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Notices by hosh (hosh@hub.vikshepa.com), page 24
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And for those who do not use a feed reader, in some (all?) parts of the Fediverse, it is possible to incorporate an RSS feed directly into the timeline. And whereas for news sites this could get a little overpowering, blogs usually have fewer posts.
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Likewise; though somehow I was following you already but with an RSS feed. When I cloned to this new instance I had to reconnect with everyone outside Hubzilla and I then discovered the error. May your power supply be uninterrupted and the monsoon rains be kind to you!
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I was just reading a review of the Logitech G710+ mechanical gaming keyboard. I was given this as a gift some time ago by my son when he bought for himself a still more expensive keyboard. In general I’m quite happy with the keyboard, though I can’t say that the typing experience is amazingly better than my other keyboards. I think I might agree with one reviewer who said the keys are just a shade too close together. Perhaps keyboards should be tailor made for the user, based on expert evaluation.
I also have a cheap Rapoo bluetooth keyboard, for example, which I bought once in India for usage with an Android tablet, but which can be used for any of my devices. In some ways this keyboard feels a little bit easier to use, despite its small size. The only trouble with bluetooth is that it is not 100% dependable. I keep the Rapoo next to the Logitech. For night use, when my spouse is sleeping, the Rapoo is a bit quieter than the Logitech, though then there is the disadvantage that the keys are not lit.
The keys, are if anything, a little more generously sized on the Rapoo, though the keyboard itself is so much smaller. There is no number pad on the Rapoo. Since I never use those number keys, it is an advantage for me that the number pad is absent: the wrist is closer to the mouse or trackball.
By and large, I think my typing experience on the Rapoo is better than that of the Logitech. An irony, since the Rapoo is so much smaller and cheaper.
Fortunately, on account of my desk setup, I can shove the G710+ to the back whenever I feel like using the Rapoo. And whenever the Rapoo decides it isn’t going to work, or I feel like I would like to use the G710+, it’s available as usual.
Recently I bought a Logitech M570 trackball, even though I have a good Logitech mouse. I've actually always liked trackballs, just as I've always hated trackpads. With a trackball, the hand does not need to travel around the desk, which I think is easier, and the actual surface under the pointing device is unimportant. Our glass topped coffee tables, for example, are fine. There's also an advantage if one is using a laptop on a portable knee tray, for example, or an airline's tray, in that less room is necessary. The only thing is that it is more important that a trackball be well designed and engineered than for a mouse. Logitech's M570 fills that bill, and has been tested by many users. My history with trackpads is that these too must be well-engineered, and I have never been able to afford the high end laptops such as Apple products, that presumably are equipped with better trackpads. I possess a Logitech keyboard - trackpad combo which is the most horrible device that I ever purchased from Logitech. I use it for our media pc, but even for that comparatively light use, it is ill-suited.
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There aren't enough vessels to contain all the world's emptiness
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Last night I sat before my computer and thought about summing up the last few days in my life. And realized again that some things are better stated in a personal notebook, rather than online in social media or my blog. I have one of those very nice Moleskine notebooks where I often do that. There's the additional advantage that a notebook is a distraction-free environment. I'm less likely to turn my attention to the latest news or notice a story somewhere that I cannot not read immediately.
On the personal canvas of a paper notebook i can ask myself questions that I'm not so willing to share with the world yet. I can give accounts about real people that I would not want them ever to see. I can make remarks that might land me in trouble, with one person or another, if posted online - and the danger of that serves as a natural inhibitor.
The only trouble is, that when there are a variety of different media to choose from, it's not always apparent what is the best place to express one's thoughts. Usually, when I sit at my table, I don't always know whether what I'm about to write will be suitable for sharing, or with whom.
In our family we also have a closed group on a social messaging app, where we often post photos, messages or links. I abandoned mainstream channels like Facebook and Twitter a few years ago, but recently went back to using alternative federated social media, so this provides another alternative for writing.
Yet with regard to these deliberations about how to express my thoughts, there's actually nothing new under my sun. I've thought through all this before. I just have a hard time assimilating my decisions. I'm like a one-person creaky old committee that can't make up its mind and, when it does, can't implement its own decisions. But the answer is, and remains: use my blog as a basis for all of these journal entries; then decide what to share, where. Some entries can be shared with alternative social media; some with friends and family; some can be placed in my blog but kept completely private.
So if I'm clever, I will act according to my own best practices, and use the framework of my WordPress blog, publishing some things, marking others as private, and sharing some posts with friends.
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For the last couple of days I've been using Tor for general browsing again. It seems to have gotten a little easier. My work email is on Google Apps, and it was previously almost impractical to use Tor with Gmail. I think some people object that it defeats the purpose of Tor to use it for sites like Gmail, but I'm not aiming for total anonymity, just better privacy than I ordinarily have. Now the Gmail issue has gone away, it's no longer necessary to divide my time between it and another browser.
While updating a website today the exit node I was connecting through was blacklisted, but it was enough to change the Tor circuit in order to overcome that.
Tor has also proved to be fast enough for my needs. Something about it may eventually iritate me; but for now good.
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I use many browsers and don't know of any service or addon that permits me to keep bookmarks in sync between one browser and another. There are online bookmark managers and I have an account at Pinboard.in, but that does not really solve the problem for day to day use.
But there are some points of light. It used to be that browsers were less standard in the way they handled bookmarks. I remember being able to import bookmarks into Opera, but not export them. There were even different formats for saving bookmarks. Perhaps there still are - I haven't used Microsoft's browser for many years. There were browsers that had folders in the bookmarks bar and those that didn't.
Fortunately all the browsers that I use now permit the import and export of bookmarks as an html file, and all have bookmark bars with folders. So it's easy to create a standard usage for bookmarks, back them up frequently and then import the backup file every time I start to use a new browser. To keep things tidy, I first delete any previous bookmarks, so I always have only the most up to date version of my bookmarks stash.
Because it's so easy to maintain bookmarks now, it also makes sense to invest a little time in organizing them. So all my bookmarks are under folders and subfolders that I keep in the bookmarks bar itself. I have master folders for News, Email, Services, Forums, Social Networks, etc. and then subfolders of those. I don't claim to have perfected the perfect organization yet, and of course it depends on my personal use case, but I can say that I'm a lot more organized than before, and it's thanks to the fact that browsers themselves are more standardized in the way they handle bookmarks.
I still use Pinboard.in, but mainly for individual news articles that interest me, and to which I may like to refer later for one reason or another.
I don't so much use sync between browsers on different devices. Mainly because I don't really need that and partly because it means creating a cloud copy of everything and then trusting the browser company to safeguard that information.
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I use many browsers and don't know of any service or addon that permits me to keep bookmarks in sync between one browser and another. There are online bookmark managers and I have an account at Pinboard.in, but that does not really solve the problem for day to day use.
But there are some points of light. It used to be that browsers were less standard in the way they handled bookmarks. I remember being able to import bookmarks into Opera, but not export them. There were even different formats for saving bookmarks. Perhaps there still are - I haven't used Microsoft's browser for many years. There were browsers that had folders in the bookmarks bar and those that didn't.
Fortunately all the browsers that I use now permit the import and export of bookmarks as an html file, and all have bookmark bars with folders. So it's easy to create a standard usage for bookmarks, back them up frequently and then import the backup file every time I start to use a new browser. To keep things tidy, I first delete any previous bookmarks, so I always have only the most up to date version of my bookmarks stash.
Because it's so easy to maintain bookmarks now, it also makes sense to invest a little time in organizing them. So all my bookmarks are under folders and subfolders that I keep in the bookmarks bar itself. I have master folders for News, Email, Services, Forums, Social Networks, etc. and then subfolders of those. I don't claim to have perfected the perfect organization yet, and of course it depends on my personal use case, but I can say that I'm a lot more organized than before, and it's thanks to the fact that browsers themselves are more standardized in the way they handle bookmarks.
I still use Pinboard.in, but mainly for individual news articles that interest me, and to which I may like to refer later for one reason or another.
I don't so much use sync between browsers on different devices. Mainly because I don't really need that and partly because it means creating a cloud copy of everything and then trusting the browser company to safeguard that information.
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LibreOffice has some nice features that are not always so well-documented. Here's one for performing currency calculations that I discovered and found useful. Typically a table might have a column in the local currency, and then require a column for the same figures in another currency. That's where it's useful to calculate the figures automatically, based on a given rate. If the current rate changes, the foreign currency rate will automatically update, based on a new figure that is placed in the cell from which the conversion will be performed. That's as long as the document is saved in .odt format. If the document is saved in .doc or .docx format, only the values will be preserved, meaning that the document should look fine, but it will not be possible to perform an automatic update of the fields based on a new currency rate.
- Choose a cell for the currency rate and place there the currency rate there, which can be obtained from xe.com
- Obtain the cell references from the status bar at the bottom of screen
- Place cursor in the cell in which the calculation should appear.
- Get the formula bar by pressing F2
- Insert the formula as (example) =/ and click on check mark (where D1 is the cell reference for the currency rate and C3 is the currency from which the calculation should be made).
- Change the number format of the cells to reflect the currency that is being converted to. (Table, Number format, choose currency and format for expressing it).
- Another way to get the cell references is to click inside the cells while the formula bar is operative, and simply type between them the operator (/ or *)
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This blog goes back to 2003, though I've made most of the early posts private. Over this period it's been on various blogging platforms on a number of hosts. Sometimes I've taken it offline, or marked the whole thing as private. I also do quite a lot of writing offline, in text files or in paper notebooks. For the last few months I've been doing the latter. Then I learned about Nearlyfreespeech.com, and decided to move it there. It was a little hard to set up, but certainly wasn't the hardest hosting arrangement I've struggled with, and the transfer went smoothly. I thought about buying a Genesis theme that I fancied, then decided to use Weaver Extreme. Weaver really offers a flexible and easy framework and is fine especially for the minimalistic look I want, with a separation between different post categories. For now, I've removed the photo albums I'd started to establish, in order to keep storage space down and the hosting cheap. For now, I'm happy with the result. I'll probably do a couple of other things later, like adding a Let's Encrypt certificate.