Computer help requests

[Thad]

Okay I'm a little concerned that I've only been using it for two days and it's already showing me articles from NAU News.

...okay, so far it's just one. Probably just a coincidence. It seems to think I'm really interested in top ten lists about Bollywood celebrities, too.

[Yoji]

Can anyone point me towards anything to help download all of a Twitter account's media? An artist I follow is closing up shop and I'd rather not have to tumble through all their posts.

[Büge]

Can anyone point me towards anything to help download all of a Twitter account's media? An artist I follow is closing up shop and I'd rather not have to tumble through all their posts.

I've used dhIMG to mass-download images from twitter accounts.

[Yoji]

Well, there's an unexpected consequence of sunsetting Adobe Flash: all my favorite screensavers are broken now. I guess add "install flash windows 10" to the ever-growing to-do list.

[Grath]

Well, there's an unexpected consequence of sunsetting Adobe Flash: all my favorite screensavers are broken now. I guess add "install flash windows 10" to the ever-growing to-do list.

Alternatively find new favorite screensavers that don't require horrifyingly insecure software?

[Upthorn]

Is running a flash file any less secure than running any random executable you might find...?
Because that's all screensavers are, executable files set to run on an idle timer, and renamed .scr so you don't run them by accident.

[Grath]

Flash is so insecure that having the ability to run Flash is probably a greater security risk than running random executables, yes, because Flash can pretend to be something not malicious whereas malicious random executables should get caught by your antivirus.

[Thad]

Not exactly a computer help request, but related:

Still planning on moving into a new house sometime in the coming months. Going to need to run some cable.

Where's a good place to buy ethernet cable by the roll? Good price, good quality? Should I stick with CAT6, or is the price difference for CAT7 worth the future-proofing at this point? (From what I've seen, CAT8 is still overpriced and overkill. CAT7 seems like even if I'm not using those speeds right now, I might be within 10 years. I don't think that's the case with CAT8.)

[Brantly B.]

I use a Best Buy Insignia cable for my one Really Long Ethernet Cable need and it's fine. I don't think they sell Cat7 though.

[Grath]

Not exactly a computer help request, but related:

Still planning on moving into a new house sometime in the coming months. Going to need to run some cable.

Where's a good place to buy ethernet cable by the roll? Good price, good quality? Should I stick with CAT6, or is the price difference for CAT7 worth the future-proofing at this point? (From what I've seen, CAT8 is still overpriced and overkill. CAT7 seems like even if I'm not using those speeds right now, I might be within 10 years. I don't think that's the case with CAT8.)

You want CAT6A, not 7. 6A is the upsides of 7 (100m range/10 gig speed) without the downside of that funky-ass proprietary connector (which is possibly still backwards compatible to RJ-45? But that's not super clear.)

Strong agree that CAT8 is overkill - my brand-new motherboard (so new it shipped with support for Ryzen 5000 processors) only caps out at 2.5 gig ethernet, and nothing else in my house supports over 1 gig.

[Thad]

You want CAT6A, not 7. 6A is the upsides of 7 (100m range/10 gig speed) without the downside of that funky-ass proprietary connector (which is possibly still backwards compatible to RJ-45? But that's not super clear.)

AFAICT it's RJ45 with shielding. Wiring is the same. I'm guessing you could slap a standard RJ45 on the end and just get a degraded signal. Which would defeat the purpose of CAT7, unless the purpose is "I might want these speeds at some point in the future," in which case wiring the house and being able to just redo the RJ45 connectors (at the switch end) and the wall jacks (at the other) at some later date might be a reasonable solution.

Good advice, though; you're probably right about 6a being the way to go. If I need to replace it some years down the line, then that's an option. (New house has an attic, unlike the current one where we can't replace wiring without tearing up the ceiling. I wouldn't want to be up in the attic in the summer, but it shouldn't be too bad this time of year.)

It looks like most 6a cables use the same shielded connector as CAT7 (and jeez, won't be buying any 6a from Best Buy), but I see Monoprice sells 6a with old-fashioned all-plastic terminators. Don't know if they're actually any good but I'll look into it.

[Grath]

AFAICT it's RJ45 with shielding. Wiring is the same. I'm guessing you could slap a standard RJ45 on the end and just get a degraded signal. Which would defeat the purpose of CAT7, unless the purpose is "I might want these speeds at some point in the future," in which case wiring the house and being able to just redo the RJ45 connectors (at the switch end) and the wall jacks (at the other) at some later date might be a reasonable solution.

Good advice, though; you're probably right about 6a being the way to go. If I need to replace it some years down the line, then that's an option. (New house has an attic, unlike the current one where we can't replace wiring without tearing up the ceiling. I wouldn't want to be up in the attic in the summer, but it shouldn't be too bad this time of year.)

It looks like most 6a cables use the same shielded connector as CAT7 (and jeez, won't be buying any 6a from Best Buy), but I see Monoprice sells 6a with old-fashioned all-plastic terminators. Don't know if they're actually any good but I'll look into it.

That's just hooking up a not-standards-compliant shielded RJ45 plug to Cat7 cable, which probably effectively makes a Cat6a cable with extra steps. Standards-compliant Cat7 uses one of GG45/ARJ45HD/ARJ45HS/TERA, only the first two of which are electrically backwards compatible to RJ45 plugs. (First two have optional connectors on the tab side of the plug to avoid crosstalk, third has mandatory connectors on the tab side and missing the middle four connectors on the non-tab side, fourth is entirely different form factor plug.)

[Thad]

Gotcha, thanks, that makes sense.

I'm probably not going to be using 10Gbps connections at the moment anyway; if that becomes a thing I need I can always buy 10Gb switches later, but given what they cost I think I'll probably stick with gigabit for now. (I've actually largely been getting by on 100Mb at my current house, for reasons I've never been able to determine. I know the cable's good and the switch is good, so either something went wrong running the cable or punching the jacks. I figure for the new house I'll take a couple laptops over there that have ethernet ports on them and test the connection speeds as I run each cable and punch each jack, so I don't end up having this kind of problem again.)

Still hoping to get some rack-mount cabs set up to help simplify the cabling of all the various shit I've got plugged into my TV. But that's a problem for later. Cabling is a more immediate concern.

[Thad]

Adding: Any thoughts on shielded/unshielded? Shielding looks like added hassle and expense and I'm skeptical that it's worth it. I don't expect a lot of interference in my walls; from what I've read I gather that even unshielded 6a should do fine blocking interference from typical residential-home stuff like light fixtures.

[Yoji]

I need to figure out a way to back up my work computer through Windows Remote Desktop.

In the Before Times, I used that computer for a lot of personal work off the clock. There's thirteen years of drawings and CAD experiments and the like on there, which I could back up regularly on my external USB hard drive. But it's a little hard to plug in devices from twenty miles away. It looks like I can just copy from Remote Desktop and paste locally as if I were right there, but I'm not sure how that'll work; we're talking a dozen or so gigabytes worth of junk here.

[Thad]

I think the easiest solution would probably be to use Dropbox or OneDrive or some other dedicated cloud-syncing app, if you have the permissions to install it on your work computer. For the amount of space you're talking about, you might have to pay for more storage, but you could always just do that temporarily until you get the files copied to your own computer.

The advantage of something like that is that it's a lot more robust than a simple copy-paste; if it craps out in the middle of a massive filecopy, it'll just pick up where it left off later.

Depending on your permissions on your work computer, there may be ways to roll your own solution and not have to have some third-party server in-between (I'm thinking rsync), but I don't know that they'd be worth the hassle.

A plain old copy-paste, a few directories at a time, would be a low-tech solution that would be a pain in the ass but should eventually get you everything you need. But that's another function of group policy, too; that functionality is often disabled for security reasons.

[mharr]

According to https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/201 ... l-computer it is possible to map local folders as network storage with drive letters on the remote machine, which should open the gates for old faithfuls like Roadkil's Unstoppable

Do you have room to image the entire drive and rescue it as a single file?

[Mongrel]

I need a little help from someone who's more clearheaded and less currently-enraged at this point.

Firefox, as always loves to completely fuck with the UI at times. Invariably, users who prefer things a certain way write edits to the .css file to fix things up.

The latest update broke a bit of code in the userchrome.css file which I was using to force the tabs to be minimalist and under the menu bar. It did so in such a way that only the current tab was visible at all (and left a huge blank bar on top where the tabs would be) . So, oh boy, now I get to spend X minutes/hours combing the FF community for a fix/update.

EDIT: You can read this if you need details, but the tl;dr is just in the next post.

I was doing this when the invisible tabs started annoying me to the point where I said, fuck it, let's downgrade to the previous version long enough so I can actually USE my browser to search for a fix, and then upgrade again.

At this point a smarter person would have just switched to another browser to do all this searching, but it's me, and I kept telling myself, "it's just a .css file edit, this should be quick to fix once I actually find it".

So I downgraded to the last pre-UI change (v88), so far so good... I think. But at some point Firefox decided to set up a nanny system where if your profile has *EVER* run on a later version of FF it will refuse to run an older version on anything but a new profile.

So I let it make a new profile, okay fine. WOW DEFAULT FF IS EVEN WORSE THAN I THOUGHT, YIKES. the new profile includes no bookmarks, history, or any .css changes. So downgrading was worse than pointless.

Now there's a workaround for this too. You can add something to the FF command line launch which gives it permission to launch older versions with current profiles. But the page explaining how to do this is now... not maintained by Mozilla. Of course. And the instructions to bring up the command line interface for FF (Shift + F2) don't seem to work at all anymore, much less adding the line to allow older profiles. Simply deleting the new profile makes it so Firefox won't run AT ALL, PERIOD, never mind letting you make another new profile or just download the current version and go back to dealing with the invisible tabs.

This also means I don't have any of the links from pages I've already searched up today to post here.

At this point I feel like I'm twisting myself into a fucking mobius strip to escape Mozilla's fucking intrusive nannying and that's an awful, enraging feeling. Just let me fucking do what I fucking want and I'll deal with the fucking consequences you fucking assholes. Just let me fix my fucking shit. Intrusive nannying from devs who "know better" than their users is why I moved to FF in the first fucking place.

Please, save the "HURR DURR INSTALL [other browser] OBV" gabbling at me for another time. I am in fact posting this from Chrome (which sucks dick, sorry, also fuck you Google). I can't even switch anyway until I can import all my FF shit to another browser anyway.

Anyway, going to try reinstalling with the current version and see if that brings me back to at least just the tabs being fucked up.

[Mongrel]

Okay, that worked, though I had to fuck with the profiles to restore my old one as the default even though FF is supposed to link profile to version ID or something like that. Let's see if I can add some links here.

One of these pages contains the information I used to fuck with my UI last time this happened. But... after a year, I'm not sure which.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/com ... ottom_fix/
https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/com ... _the_tabs/
https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/com ... fix_didnt/

Damned if I can recall what.

Obviously, good practices is to comment your code, but I am no programmer and I don't normally think of "editing my user css file in FF" as programming. Obviously I could clean my .css by just reverting it to default, but I have quite a few other changes (mostly small edits to eliminate wasted space or rearrange toolbars because Mozilla doesn't think this is something the user should have any easy say over...).

So what I need help with is "what's the best way to figure out which of the suggested userchrome edits on those pages was what I actually implemented?"

At this point I'm more exhausted than enraged so feel free to rub alternate browser suggestions in my face, though last time this came up, it seemed like every browser was going to shit chasing Chrome.

EDIT: To give you an idea of where FF seems to be headed. Last month they disabled the fucking backspace button for basic navigation.

You can re-enable it in config very easily, but really, for fuck's sakes. You removed fucking BACKSPACE?

EDIT 2: Hey, it's 4pm. Maybe I ought to go finish eating breakfast.

[mharr]

Every browser is indeed going to shit chasing Chrome. Except I heard Edge might be okayish these days. Pretty sure you're already using the best one.