|
|
|
a web experience cluttered with scammy advertisements
Saturday, March 8 2025
When I was packing up the menorah to ship (using a large insulated box that had been used to ship us faux meat from Blackbird Foods), Gretchen had suggested I include a card for my "business." So I made what was probably the worst business card ever using a highly-solarized color-inverted image of one of my menorahs printed on a piece of card stock (technically it was that light-yellow paper used in Braille typewriters, one of which I inherited from my mother). I thought a better basis for such a card might be a painting of my reticulate menorah on a tiny canvas. So today I painted just such a painting.
Today's tiny painting of a menorah. Click to enlarge.
I'd taken a recreational dose of pseudoephedrine in hopes it would give me the energy and focus to redo the way I encrypt a secret that my ESP8266 Remote firmware passes in plaintext to the backend, which the backend then uses to confirm that the data being sent is legitimate. But I never got around to it. Instead I ended up mostly lying on the beanbag watching YouTube videos in the laboratory. Gretchen was gone for most the afternoon and evening, and I took advantage of that to walk the dogs in a loop west of the Farm Road. (Unfortunately, with this particular pair of dogs, they will not walk with me if Gretchen is around.)
I rarely see the shouty mess that the World Wide Web has become in the past twenty years because I, like anyone with any sense, use an ad blocker. The one I use is an extension called uBlock Origin, and it works great, even stripping ads out of YouTube (something it's doubtful I would watch without it). But Google, an increasingly malevolent actor in the world, has decided that uBlock Origin has to go. Recently they changed their "policy," forcing all extensions to adhere to a framework called Extension Manifest V3. This manifest doesn't allow uBlock Origin to do what it needs to do, so it ends up disabled. After a reboot today (Central Hudson had caused a brief power outage while installing utility poles down the hill on Dug Hill Road), Chrome on Woodchuck (my main workstation) said that uBlock Origin (and a number of other Chrome extensions) had been disabled due to their not following best practices or some such bullshit. So I tried an extension called uBlock Origin Lite, but I only lived with it for an hour or two before I found the intrusive ads it was letting through unaccepable. In particular, I was now seeing an incredibly annoying ad at the beginning of every YouTube video selling, get this, a different ad blocker. So I did some searching (in DuckDuckGo) and found a registry hack that allows Chrome to use the older ManifestV2 until at least June. After that, I might have to switch to using Firefox, a browser I haven't used as a daily driver in 15 years. But a web experience cluttered with scammy advertisements is not something I will tolerate.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250308 feedback
previous | next |
