Shallow Thoughts : : Jan

View or Reset All Your Firefox Zoom Settings

Firefox's zoom settings are useful. You can zoom in on a page with Ctrl-+ (actually Ctrl-+ on a US-English keyboard), or out with Ctrl--.

Useful, that is, until you start noticing that lots of pages you visit have weirdly large or small font sizes, and it turns out that Firefox is remembering a Zoom setting you used on that site half a year ago on a different monitor.

Whenever you zoom, Firefox remembers that site, and uses that zoom setting any time you go to that site forevermore (unless you zoom back out).

Now that I'm using the same laptop in different modes — sometimes plugged into a monitor, sometimes using its own screen — that has become a problem.

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Setting a grub2 Boot Splash Image

For many years, I used extlinux as my boot loader to avoid having to deal with the annoying and difficult grub2. But that was on MBR machines. I never got the sense that extlinux was terribly well supported in the newer UEFI/Secure Boot world. So when I bought my current machine a few years ago, I bit the bullet and let Ubuntu's installer put grub2 on the hard drive.

One of the things I lost in that transition was a boot splash image.

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My Favorite Plane(s)

On most Sundays, you can find me at Overlook Park where the Los Alamos Aeromodelers fly radio controlled model airplanes at the big soccer field. The Los Alamos Aeromodelers used to be an official flying club, but now it's just a group of friends who fly together.

I first got into R/C flying in the 1980s. Back then, model planes were made of balsa wood. They took forever to build. The planes were heavy (five or six pounds) and flew fast, and so when they crashed — which they did a LOT — you had a lot of fastidious rebuilding to do.

They were powered with internal combustion 2-stroke motors. They were SO LOUD. You couldn't fly them in local parks; you had to drive to a remote flying field where the noise wouldn't disturb anyone.

Plus the motors were finicky and messy: they spewed oil everywhere, so you had to clean the plane off with paper towels and a degreaser after every flight. Ick.

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Editing GPX Track Files from OsmAnd in a Text Editor

I record track files in OsmAnd for most of my hikes. But about a quarter of the time, when I get back to the car, I forget to turn tracking off. So I end up with a track file that shows the hike plus at least part of the car trip afterward. Not very useful for purposes like calculating mileage.

My PyTopo can do simple track edits, like splitting the track into two or deleting from some point to the end. But most of the time it's easier just to edit the GPX file with a text editor.

Eesh, edit GPX directly?? Sounds like something you oughtn't do, doesn't it? But actually, GPX (a form of XML) is human readable and editable. And this specific case, separating the walking from the car trip in an OsmAnd track file, is particularly easy, because OsmAnd helpfully adds a speed to every point it saves.

These instructions seem long, but really, once you've done it once, you'll realize that it's all very straightforward; explaining the steps is harder than doing them.

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Best Books I Read in 2021

Happy New Year!

I wrote a few years ago about keeping lists of the books I read, first because I was curious how many books I read, but later because I found the lists quite useful for other purposes.

But I realized this year that I hardly ever write about the good books I discover each year. That's a shame: how are we to find out about great new authors if we don't all make a point of sharing them?

So today I'm going to write about the best books I read in 2021. I'll probably write catch-up articles about some of the best from earlier years in future articles.

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