Firefox Strikes Again!

All my computers were going crazy.
And I was going crazy trying to find out what was wrong with them.

So I turned on the Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and looked at Processes. Firefox had 2 firefox.exe files running. One had over 700,000 K, the other over 300,000 K and I had no idea what was going on.
Then I looked at the Resources Monitor and saw that Free Memory was an extremely scarce resource.

So I Googled "2 firefox.exes running" and yadda-yadda-yadda came to the issue of Firefox e10s.....

and I don't care what they are....
I mean, I don't care what "e10s" are and why Firefox needs to slip them in on me and drive me crazy for a month or so, and just sit back and laugh at my discomfiture. I don't care. I don't want! Get it!??!

so I'm not going to go into why Firefox did sneak them in in one of their innumerable updates....

Anyway, I Googled again, found  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1147868#question-reply

and followed the recipe, got rid of the doppelganger Firefox, and everything works one heck of a lot better.

Flash Player

This morning I finally shut off Flash Player in Firefox.
I usually have at least 4 tabs open, reading and following links and looking up references. Every page has advertisements running and slowing things down to a crawl.

So I turned it off.
If there is something I want that requires it, Firefox asks me if I wish to activate it for just now or for automatic operation. There is not much I need to watch on it.


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Roboto

As Dorothy Parker once famously wrote:

I'd rather flunk my Turing Test,
than read a poem by Edgar Guest.


I am of conflicted loyalties, since it seems my paternal ancestors were full of praise for Mr. Guest, once poet laureate of The Detroit Free Press. I have some editions of his work that came from them. Of course, they are not exactly well thumbed, dog-eared, and marked by the flotsam and jetsam of being assiduously read while eating and drinking... but I think Mr. Guest was esteemed.

His poetry was all the rage back when a plate of eggs cost a quarter or five bees.

More to the point, I find myself more and more flunking those Turing-Test-Thingies in the comment section of blogs, where one is asked to enter what one see in order to prove that one is most definitely not a robot.
Not a robot, not half-blood-robot, not quarter-servo-robot... not even an octaroon-robot.
Which raises the distinctly unsettling notion that maybe I do have some Robot blood in my history.

This is not a far-fetched possibility. Recall that Hero of Alexandria devised such busybody gizmos back 2,000 years ago, and Homer sings to us of mechanical maidens of gold and self-proplled tripods buzzing through the hallways of Hephaestus, bringing tea pots under Mycenaean cozies to all and sundry.
And then there's the story of dewy eyed Pasiphaea, which is not exactly a robo-cow-story, but is a much more interesting story than is my post.
(I almost wrote "postern" instead of "post", sort of being all overcome by that cows and bulls and gates leading to the meadows business...  very much a georgic nature have I in the worst Virgilian sense.)

Anyway, I write that I see bricks, lumber, post boards, posters admonishing the populace that loose lips doing something awful to ships, and adverts for Victory Gin. What they seem to actually want is some fuzzy and obscure sequence of numbers attached to the stoop of an unfamiliar house.

In some uncanny sense in this day of identity theft and widespread computer hacking, this blurry sequence of numbers has become a mezuzah upon the door which leads to the admittance of  your comment.
(Maybe I should have a a scholar and scribe write the Shema on a shtikl paper and create a mezuzah for my computer?!...
By the way, within the past few months I have been accused of studying Yiddish for the jokes. As if my life were a Seinfeld episode!
Did I tell you I was having some Mandelbaum's Gym T-Shirts made up?)

Where's the sense in that test? Any robot can recite a sequence of numbers.

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Techno-Freckles And Feather-Bedding Advertisements

I am making progress with my new computer.

I have discovered some new things about my Synaptic TouchPad V7.5, and it is working a great deal better. These things are "discovered" because they were not covered in the instructions. It seems to me that one of the major flaws with technology is a strange inability to communicate with precision.

The mathematics, the electrical engineering, the computer science are done extremely well, but the communication with the user seems to be full of gaps and lack of clarity, not to mention that sometimes the technology companies do not seem to have a proper understanding of their products; that is, their products operate within a range of variability, yet they seem to write to me as if everything was exactly that point estimate of exactitude that they set themselves to attain.

Case in point: enlarging or diminishing the display.
The instructions say that you spread your two fingers to enlarge and pinch them to diminish, just as if you were working an iPhone.
However, on my computer, this spreading of the fingers has the effect of letting a lonely bull out into the fields filled with Holsteins; it cannot be easily controlled. Same way for the finger pinch; it rapidly decreases in a Costanza-ish manner that is disconcerting.

However, I have found that using a series of small strokes, either spreading or pinching, controls the movement very well. I estimate that I move the fingers maybe just less than an inch apart or together and things are under control.
And it is not the tip of the finger one uses, rather a portion of the finger tip upon which the fingerprint is.
And for highlighting text, the double tap is nowhere as slow as the instructions indicate; rather, it is a fast double tap - about 3 to 4 times faster -  and then highlight.
There is no mention of any of this in the instructions. In the instructions, it is the best of all possible worlds, sort of like the Speech Recognition tutorial that gets you all enthusiastic about using your voice to control things. There are only so many times one can say "Scroll down" and get an inquiry whether one said "Blow down" or "Flow down", and please say the number of the correct item without becoming despondent.

I bought an HP optical mouse which works well.
We usually sit in a chair to read the news, and we have the laptop recumbent on our laps upon a write/erase board which I drafted for the job of supporting the laptop while allowing air to move freely into the cooling system.
The mouse works very well by just using the arm of the chair as a mouse pad. This surprised me, and I was very happy to see how that worked out. The mouse cost about $15.

My Optical Mouse

I still have a lot of worthless apps cluttering up the start screen.
Reading is getting harder, for the more proficient I become, the faster I go, and I am always ready to jump into an article, but there are so many ads that need to be closed and small Flash videos running somewhere that I have to be patient.
It seems to me that faster processors are needed not just for gaming, but also for mundane tasks, such as reading a news site, because before I can navigate the page, I have to wait for all the techno-skin-tags and techno-freckles to finish loading on the face of the front page.

I mean, I should have bought something that ran close to the speed of IBM's Watson just to read the morning news. I usually go to the first page of an article I wish to read, read the first couple lines, or the first paragraph, then a page down or two-finger scroll to continue, and the thing just sits still as it waits for the feather-bedding advertisements to get their 8 hours in.

I can just hear them:

Registration Advertisement: "Hey! You! Two-Finger Righty! Slow down! Ya wanna ruin this cushy job for the rest of us?!"

Flash Video Ad:  "If you don't slow down, I'll make you crawl! "

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Windows 8 Laptography

Getting Along In Windows 8

I am actually getting along with Windows 8. That's why The Beagle Boys have taken over from Goofy in the photo. Our plans of world domination are getting back on track.

By learning key stroke controls and using speech recognition and the quirky touchpad on my HP machine, I am getting in control.
I may spring for an optical mouse for less than $20.

My HomeGroup is established, and I am working on a plan for archiving past, present, and future which will probably include a Terabyte external HD for backups and long-term storage.

At this moment, I am working on my old machine. When I am done writing this, I will bring the new one in an try an take a photo with it web cam. Then I will transfer it via the HomeGroup Network to this machine, and you can see the Rube Goldberg set-up I've had since Christmas:
Old Reliable - a Lenovo - whose display hinges gave out, so I used small C-clamps to apply enough pressure for them to hold the screen up again. My wife over-tightened one of these, causing the screen to crack , and I had to connect it to an old HPw2007 monitor witha VGA cable just to see things.
The laptop battery is totally toast and only works with a direct supply of electricity, and the monitor has an iffy power connection which, once you have the power cord jiggled around into the right position, you try not to touch it again.

I shall add the photo to this post later today, so check back later for the steampunk laptop show.

I did not opt for TouchScreen, and I am glad I did not do so.
I have enough issues stemming from my posture while doing my Laptography (Plato's and Aristotle's expression for "writing while using a laptop or tablet"... pronounced lap-TO-graph-y... the final "p" in "laptop" is elided).

I really doubt that I could put up with even more slouching forward even the few millimeters needed to interact with the screen. I think I would be better off to learn touch typing. There are a host of ergonomic issues in all this.
That's why when the concept of Google glasses was floated about 7 years ago, I thought it was sometimes a great notion.

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Snapshot of old Lenovo

The glare on the large monitor is reflection.
The white on the laptop monitor is parts of a messed up screen.
Notice the C-clamp 0n the right.

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How To Dodge A Java Update

I would like to start up my computer some day without seeing that another Java the Hutt update is available.
It is almost as annoying as Adobe Air updates.
Java is particularly good, because once it has installed, it immediately informs me again that there is an update available, and let's spend some more time on verifying the version, OK?

Or Firefox updates.
I save a large number of references as complete web pages. Suddenly, sometime since Christmas, I updated yet another Firefox update after putting them off for days, only to have them pester me more and more. Lo and behold! I can no longer save complete web pages.

There is a fix with SavePageURL or some such thing which is an add on used with web pages saved as HTML files. It seems to work well.

It only took an hour to research and search... that's how you do it when you're a tech consumer schlub on the "techie" end of the stick: you research and search.

On my new computer, I am actually staying with Internet Explorer.
Whatever Firefox has to offer just is not worth it.

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My New Computer

 Welcome to Windows 8 !

I have a new HP laptop.
It runs on Windows 8.

I was going to stay with Windows 7, but I found that Windows 7 units cost more for what you were getting than new Windows 8 units.
That should have tipped me off.

I have devoted a good deal of time to both the hardware and software, and I'll talk about software.

Windows 8: I do not get it.
I fail to see how radically changing the way things are done enhances my computer experience.

I see almost no utility in the Start screen, other than pointing to the Desktop mode I am used to. I have tried to find some benefit in the Start screen, but I do not see how it would increase the utility of the computer for me.

The "charms" on the right are not charming. It is just a different place to stick a logo and click it.

And as with every new version, Microsoft finds a way to hide things you have grown used to using.

As is usual, some sort of Security crap came with it. I was busy after I bought it, and did not even open it until a week after purchase. By that time, the trial period of the Security stuff was nearing an end.
When it expired yesterday, I had to locate Windows Defender, only to discover I could not start it.
So I had to search on-line as to why this was the case, finding that certain Security packages disable Defender... which was not mentioned anywhere in my materials.

Uninstall the security stuff, and start up Defender. Defender needed an update and to do a scan, which took 5 hours for a full scan. I wonder how long it will take when I actually have put data on the computer?

I will briefly summarize my experience by saying (1) no more HP computers, and (2) next computer -hopefully - will be a Mac.
Therefore, I shall have a Mac in 3 years. Three years is the time an HP computer lasts, like many other brands. Three years almost exactly.

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