Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

A Holden Commodore screeches to a halt. The Commodores Greatest Hits blares from within until the car is turned off. I open the door & emerge with a Commodore SX-64 carried like a briefcase. I turn to the camera, smiling & holding up a finger from my free hand. A disembodied voice sings the jingle, "Are you keeping up with the Commodore? Because the Commodore is keeping up with you."

Merry Yule, northern hemisphere folks! Merry Litha, southern hemisphere folks!

Unlike the simple on-off switch built into some browsers, NoScript & ScriptSafe are selective & granular JavaScript blockers. That means, with either of them, you can allow JavaScript from a website's domains while blocking & distrusting JavaScript from ad network domains. And that distrust of an ad network's JavaScript (or any domain's JS) follows you across the World Wide Web to every website attempting to use it on you, not just the one site you distrusted it on.

For anti-adblock pop-ups, I usually recommend the more extreme action of blocking JavaScript on that website, either through "Site Settings" behind the info icon in the Chrome address bar, or through an extension such as NoScript for Firefox & ScriptSafe for Chrome/Chromium.

If the page content is completely inaccessible with both ads & JS blocked, then there's nothing for it; I recommend abandoning the site. Like a game of Three-Card Monte in an alley, the only winning move is not to play.

Cleaning up a customer's PC, I made the mistake of leaving a tab open on Yahoo's home page. Only 1 minute later: malvertized. Sunuva...

I did it again to pin down the cause, & indeed it's Yahoo's ads breaking out, taking over the page, & loading scary messages that make it difficult to leave.

I can't stress enough, folks, that an ad blocker is Internet SECURITY software.

current status: "This shouldn't take long. Thanks for being patient."

They're out of fresh strawberries. Guess I'll have to get the recycled strawberries instead.

It's been an age since I installed Microsoft Office. I've been sitting at Office 365's "We'll be done in just a moment" prompt for the last half hour plus. It's on-site for a customer, so it's billed time I've been waiting, but staring at the progress bar & experiencing Microsoft's idea of "just a moment" is boring.

When you're writing code, don't forget that one of the people who might end up using it, one of the people you need to write docs for, is you. Specifically, a version of you 3-5 years from now who has no memory or idea of what you were thinking when you wrote it.

I just found out how to easily test every single byte of swap space I have: All I have to do is leave Firefox alone but running for most of a week.

Don't you just wish your Rubik's Cube would solve itself?
https://boingboing.net/2018/09/24/self-solving-rubiks-cube.html -
https://media.dmm-make.com/item/4462/ -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCoH2AORcEQ