise on one thing, but it'll be ok. I never use the number pad though it's always been present on my past keyboards, so I thought to get the keyboard version that omits that rightmost set of keys. Every time I checked, they were out of it in Silent Red, though they had other key types. Eventually I decided eh, might as well get the kind I've always had and that I can actually get now. If I ever need to replace this keyboard (they're supposed to last a long time), I can experiment then. Or not -- it wasn't a strong preference, just a thing to try.

In just the little bit of typing I've done so far I can already tell this is going to be much more comfortable. Yay!

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Windows: accessibility obstacles

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 02:00:21 GMT

I got a new laptop at work last week, so naturally it came with Windows 10. Some of the software my group uses requires Windows; I'm currently still on Win 7 on my old machine. (And haven't gotten updates since last November. Eventually IT would have noticed. But even aside from that, the machine is five years old and starting to become unreliable.) The migration has been...challenging, with some accessibility regressions I don't know how to fix.

On Win 7 I defined a custom theme which had the following important properties:

Window background is not bright white but a light tan: bright white backgrounds hurt my eyes a lot, especially over a sustained period. This is set at the OS level, so all applications get it by default.
Font size for menus, window titles, and assorted other UI elements is increased so I can actually read them.
Colors for the title bars of active and inactive windows are very different so I can easily spot which window is currently active.

On Windows 10 I can do none of those. In their themes I can set a "color" and an "accent color". The color is used as the background color for the start bar (well, whatever they call that now) and, if you check a box, all window title bars (active and inactive). I think the accent color is used for highlighting. Alternatively, I can apply a "tint" to everything, but (a) that would mess up graphics somewhat and (b) I can only choose one of a few baked-in colors, none of which is a good choice for me. If I'm going to go the "tint" route, I should attack it via monitor settings.

There is a "high contrast" option, but high contrast is exactly what I don't want so I gave it only a passing glance at first. (The choices there are white or bright yellow on black or the reverse of those. Ow.) Then a helpful Microsoftian who saw my plaintive tweet (thanks!) pointed out that in high-contrast mode you can change foreground and background colors (not at all obvious in the UI!), so I tried that as a way to change the background color. Unfortunately, high-contrast mode changes some other things that make it harder for me to see things (regardless of what colors you use). For example, it removes color from all the icons that sit on the task bar. I'm used to identifying some of those by "small blob of green", "blue squarish thing", and so on. It made other changes I found difficult too; don't remember what exactly.

Somebody else, either on Twitter or Super User, told me that the color setting for the window background is actually in the registry so I could brute-force it that way. Aha! So I did that, and... some applications honor it and some do not. Windows the OS seems to not. But hey, progress! While I was in there I couldn't help noticing that there were also registry entries for things like active-window color, menu font size, and more, so I exported all my settings from Win 7, loaded them into the registry on Win 10, and...saw no change, even after rebooting. Those registry settings are there, but apparently most of them are ignored? Or overridden somewhere else?

On the font-size front, there seems to be no help for me. All application menus and the Outlook navigation pane use a font that is too small for me to see without leaning in. Note that I have a pretty high-end monitor and prescription computer glasses that work just fine for me on Win 7. I got them to fix the ergonomics problem of having to lean in too close to the monitor. But I can't increase that font size on Win 10.

The answer from Microsoft's help and forums seems to be: increase the "text size" setting at the OS level. I currently have it at 125%, same as I did on Win 7. Oh, if only it were just text size! When I bumped it to 150% I discovered that that setting does a lot more; it's effectively zoom for the whole desktop. So, for example, I would have to make browser windows proportionally even more humongous to avoid the ill effects of "responsive design" that assumes wide windows and perfect vision. I'd have to make Emacs and shells that much wider to support 80-character lines. I'd have to make the file browser that much wider to still see the details view on listings. And so on. It's the equivalent of lowering the resolution on my monitor. I'm not sure the documentation IDE I use (Madcap Flare) will even fit on the screen at that zoom level; it certainly wouldn't let me see at least a little rendered output or the contents of a shell at the same time. No. That Does Not Work.

(Get a bigger monitor? I'm kind of at the limits of my vision now. If I have to move my head back and forth to read a line of text in an application, on a web page, or in an editor, that's going to be both inefficient and terrible ergonomics.)

This has all been terribly frustrating. From my perspective Microsoft removed accessibility controls that I relied on. (From their perspective they redesigned everything to take advantage of the benefits of Metro, I imagine.) It feels very "one size fits most, and the few don't matter", an attitude I previously only experienced with Apple. (Yeah, I can't control these things on my Mac either, but on my Mac, at home, I mainly use Emacs and browsers, and I can customize those directly.) In principle I could switch over to Linux and run some stuff in a Windows VM, but in practice I would be on my own for making that work and the last person in my group who tried that found the performance of Flare in a VM to be unsatisfactory. And if I'm going to have to manage everything myself with no help from IT (for not being the standard image), I might as well install a rogue Win 7 and carry on. But I'd probably get in trouble for that.

I realize that my problems are specialized and finicky, but if anyone reading this has input on any part of it, please share.

Update: I found System Font Size Changer, which let me set font sizes independently if needed for menus, title bars, message boxes, and a few other things. And it worked! Outlook uses one of them (not sure which) for the navigation pane, so I can even see the names of my folders and stuff now! Alas, the color-changer application by the same person didn't have much of an effect. At the end of Wednesday I installed f.lux to see if that can help me, after discovering just how much Madcap Flare does not honor settings in Win 10. I can't work with that tool without some fix for my color problems. It hurts too much.

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vision problems and computers

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 04:07:50 GMT

A friend is having some vision problems that currently impede her computer use. She knows that I have vision problems and use computers heavily, so she asked me for advice. So I don't lose track of it, and for the possible benefit of others, I'm going to mostly cut and paste the email I sent.

My normal focal distance for reading is about 8-10 inches using bifocals, which makes laptops pretty unworkable and even regular monitors awkward if they're larger (because not everything can be in range at the same time at that distance). I solved this part of the problem by getting a pair of computer glasses, which are focused at a reasonable monitor distance instead of infinity. That is, the part that would normally be distance vision is instead monitor-distance vision, and I also still have the bifocal (my ophthalmologist's suggestion -- "do you ever have to read notes or something too?"). Once you know that your prescription isn't going to be changing a lot, that's something to consider -- but it does mean paying for another pair of glasses. (If you do get computer glasses, get the anti-glare treatment on them even if you're using monitors that are nominally glare-resistant.) Ask your ophthalmologist if this makes sense for you. I did find that I had to bump up font sizes across the board, because monitor-tuned distance vision is different from reading-tuned bifocal. I don't understand all the optics; apparently I can't get a pair of glasses that's just like reading through my bifocal but at twice the distance.

On the software side, here are several things I did. My vision problems are different from yours so I don't know which of these will help.

If you're using Windows, you can set text magnification system-wide to 100, 125, or 150%. I use 125%. This is in the control panel under either "display" or "personalization".

For Outlook, consider forcing all your email to plain text by default. You can then set the font size for that text. [My friend had complained that zoom levels didn't stick; she has to zoom each message. This works around that.] If you need to see formatting or embedded images, you can, for an individual message, choose "show as HTML" from a control just above the message text. Plain-text email is sometimes ugly because of the formatting you're not seeing, but I find it better than letting the sender choose fonts, font sizes, color, and, heaven help us, stationery. The "show as plain text" option is hidden in a very counter-intuitive place (thanks Microsoft!), at least in Outlook 2013 -- go to "trust center" and it's in there somewhere. Yes plain text is a way to avoid malicious Javascript, but I think of it more as an accessibility setting or something that should at least be mentioned under "email settings". We got new domain accounts recently and it took forever for me to find that again.

I have found no way to adjust the size of the header fields (including subject line) on individual messages -- very frustrating. You can change the size of the text shown in a folder (like the inbox) under "view settings". You have to do it for every folder you care about (like you do to dismiss the reading pane) because Microsoft hates us.

I don't know if this will help you, but consider switching your color theme. Black text on a white, backlit background is actually pretty hard on the eyes. You can try one of the reverse-video themes but (a) they can be hard to get used to and (b) most of your web browsing won't use dark/reverse themes and will seem even harsher by comparison (more about browsing in a bit). What I did instead was to personalize the desktop theme to make the default white background a gentler light tan instead. This is all under display -> personalization in the control panel. That's for Windows; on a Mac you're SOL, unfortunately, because Apple knows what's right for everybody.

If that makes a difference for you, then take a look at your monitor's color settings. (I don't know if laptops have this, but external monitors will.) A different color temperature might help you. Also, look at your contrast and brightness settings; I personally find high contrast and lower brightness to be most comfortable, though I've heard others say the opposite works better for them. Leave one of them alone while you experiment with the other. If the lighting near you is under your control, that's another knob you can turn. (I can say about lighting upon request.)

About browsing... lots of sites out there are designed by people with perfect vision who never thought about the rest of us, and some of the results are horrid. (What is with this trendy "light gray text on white background" meme?) Very frustrating. You can set a minimum font size in your browser and you can zoom individual sites with ctrl+/ctrl- (ctrl0 to reset to 100%). Firefox and Chrome remember these settings for a site; I don't know offhand if IE and Edge do. Some sites don't play as well with zoom as others -- maybe it makes the page too wide for your browser window and you now have horizontal scrolling, or maybe it uses a "responsive" design and moves things around on you. There are addons that let you force your own CSS on a site (Stylus) or apply your own Javascript to a site (Tampermonkey), but be warned that you will find yourself tinkering with settings often to respond to that shiny new thing your favorite site's designer came up with. I can pontificate at more length about browsers if you want.

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bad IT day :-(

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 02:37:58 GMT

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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oh hey, I have a desk

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 01:10:36 GMT

My (old) UPS has not been doing so well on the "U" part lately; a power flicker a few days ago rebooted my computer, and I attribute the loss of my browser tabs in a recent power outage to it. The replacement I ordered (on Thursday night! with the slower free shipping!) came today.

I took the opportunity to reorganize because, demonstrably, I don't otherwise. I kept my older Mac Mini for its CD drive (I should get an external CD drive, I guess), but removed the flatbed scanner that my newer Mac Mini can't talk to. (I've gotten used to just using the camera on my phone, at least for now; if I need a better scanner at some point in the future, I'll deal with it then.) I also don't need to keep a monitor plugged into the older machine, which I access via virtual desktop when I need to.

I can see more of my desk now. Wow, there were a lot of dust bunnies around the base of the scanner!

(I would have had to move things around, and move this desk, had an interesting recent opportunity worked out, but it didn't so I didn't. But now I've cleaned up anyway, heh.)

Maybe the old UPS just needs a new battery, but that wasn't enough less money and hassle for me to explore. I don't remember how old it is. If you're local and you want it, let me know.

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computer slowdowns everywhere

Fri, 12 Jan 2018 19:48:28 GMT

This morning while I was having an uncomfortable annual preventative exam, the technician apologized for something taking so long and said the computer was slow today. I asked "you got the patch for the Intel thing?" and she gave me a blank look; she hadn't heard of the Meltdown/Spectre problem. I gave her a super-high-level summary and suggested what she could Google for later.

She asked me how much things would slow down and I said it's hard to tell -- could be 5%, could be 30%, could be worse -- depends on lots of things. She got a look of horror on her face and said "if it's that bad, we're going to have to change how we schedule appointments!".

Wow. That kind of effect had not occurred to me. I mean, there are computers with affected chips in everything these days -- medical equipment, air-traffic-control systems, sensor networks, self-driving cars... I presume that many of those systems will have to get patched, and that hardware replacements are big productions that won't happen until current systems reach the end-of-life mark, and that the consequences of slower execution could matter in some of those use cases. (Car: "stop at that red light... oh, that was back there".) Even if it's "just" diagnostic scans taking longer, what happens, logically and financially, when providers can see fewer patients per day?

I asked if the machine she was currently using was networked. It's on the facility's network only, as I expected. I said that perhaps their IT people will opt for securing the network and not applying the patch, but to myself I wondered if that opens them to liability claims or regulatory problems. It's also possible that some of these machines are specialized enough that they don't have the affected chips. I know next to nothing about embedded systems, specialized equipment like mammogram scanners, and so on.

I assume that in time this problem will be dealt with or worked around. I've already seen recommendations suggesting which patches to take and which to disable to walk that balance between reduced effects and security. I'm not trying to paint a picture of doom and gloom here. I just wonder how some of the bumps along the way will manifest.

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link round-up

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 02:26:17 GMT

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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anti-virus for less-technical users?

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 14:05:50 GMT

Somebody asked me this morning for help finding reliable advice about anti-virus software for his PC. He's currently using Norton (I don't know details, including what updates he's getting). I think he's going to need to find something simple -- fire-and-forget would be best (so automatic updates, at least). Who out there is currently doing reasonable neutral product comparisons in this area (Windows, not Mac)? If I could point him to one site where he could learn enough to make a decision, what would that site be?

I did talk with him about hygiene, it being far better to *avoid getting* viruses than to clean them up after. He says he's not opening unknown attachments or browsing in bad neighborhoods (though we didn't talk about how he would know, so I don't know if that's correct), but he's getting a lot of viruses and trojans. Or warnings about them, anyway; I haven't dismissed the possibility that he's picked up some malware that's doing that.

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keyboards: it's the little things

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 01:50:46 GMT

When I started using computers, keyboards were practically immortal. I stopped using my first keyboard when a couple keys physically broke such that I couldn't get the caps to stay on. My last couple keyboards have not fared so well.

I have an inxpensive Logitech keyboard. "Inexpensive" wasn't actually one of the governing criteria when shopping; I'm willing to pay for a keyboard that delivers higher quality. But what's locally available in stores tends to not be high-end, and I'm not going to spend real money on a keyboard I can't touch first.

The failure mode is irritating, though. My keyboard works fine in most respects, but... well, let me show you a picture:

I can actually live with the worn-off letters because I mostly touch-type. (I'm mystified by what's special about 'L' and 'O'. No, not gaming hotkeys.) But, as a touch-typist, I rely on those little ridges on the 'F' and 'J' keys to tell me that I'm oriented correctly. In the days of typewriters that didn't matter much as you almost never took your hands off the keys, but with a mouse on one side and sometimes a drink on the other, plus things like arrow keys and paging keys, it's pretty essential to the way I use a computer.

My 'J' ridge is gone. And 'F' isn't doing so well either. WTF? That's supposed to be molded plastic!

(I'm open to suggestions, though keyboards are a matter of personal taste so I don't expect them. I require keys that actually have some depth to them; I hate the Mac flat keyboards, which is why I'm using a generic keyboard with my Mac. I also require "not clicky"; typing on anything makes some noise, but I want a quiet one as much as is feasible and definitely not one of the old-style extra-loud ones. I don't care about special keys or even, most of the time, function keys; you'll notice the pristine state of those keys in the photo, cat hair aside. I would prefer that Escape be full-sized. I need the little legs that raise the back of the keyboard.)

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lies Google told me

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 03:10:06 GMT

Today I got the following notification on my Android phone, allegedly from Google:

I haven't typed my Google password on my phone recently, nor has my account changed. Hmm. I saw a few possibilities:

1. Google legitimately wants me to re-enter my password, but their notice is wrong.

2. Phishing, though there's no obvious vector (no recent apps or suspicious web sites).

3. Compromised account, though that seemed very unlikely. (I use a very strong password for Google.)

When I got home (and thus to another computer) I verified that #3 was not the case. I then began searching for explanations for this notice. I had a wisdom of the ancients moment -- people have been having this problem since at least 2014, but no solutions were extant. I saw enough to decide that the notice really was from Google (so, #1) and re-entered my password, and lo, email returned to my phone.

So what was that? It's ok with me if Google wants to require re-authentication periodically on small, stealable devices with access to significant personal information, but if that's what happened, couldn't they tell us?

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