My company has ceased its semi-annual phishing testing without explanation.
I suspect it may be the fact that the failure-rate of these tests creates a paper trail of liability.
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Google is rolling back the AI summaries of their search results. Too many āeat glue, eat rocks, drink urine, jump off the golden gate bridgeā answers, apparently. Gee who could have guessed?
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This concludes the second ever test of the Google AI. The first test was where we asked the AI āshould we do internal testing first to see if our AI will generate dangerous advice?ā ā that test concluded successfully with the answer āNo, ship it.ā
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It has been quiet around here, seems everything has been working outā¦
Well, I have a questionā¦ a friendsā Windows laptop is giving Bad_File_system_Info errors after an update.
He has shell access but when trying to save the data with xcopy (thatās what he told me he was doing) he gets another error that the filename cannot be saved.
I donāt have more info atm because he can only type on his mobile obviously.
What would be the best strategy to save the data from the hard-drive?
Is there a number with the filesyaem error? It tells (someone who knows them) what kind of error is happening, which can point to a solution. (And remind your friend they can take a picture of the screen with their phoneā¦)
My expectation is failing disk.
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The photo of the blue screen says actually āBAD SYSTEM CONFIG INFOā
This seems to have happened after the computer first did the latest windows update and then a bios update on topā¦
The potential data loss is about a few dozen photos and a whole lot of work setting up a new system of course. Most of my friendās data is online luckily.
The trouble is that the only USB drive he has at the moment apparently is not formatted in a compatible way. So tomorrow morning heāll probably try to buy a fresh one to get at those files and then see if any of the system can be salvaged.
Which reminds me to commit and push all my git repos ā¦ (I have a few that are not code and so donāt get committed on every single change)
I have a problem with how I use my web browser.
I open a lot of tabs and rarely ever close any of them.
A lot of this is due to my work ā I am constantly dealing with a wide range of web-based content, and might easily open up dozens of tabs along the way while working on a task. And outside of specific work tasks, I also spend a lot more time opening web pages, many of which are ultimately set aside for later reference because I donāt have time to read them then and there.
Mostly the hardware and software cope, and not dealing with the problem is easier than dealing with it; and so over long, long periods of time the number of tabs in my persistent browser session becomes enormous. And itās always a mixture of things I no longer need and things I know I still want to look at, so I donāt want to just kill an entire window of them ā but I almost never go to the effort of cleaning them up.
Eventually it does get unwieldy of course, so thatās when I finallyā¦ open a new browser window and continue the pattern in there. And if the number of windows becomes too much, I just send some of them off to one of the 10 workspaces that I donāt have another use for.
Over time, vast numbers of browser windows, all loaded with tabs, accumulate in that workspace Iām never looking at. And when I restart the browser, my system remembers which workspace they were in, puts them back there, and I never really see them.
And, finally, the hardware starts to struggle ā but the vast, vast majority of the tabs are not properly loaded most of the time ā i.e. itās not āIām struggling because Iām rendering all these pagesā but rather āIām struggling because simply keeping track of the list of things I might be asked to load has become difficultā.
All of this to convince you that Iām genuinely not joking when I tell you that my browser session, accumulated over I donāt know how many months, contained 8,843 tabs.
Furthermore, every tab has its own history, and if you included all of that then the total number of page views being tracked in that session was 24,269.
I wouldnāt normally know these numbers (this isnāt the first time Iāve been in this situation), but the last time I did a clean up I did it manually, window-by-window, tab-by-tab, and it took hours. So today I did what I should have done then, and I figured out how Firefox actually stores this stuff, and how I might perform some direct surgery on that data in order to purge the URL patterns I knew I could safely lose, without losing the things I might still want.
I mostly attacked the biggest targets ā today was not an attempt to reach āsaneā levels of session state, but rather to solve the performance issues Iād been observing for a while ā and so while the current figure of 2,565 (or 4,156 when including tab history) would still sound utterly ludicrous to almost anyone, it represents a tremendous improvement for a first pass at the issue. My laptop is remarkably happy about the situation!
I will of course share details on the offchance that anyone else would find it usefulā¦
- On my system, Firefox stores the profile in
~/.mozilla/firefox/<name>/ - When you shut down Firefox, it writes the session state to a compressed JSON file named
sessionstore.jsonlz4 - The
*.jsonlz4files (and also*.mozlz4files) are compressed using Mozillaās customised version of the LZ4 format, so you canāt use standard LZ4 tools to process them. - The Ubuntu package archives contain a package
lz4jsonwhich provides a programlz4jsoncatwhich can decompress these files, but that cannot re-compress them. - Instead you can use mozlz4 to both decompress and recompress.
- To do the heavy lifting with the JSON itself, you want the venerable (and fast)
jq. - The manual process I used looked something like the followingā¦ (n.b. Iāve edited some stuff here without re-testing, so itās not impossible that Iāve introduced an error. If you can use this, though, youāll probably know how to deal with any mistake Iāve made.)
# Shut down Firefox
# Back up the session file
cp sessionstore.jsonlz4 sessionstore.jsonlz4.backup
# Extract JSON data.
mozlz4-linux -x sessionstore.jsonlz4 ss0.json
# or: lz4jsoncat sessionstore.jsonlz4 >ss0.json
# Format the minimised JSON, if you want to look at it yourself.
cat ss0.json | jq >ss1.json
# How many URLs are there in total? (full history of every tab in every window)
cat ss0.json | jq '.windows[].tabs[].entries[].url' | wc -l
# How many tabs are there?
cat ss0.json | jq '.windows[].tabs[].entries[0].url' | wc -l
# Produce a sorted file of URLs in order to easily pick out target patterns for deletion.
cat ss0.json | jq '.windows[].tabs[].entries[].url' | sort >ss_files.txt
# Purge all unwanted URL entries from all tabs (each tab having its own history).
# You will need a REGEXP_MATCHING_URLS_TO_PURGE.
# (Probably in the form of "foo|bar|baz", etc...)
cat ss0.json | jq 'del(.windows[].tabs[].entries[] | select(.url|test("REGEXP_MATCHING_URLS_TO_PURGE")))' >ss2.json
# Purge all tabs which are now empty.
cat ss2.json | jq 'del(.windows[].tabs[] | select(.entries | select(type == "array" and length == 0)))' >ss3.json
# Re-compress and clobber original session file
jq -c ss3.json | mozlz4-linux -z - sessionstore.jsonlz4
I then crossed my fingers and started Firefox.
Iām not sure whether it had to Figure Some Stuff Out on account of what Iād done, as my machine seemed to struggle a bit, but I think it was mostly that Iād purged all tabs that had been showing the ānew tabā page, and Iād previously been using that as a mitigation for having so many windows ā in each window I didnāt need, I opened that ānew tabā page, which consumes few resources; and when I restart Firefox it only goes to the bother of loading pages which are in visible tabs; so that goes a long way to stopping it from churning CPU for every window, and Iād eliminated that protectionā¦
Despite having managed to close a bunch of browser windows after the big purge, I still have a very silly number of them (22); so that probably accounts for the initial sluggishness (especially as I think some of those tabs were for fairly heavyweight pages). Once Iād closed the windows I could easily close, restored my ānew tabā mitigations in the others, and restarted Firefox, it felt incredibly snappy!
I donāt believe I spent any more time getting to that point than Iād used on any prior clean-up, but now I have a process I could use to trim the fat at any time with very little bother.
Or I could, you know, try to form a habit of reviewing and closing tabs more often. I know myself well enough to not trust that, thoughā¦
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Well that sounds stressful.
I am a tab closer. I get nervous when I have more than 10 tabs open at the same time. (I have about 10 pinned tabs that donāt countāincluding webmail, my nextcloud, todoist, tekeli.li, bgg)
What I have is tab containers where I can send tabs to another container within the browser. And I have named those by context. Work, Games, Shopping, newsā¦. occasionally I donāt switch between those for a while and find that one of them has accumulated a dozen tabs. I quickly clean those away.
When I find I am keeping a tab because I would normally be bookmarking it insteadāI bookmark it. Or I add the link to todoist if it is something I mean to read later but not now.
How do you even find anything with 1000s of tabs? Wouldnāt an improved tab history be much more valuable?
But my partner is also a tab-keeper. Waiting for him to find a particular tab where he put whatever he is looking for is hard for me to watch.
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How do you even find anything with 1000s of tabs?
Well a lot of the time I just open a new tab, of course!
Mostly the stuff Iām using in the short term is nearby, though.
I can also search the tabs, and I use that quite frequently.
I wonāt attempt to defend my approach as in any way reasonable, though.
I get nervous when I have more than 10 tabs open at the same time.
Iāve been on video calls where someone shared a screen with maybe double-figures of tabs, and another person has made a comment about them having so many tabs openā¦ and I just hold my tongue and wonder exactly what would happen if I shared my screenā¦
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Wow.
Yeah, put me in the two figure tab camp. I think my weirdest habit is that I have a collapsed block of tabs for commonly used symbols that arenāt on keyboards - minus sign, multiplication symbol, greater than or equal, etc. - because I canāt be bothered to learn the shortcuts to input them.
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I currently have 45 tabs open on my work computer across two windows of Chrome, and then 12 tabs in Edge. This fluctuates back and forth a bit, but is usually a little less than this. Edge is primarily for our company Sharepoint and Power Automate stuff, and as Iāve been creating flows I have some reference tabs for how to do particular things. The Chrome stuff is a mix of work and personal stuff, like these forums and BGG, but they are mostly the login pages for various utilities I may need on any given day, or instructions on how to do particular things that I donāt need to do very often.
Sometimes I will just make something into a bookmark/favorite and close the tab. 90% of the time, I never end up needing to use it again.
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Iāve replaced my old wired gaming mouse with a more ergonomic wireless mouse. Unlearning 13 years of muscle memory is hard but my hand and wrist position already feels better.
I bought an extra dongle so I can use it on my desktop and work laptop.
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When I changed from a plain three button mouse to a trackpad, I kept a (sadly two buttons plus clickable annoyance wheel, not a proper 3 button mouse) mouse hooked up for years, just in case I really needed it. I used it a fair bit originally, but not at all after a few months. I had to look for it a couple years ago when I got a new work desktop, because the Bluetooth trackpad wouldnāt work out of the box, and the mouse it came with was defective. (I had an amusing experience at the Apple Store getting a replacement. I had taken the mouse along when I had another reason to go to the store, and the woman helping me was unable to replace it, because for some silly reason I had not memorized the serial number of the computer. She realized how stupid that was, and grabbed one from a display computer and just handed it to me. )
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The mice provided at work are the standard symmetrical HP two button with scroll wheel. The more recent versions seem to have got slimmer.
Iāve also had the mouse and keyboard completely disappear from the desk I usually work at when Iām in the office.
Donāt think Iāll be bringing my own mechanical keyboard into work (as much as I hate the squishy HP keyboards) but a mouse is easy enough.
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Iāve been using trackballs for years - not the Microsoft-made ones, for some reason every Microsoft peripheral starting from the original ānaturalā keyboards just sits wrong under my hand, but your basic asymmetric thumb-ball works well for me.
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Iām about to buy a TV for the first time in 20 years. Iām very wary of āsmartā technology, but almost resigned to it after a brief online trawl. Any tips on buying, āsmartā or otherwise?
My only comment is that a screen that looks massive at first glance will pretty quickly become ānormal-sizedā ā and if you havenāt had a TV in 20 years, they will probably all look massive at first. As such, you might well be best-served in the long run by something which is larger than whatever your gut feeling says is big enough.
(Unless you rented one for a bit, though, I canāt think how youād know for sure.)
My parents recently went from a 32" to 43" which originally felt like a big step up but quickly felt a bit small.
I donāt think they mind as I think theyād prefer the TV not dominate the living room. Some of their neighbours have 50" plus and looking through their windows it almost feels like the TV is the entirety of their living room.
Oh, in fact I have other comments. Two things which have traditionally varied a great deal with flat screens are refresh rates and black levels.
Even if you donāt care about sports, they can be rather good for deciding whether the refresh rates are good ā if you can clearly track a very small, distant ball travelling at high speed across the screen, youāll probably not have any issues with anything else either.
If you care about black levels (some screen tech just isnāt great at not lighting up pixels to some extent) then super-bright demo content isnāt going to help show that off. Nor will a brightly-lit shop room, though. If you really care, then a darkened demo room would be the thing, and maybe a film set at night :). You might be lucky to find that though, in which case good reviews may be your best bet.
I donāt really know what the current state of the technology is like, though.
(On which note: I personally donāt understand who could possibly need a 4K TV. But Iāve never sat in front of one either. It sounds absolutely insane to me, though ā thatās a resolution you can project on a movie theatre screen and have a really great picture (in fact a quick web search suggests most digital theatres use 2K projectors, and only a relative minority 4K). I just donāt understand why itās a thing for televisions at all. Yes, youāre closer ā but not that close, surely? My suspicion is that dealing in 4K is just asking considerably more of all of the hardware involved, for no real benefit (and if there was any risk of the hardware ever struggling with that, then Iād prefer a downgrade in resolution every time). Folks with experience of the things may well disagree, though.)
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Thanks.
I relatively recently bought a higher resolution monitor, and the difference is clear to me there. Doesnāt seem strictly necessary for streamed content, which is likely the only 4k content that will appear on the TV, but since the screen will be about four times bigger than my monitor, and our house internet speed isnāt lacking, it surely canāt hurt.