Shallow Thoughts : : tech
Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.
Fri, 17 Oct 2025
I just updated to Firefox 144 and discovered that when I narrow my
Mastodon window to its minimum size, it no longer fits in the space
between my mail and IRC windows. I suppose I could reduce the IRC window
even further, but I don't want to; the sizes I was using yesterday
were fine.
I ask you, what was the compelling reason that Firefox users had to be
prevented from using a 450-pixel wide window? What is up with Mozilla
developers? (And why do I still put up with random time-wasters like this?
Read more ...
Tags: firefox
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12:00 Oct 17, 2025
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Sat, 27 Sep 2025
Someone sent me an alert that my
Galilean Jupiter's moons simulation
and
SatSat Saturn's moons simulation
pages weren't working.
Sure enough, they weren't. The error console said
Loading failed for the script
with the name of a calendar widget I use, along with the CSS it uses,
both loaded from a directory inside /javascript on my website,
the same website where the moon simulations are running.
I checked the logs: sure enough, references to those files were returning
404 in the access log, with nothing at all in the error log. The files
were clearly there, and world readable, so it wasn't a permissions problem.
Read more ...
Tags: apache, debian, linux, tech, web
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13:29 Sep 27, 2025
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Wed, 26 Mar 2025
Michael Kennedy
asked
whether people are using search engines less because of AI chatbots.
I haven't really gotten into using AI chatbots as coding assistants,
so I'm not one to say. But it did make me wonder how many searches I do.
Michael saw a stat that people average fewer than 300 searches per month;
he thought that was absurdly low until he checked his own stats and
found he'd only made 211 searches so far in March.
(Of course, March isn't over yet.
He didn't give a search number for a complete month.)
Read more ...
Tags: tech, firefox, web, python, google, sqlite
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16:07 Mar 26, 2025
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Fri, 29 Mar 2024
In 2022 I wrote about
Sending Mail via Gmail using OAuth2.
But it turned out that Google expires OAuth2 tokens on a weekly basis.
So if you use that method, once a week you'll have to bring up a browser,
log in to your Google account and go through the five or so pages of
re-authorizing. Which will invariably happen when you're in a hurry
and just wanted to send a quick email so you can move on to other things.
However, it turns out there's an easier way, which apparently doesn't
expire: App passwords. I switched to using app passwords back then
(I've been using that app password since then),
and I even wrote it up, and then forgot to post it. What a dingbat!
But I changed my GMail password recently, and it turns out when you change
your Gmail account password, Google revokes all app passwords you've
set up (and, of course, doesn't bother to tell you that, and the
error message you get when you try to sign in with the old app password
has nothing whatever to do with the actual problem, which is that your
app password has been revoked and you need to create a new one).
So I dug out this old never-got-posted article and used it to
make a new app password, and have updated the parts that were a little
out of date.
Read more ...
Tags: email, mutt, gmail
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20:32 Mar 29, 2024
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Thu, 27 Jul 2023
I don't write a lot of book reviews here, but I just finished a book
I'm enthusiastic about:
Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age
and How We Can Do Better, by Jennifer Pahlka.
Read more ...
Tags: books, programming, tech
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19:20 Jul 27, 2023
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Thu, 13 Apr 2023
Last week I spent some time monitoring my apache error logs to try to
get rid of warnings from my website and see if there are any errors I
need to fix. (Answer: yes, there were a few things I needed to fix,
mostly due to changes in libraries since I wrote the pages in question.)
The vast majority of lines in my error log, however, are requests for
/wp-login.php or /xmlrpc.php. There are so many of them
that they drown out any actual errors on the website.
Read more ...
Tags: web, apache
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10:28 Apr 13, 2023
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Tue, 10 Jan 2023
I wanted to find something I'd googled for recently.
That should be easy, right? Just go to the browser's history window.
Well, actually not so much.
You can see them in Firefox's history window, but they're interspersed
with all the other places you've surfed so it's hard to skim the list quickly.
I decided to take a little time and figure out how to extract the
search terms. I was pretty sure that they were in places.sqlite3
inside the firefox profile. And they were.
Read more ...
Tags: web, firefox, google, sqlite
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16:54 Jan 10, 2023
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Sun, 18 Dec 2022
Back in 2015, I wrote a script for the mutt mailer (or any
plaintext mail program, really) to
view
MS Word documents (or other unfriendly formats) attached to emails.
(This is unfortunately something that comes up constantly in email
exchanges with League of Women Voters people —
Read more ...
Tags: email, mutt, programming, python, linux
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18:52 Dec 18, 2022
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