Improvement?

General

Got sick of dealing with Chrome’s little quirks, so over the weekend I installed Firefox instead.

So far, so good.  I was able to transfer my bookmarks over without too much hassle (once I’d figured it out), and installed AdBlock (which annoyingly, requires three menu clicks to temporarily disable it on a specific website, as opposed to only one on Chrome;  but an ad-free existence is worth almost any inconvenience short of self-amputation).

That’s two conscious decouplings from the Evil Google Empire:  DuckDuck Go as a search engine instead of the awful Google Search, and now Firefox for Chrome.  Annoyingly, I can’t really do without Google Maps, because those fuckers have sunk their fangs deeply into almost all shopping sites, and anyway, Uber seems to require Google for their vehicle tracking — assuming, that is, that I can ever get back to driving for Uber.

One day soon I’ll go back to using a paper journal / diary instead of the foul Google Calendar.  Back when I was a Great Big Executive (in the Pre-Personal Computer Era), I used a tiny calendar to manage my entire life, and somehow I got by even though my daily life was littered with office appointments, birthdays, weekend plans, band practices / performances.  The best part of this practice, in retrospect, came from knowing that the details of my personal life were absolutely confidential and impervious to snooping from commercial interests, Chinese and Russian hackers, and bored, basement-dwelling neckbeards (who snoop just because they can).  I could also open up my diary without having adverts screaming at me and / or redirecting my attention (and often, dollars) to malevolent data strip-miners.

I long ago quit using any of the over-complicated MS Office products, of course, as the (free) Open Office suite gives me everything I need to run my life from a writing, mathematical and accounting perspective.

Oh, and one last thing:  if you feel the need to comment on this post, please refrain from making any sentences which include the word “Linux” because they will be deleted.  Just as I refuse to grow my own wheat to make bread, I refuse to use an operating system that requires knowledge of concepts like “kernels”;  and similarly, word processing is streets better than poring over type trays and composing sticks while having to think about kerning (no relation).

At some point, a complicated life gets simplified by invention and ingenuity, and then the invention and ingenuity start to take over whereupon life becomes complicated, once again.  All I’m trying to do is pull back a little, to simplify my life a tad and slow things down so I can get halfway through the day without going “WTF?” and tossing shit into the swimming pool.

And did I mention that all the area shooting ranges — my favorite panacea for dealing with irritability, confusion and rage — are still closed?

27 comments

  1. I too of late have grown more than tired of the Chrome debacle. I installed Firefox and Brave and spent some time configuring them but I’m an old stick in the mud, not really wanting to change. So I’m back to putting up with Chrome, until….

    My biggest problem with computers now is everything Windows 10. It is a scourge that cannot be tamed. I suffer from the double tag team attack of Windows and AutoDesk. I rely on AutoCAD for my income and over the years both Windows and AutoDesk have become intolerable hostile to the users. I won’t go into the details of what I am dealing with but I’ll say this. I have 2 complete tower systems here on my 8′ very crowded desk linked by 2 large monitors and 1 keyboard and 1 mouse linked by a KVM switch in order to perform my daily functions and much of the time it’s not pretty, and sometimes (like yesterday) and can be like a cage brawl. I’ve been involved with computers since 1979 and I’m so done with all of it that if I was independently wealthy I’d get rid of it all and start living like a human being again.

    1. I’ve also got a couple of desktops linked by a KVM switch; one is a Windows 7 with Office 2013 and the other is a Minty version of The Elword with Libre Office that I’ve had up and running for about ten months. (My house is where old computers come to die. I hot-rod them with EBay parts and since I’ve discovered how cheap SSDs are, they all run plenty fast enough for me.)

      The Windows box is mainly for me to use Word and Excel; and the Elword box is for everything else. It seems that Libre Office Write won’t do some of the things that I want to do with some of my writing projects.

      Also, the Windows box is to get the good out of the Office suite I bought, as I have sworn a blood oath that I will never again put a nickel in Bill Gates’ pocket.

      I can sympathize with Kim about setting up an Elword box, but once it’s set up, it runs and runs. And if you have a problem, Duck-Duck-Go is your friend. You can get actual answers from others, instead of carefully-worded avoidance of good advice from MS.

      1. crazyeighter,
        You might want to try installing WINE on your Minty version of The Elword. It seems to run MS Office 2013 fine.

  3. Firefox famously fired a guy for opposing fag “marriage”, so fuck them. Plenty of other browsers around.

    1. If you like FireFox, but don’t like their politics, then consider WaterFox and Pale Moon.

      And if you like Chrome, give Brave a try. Faster than FireFox, NO ads and no Google snoopery.

    2. I used Opera for years until they sold out to the Gooks.

      Vivaldi is good browser, founded by one of the original Opera developers, I believe.

      1. I’ve also settled on Vivaldi. It allows me to create folders in the Bookmark Toolbar & add individual bookmarks there. Duck Duck Go is the only search engine I use, a pox on everything Google. I also added Ublock, AdBlock, and Ghostery to block unwanted crap. Sometimes I have to deactivate some or all to get a web page to work but for general browsing, they work fine.

        I’ve also started using private windows when I browse. It really cuts down on the amount of cookies & tracking crap that gets on your computer. I run CCleaner weekly & I’m amazed at how few unwanted cookies & registry issues I see.

        Oh, and they will have to pry Windows 7 from my cold, dead hands.

      2. Another vote for Vivaldi and not Opera. Vivaldi is what Opera was.

        the newest version has lots of new privacy and ad blocking features built in, and runs on Windows, Macs, Android and … uh… yes, Linux boxes.

        It’s my daily goto browser.

  5. I’ll second gargoyle. I use Brave. In addition to their wokeness, I found firefox unstable for a lot of things I do.

    But I do use chrome. It’s my ‘dirty’ browser. It’s what I use for facebook and work stuff. Sort of like hiding in a crowd. I have a google account for my servers (for work), but it has no personal information.

    I have a long memory for times I’m cheesed at a manufacturer, vendor, or any business. There are many, many entities that I’ll do business with only as a last resort, no options open.

    This is why you won’t see my fat irish ass driving a GM product, using adobe anything, or darkening the doors of a TGI Fridays.

  6. I use 3-4 different browsers at the same time due to work needs, but I will say that 90% of what I do for personal stuff is using Brave. I have found it to be just as good as anything else out there, and it seems to have a much more healthy respect for my privacy.

    On Opera : Was great until they got purchased by a China company and started to ‘give away free’ a “privacy vpn”… Gee, they just want you to tunnel all your traffic through their ‘free’ vpn? How nice. Opera 12 was awesome, the modern version I won’t allow on my network.

    If you must use Chrome, you might want the un-Googled versions of Chromium that can be found on chromium.woolyss.com . It is what I use when I must use Chrome based.

  8. Long time Firefox user. I keep Chrome installed for that odd page that has issues, but thats rare these days. I run double add blockers (Adblock Plus / Adblocker X) so nothing squeezes by. The single feature the Firefox has, that Chrome doesn’t, that makes Chrome a non starter, is bookmarks displayed on the right side. (Ctrl B) It just make it so easy to progress through all the sites I read daily and keep track of things.

  9. I was using Firefox back when it was Firebird. But I ditched it when they got rid of Brendon Eich. First, I switched to PaleMoon, but it doesn’t support XP anymore (stop laughing), and although I still use it, I mostly use MyPal, which is even faster.

    And I ditched OpenOffice years ago when a spreadsheet got corrupted and they wanted $35 for program to de-corrupt it. (Shut up. Totally a word.) Now I use LibreOffice. YMMV.

  10. Ranges closed? They are considered essential here in Ohio. I don’t like the local indoor range, and the gun club that I belong to has a real nice outdoor one. The problem is it hasn’t stopped raining almost every day for the past month. It get’s real tiresome walking in ankle deep mud to place your targets. Yes I walk my old ass out the to place the targets on the 100 and 200 yard ranges. I reserve the golf cart for my elders, but you can’t use it if the path is muddy.

  11. I keep coming back to Firefox on my Mac, though it sometimes can’t handle certain websites. I like the interplay of the bookmarks sidebar and the middle-click button on my ancient Logitech Trackman Marble FX, connected with a PS/2 to USB adapter. Middle clicking on an item in the sidebar opens it in a new tab. Convenient.

    At the risk of divine wrath, of the various L-word versions I’ve tried, L-word Mint Cinnamon is especially user-friendly. I have it installed on a 2006 White MacBook. Performance is lacking, but it gets there. If everything else gets hosed, I can use that to search for recovery options. Mint also works very well in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine on my 2018 Mac mini.

    After losing track of Kim some years ago, I was delighted to find him back on the ether and am now a daily communicant.

  12. I started with the experimental version of Mosaic on a SPARC Workstation in about 1992 before it was generally available. I had a small personal website on the workstation and learned a little HTML. Later I moved on to Netscape Navigator and finally Firefox with Thunderbird as my email client. Been there for nearly twenty years. I still use a copy of MS Office 2003. Seems to get the job done. I’m not one of those “Let’s install this. It looks like fun. Then, let’s install that. It looks like fun too.” I’m still on Windows 7 and have no intention of going to Windows 10 or a MAC. I have all the parts to build a new PC for myself and will probably wind up using Ubuntu L-word since Firefox and Thunderbird are available on it. If I stick with MS I will use Windows 7 in a stripped down version dual booted with the L-word.

  13. I wasn’t going to mention the L word until you did, but your info is about 15 years out of date. If you go with the popular African named distro, it installs just like windows, you never have to touch the command line, and OpenOffice is actually native to IT rather than windows. In the last year, I’ve spent more time in the command line fixing my windows machines (windows update seems to break regularly again) and zero time in the others that I use for web browsing.

    It’s not worth switching from a perfectly good windows machine to it, but if you end up with a second hand machine and don’t plan to play vidya games on it, it will do just as well now.

    1. Many moons ago we purchased a pair of desktops for the youngun’s that came pre-loaded with Vista. (now there’s a real POS OS!)
      When they started high school they had to get touch-screen tablets so I took the RAM from one and put it into the other. Ran DBAN on the hard drive to wipe out all vestiges of MicroShit and installed the latest version of MINT (Cinnamon flavor). Don’t worry. It’s GUI usable.
      It came pre-loaded with Libre Office, FireFox, Audacity, and other good stuff.
      I’m happy as a clam with it.
      Of course, YMMV.

  14. If you have not tried Libre Office, check it out. I think it better than Open Office.

    And welcome to the club, switched to Fire Fox and Thunderbird after my favorite Netscape died, sad day that was.

    Absolutely despise Google and all of it’s spawn but they keep buying up and taking over bloody everything that Amazon does not grab first. Have to retain Android though as Apple logic simply defies my engineer trained brain; hippies should never be allowed to design anything technical.

    I tolerate Bill Gates because I have been using the platform since BEFORE he took it over (as far as I am concerned Bill stole it from Heath Co. building upon what was then called HDOS). I know this because he filtched one of our lead software designers back in 1980 (full disclosure – I worked for Heath 79-91).

  15. What’s up with your gun ranges? Must be the various owner’s decision to close. Here in Houston I’ve been going 3 times a week since this insanity started. Would be totally losing my shit otherwise.

  16. Kim,

    Bullet Trap and Frisco Gun Club here in Plano are both open, although at reduced capacity (every other lane for social distancing purposes). I can personally confirm Bullet Trap.

    1. SDN,
      I don’t shoot at Bullet Trap because their attitude is everything that’s wrong with shooting ranges, and Frisco Gun Club (rightly) gives priority to its members, which means that because of the “distancing” nonsense, the wait time for a shooting bay can be days, not minutes or hours.

      DFW, whose range was subject to the Dallas County closure order — the shop wasn’t — opens next week, however, so the gloom is starting to lift.

Comments are closed.