Tag: TODO: Tech Tips

Need to look up whether there’s a way in Android to keep a rarely-used app on pause as its default, so I can keep it installe…

Need to look up whether there’s a way in Android to keep a rarely-used app on pause as its default, so I can keep it installed and up to date for when I need it, but not worry about it doing anything behind my back or sending me notifications I don’t want.

This would be ideal for things like ride-hailing apps, where every once in a while I need it to track my location and send me a zillion notifications, preferably without downloading and installing a fresh copy, but the rest of the time I don’t want it running at all.

—

I know how to pause an app for the rest of the day, but it turns right back on in the morning. And I know the system will remove permissions from apps that haven’t been used in months (for some definition of “used,” anyway), but that’s an extra 3 months of the app still doing whatever it’s built to do in the background

—

Sigh…99% of search results are about disabling preinstalled apps.

But this app looks like the kind of thing I’m looking for:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/superfreeze.tool.android/

I’d forgotten about the old task-killer/battery-management category. As several articles pointed out when I followed up on superfreeze, most of the use cases for them have been resolved over the years as batteries and Android’s background-process management have gotten better.

But this use case isn’t one that’s been resolved by the OS, and as long as the app doesn’t interfere with the built-in power management, it might do the trick.

I love how this shiny new business email layout renders on everything except (checks notes) Outlook for Windows.😠

I love how this shiny new business email layout renders on everything except (checks notes) Outlook for Windows.

😠

I’m beginning to suspect my “Outlook eventually became useful” perspective is because I’ve been using it on macOS

(And when I say it renders on everything except Outlook/Win, I mean it actually appears on everything else, but it’s BLANK on Outlook.)

…

Figured that part out, and spent over an hour triyng to figure out why one box wasn’t filling the background all the way to the edge. Only Outlook for Windows.

Finally started looking up quirks and found this:

Outlook Email Rendering Issues and How to Solve Them

Outlook 2007-2019
These are the Windows desktop versions of Outlook. These use Word as the rendering engine, which made sense at a time when email was like writing letters. (Ah, simpler times.)

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.

Not Blink or Trident. But WORD.

According to this page, even Outlook 365’s Windows Desktop client uses Word’s rendering engine!

The Mac version uses Webkit. The “New Outlook” on Windows uses Blink. The web version uses whatever browser it’s running in. But that’s only been released this year.

Was this some shortcut back in 2007 to prevent Outlook from executing JavaScript or something?

Switching to Wayland with an NVidia GPU

Latest attempt to switch my desktop to Wayland with an NVidia GPU: So far, so good!

Gnome is just fine. Most of the desktop apps I’ve tried so far are fine. Minecraft runs well. I’ve spot-checked several Steam games and they’re working well.

The biggest issues I’ve found so far:

  • Some games trip the “not responding” checks during things like level loading.
  • Steam client is a bit laggy and wonky. (Apparently it doesn’t have direct Wayland support yet, and something’s not quiiite there with running it under XWayland.)

Notes to include in tech tips write-up:

– commenting the line in gdm.conf didn’t help

– Had to do this:

How to Enable Wayland for Hybrid NVIDIA Graphics on Fedora Linux 38 Workstation

“`
sudo cp -a /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules
“`

And comment out the TEST and IMPORT lines in the “Check if suspend/resume services necessary for working wayland support is available”

Because of this:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2128910

Apparently the tests are to work around a Wayland issue where manually-installed NVidia drivers need additional configuration for suspend/resume to work, but RPMFusion’s packages set up the needed config. Commenting them out should allow GDM to start a Wayland session.

Suspend and resume has worked at least once!

Also:

LXQt Wayland support project(for the pinetab): https://github.com/orgs/lxqt/projects/4/views/2

Coffee maker started leaking a few days after we descaled it

Coffee maker started leaking a few days after we descaled it. Just a little at first, then more each day. kid opened it up. One of the water hoses has a crack in it surrounded by mineral deposits. As near as we can tell, the minerals were probably blocking the leak. 🤦‍♂️

No luck finding dedicated replacement parts, but we found a 5′ length of high-temperature silicone tubing in the right size. Here’s hoping it arrives soon. And works.

On Wandering.shop

I’ve been meaning to put together something to automatically retrieve remote images and attach them …

I’ve been meaning to put together something to automatically retrieve remote images and attach them to a #WordPress post (for automatically generated posts). I figured I’d have to do something with curl to download the image, save it to a temp file, upload it to WP etc. Turns out there’s a function built in!

All I have to do is add a hook to wp_insert_post that calls media_sideload_image() when it finds the pattern I want, and plug the result into the post content.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/media_sideload_image

On Wandering.shop

The owner of example.com automatically owns www.example.com, whatever.example.com…

In response to concerns that someone could set up a phishing subdomain on a legit primary domain

@jessmahler @rowan @ibagail @DialMforMara @Anke They’d have to alter the registry info (either at the registrar itself or by controlling the network that the target user is on) in order to set up another subdomain and actually get it to function. If they can do that, they don’t need the subdomain – they can alter the records for the primary.

@ibagail The owner of example.com automatically owns http://www.example.com, whatever.example.com, blah.blah.blah.example.com, etc. In the case of YouTube, YouTube.com is the building and www is one floor of the building.

They can let someone else use some floors if they want to, but no one can just grab http://www.youtube.com

That said, it is possible for YouTube to set up different websites with and without www. It’s not common, and most sites choose not to in order to avoid confusion, but it does happen.

On Wandering.shop