Transifex website, where many open-source distros and other projects host their translation environment, has made some alterations to the way traffic occurs after users log in. There are no good cookies anymore that I can trace. I had to disable adblock to be able to stay logged in.
Is this a wider trend?
When you log in to websites, what security measures do you take? Do you check/modify the headers and the referrer that your browser sends to the server? Do you take a look what headers the server replies with? Do you count the cookies? Is your browser set to erase history at close? Share your habits and tips.
and I am quite happy with what it does. It doesn't ruin my ordinary profile, and any traces it leaves on the computer are fleeting. However, when used this way, there's no way to get any permanent convenient settings.
And so I remembered that Opera used to have -kioskmode. It's great when you set up a public computer where you can provide a browser configured for easy basic usability and with excessive features turned off.
In -kioskmode, the user would not have access to settings and configuration. The app window could be maximized only. Bookmarks and sessions would be uncheangeable. History and cookies would get auto-cleared at set intervals even when the app never closes. On the other hand, if applicable from the kiosk provider's point of view, printing would be available and basic internet usability features such as find, copy, paste, search, would be prominently featured.
This is my big idea for today (I have them all the time. Must hold myself back not to write too much.)
This idea makes sense, for one, because Opera had kioskmode and Otter emulates Opera. For second, e.g. municipal halls increasingly provide free public computers. I think the trend is on the rise. Access to internet is seen as a basic human right already and if kioskmode is implemented with usability, accessibility, and common-sense restrictions in balance, it could be even possible to market Otter with this feature for wider publicity. These days of course I guess we should think of an entire little opsys configured for this niche, with Otter installed on the platform.
This idea would require a way to configure Otter from outside the profile. The profile would be set from somewhere else.
Anyway, nothing to get too enthusiastic about. Let's make this a good browser for power users first
Otter has a --privatesession option which misbehaves. I think a better idea would be a --tempprofile option which would create a whole new profile at startup, load the default settings, and delete the profile at program quit.
DWB browser has this option. It's very good for testing some specific features of the browser with new profile and also when allowing someone else to browse around the web for a little while in your browser.
Btw, the new click-to-load feature for plugins, implemented in weekly47, seems to work fine
initial version of sidebar; added possibility to set Otter Browser as default under Windows; added initial versions of Website Preferences and Quick Preferences (F12); added Trash to Bookmarks Manager; added Ctrl+Tab tabs switching; added option to set user style sheet; added tray icon; allow to customize menu bar (JSON file); various minor fixes and improvements.
I would like to thank all contributors (again especially bajasoft and Chocimier), bug reporters, translators and all users.
“The great advances of civilization,” wrote Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom, his influential best seller published in 1962, “whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.” He did not say what he made of the state-sponsored art of Athens’s Periclean Age or the Medici family, who, as Europe’s dominant bankers but then as Florentine rulers, commissioned and financed so much Renaissance art. Or the Spanish court that gave us Velázquez. Or the many public universities that produced great scientists in our times. Or, even just before Friedman was writing, what could he have made of the Manhattan Project of the US government, which produced the atomic bomb? Or the National Institutes of Health, whose government-supported grants led to many of the most important pharmaceutical breakthroughs?
We could perhaps forgive Friedman’s ill-informed remarks as a burst of ideological enthusiasm if so many economists and business executives didn’t accept this myth as largely true.
Sometimes they make both a book and a film out of the same story, such as all Michael Crichton or all Stephen King...
This thread is to share and discuss literature and cinematography as art forms and personal passion, not as mere entertainment. List your favourites and discuss
MY BOOKS TOP 5
Mika Waltari, Sinuhe Milan Kundera, Immortality W.S.Maugham, Of Human Bondage Ghazali, Niche of Lights Vidyaranya, Panchadasi
MY FILMS TOP 5
Miyazaki, Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi Chaplin, City Lights Kromanov, Põrgupõhja uus vanapagan (1964) Nair, Salaam Bombay Petersen, Das Boot (1981 original, not the lengthened director's cut)
COMMENTS
In my list, the books Sinuhe and Of Human Bondage have made it to film. I have seen the films Sinuhe by Michael Curtiz, 1954, and the British Of Human Bondage from 1934. While re-written well into self-contained films, they are necessarily limited compared to the books. The novels are true epics and cannot be properly transferred to film (unless one is ready for lengthy soap-operatic TV series).
Among films in my list, I have heard that Das Boot was originally a novel, but I haven't read it. Põrgupõhja uus vanapagan is a novella by the most celebrated Estonian author Tammsaare, based on Estonian folk tales. The film version is by one of the very few Estonian directors who is worth to be called a director at all. Estonian cinematography in general never was worth watching, but Kromanov almost has a touch of Ingmar Bergman. Estonian writers are generally recommendable though.
- Start menu is back - Live tiles moved into start menu - Store apps, irretrievably fullscreen in Win 8, can now be resized - Multitask app-switcher (like Alt+Tab, but looks now like in Nexus tablet) - Window snapping/tiling - Adding a desktop
Of course all this is stuff that either used to be there or have been there in other OS's for a decade or more (the first thing used to be the norm in Windows itself) but I guess it counts as innovation in the world of Microsoft.
The point of the poll was to include here the technology used to access the forums. For a while I thought of expanding the list with for example e-book readers, because these too sometimes have internet access, but I guess there are enough options already.
Discussion about e-book readers is is still welcome. And about printed books (obvious hardware). For some people, wristwatch is the kind of technology they need most. All this is hardware subject for discussion in this thread. And of course computer parts.
RSS feeds view is currently unstyled. Anyone up for the task?
Question to Otter developer: In what way can RSS feeds view be styled? There seems to be nothing relevant about it in about:config Should I start a ticket in Github?
If the format works, one simple solution would be to apply Opera's webfeeds.html which is obtainable from Opera Presto's file structure when you have it installed
Over the years, fans have created customised webfeeds files, but after some searching I found only dead links to where some such customisations used to be.
surf is a simple web browser based on WebKit/GTK+. It is able to display websites and follow links. It supports the XEmbed protocol which makes it possible to embed it in another application. Furthermore, one can point surf to another URI by setting its XProperties.
It does not do much else.
no auto-update no built-in search engine access no cookie management no configuration file no extension system no password management no standard bookmark system no tabbing no toolbars . . . and no bloat.
On my machine I have currently the minimalist Webkit browser Luakit. In Luakit only the interface is minimal. Otherwise there's
- Tabs - Bookmarks (!!) - Search engines - Cookie management - Completely configurable keyboard controls - Extensible whichever way by means of lua scripting language - Flash plugin
Looks like I like under-the-hood tweakability
But this thread is for all likeable minimalist apps, not just browsers.
But no one pays attention to the pre socratics these days.
Not quite true: Among other things, some pre-Socratic Greek Stoics did creditable work on what we now call the sentential calculus; that the logic of the syllogism eclipsed it is a fact of history that I think retarded both science and logic/mathematics…
Disregarding the ahistoricity of the view that there were any Stoics before Socrates, what makes the syllogism inferior and the propositional calculus superior? Specifically and at length please. And in your own words, no links to external writers thankyouverymuch.
Or, since the argument from authority seems to be inevitable for you, let's try this way too:
(Yes, I do think that the "modern" first-order predicate calculus should have been recognized and formalized in the Middle Ages. Instead, we had to wait until 1879… )(Popper himself said this.*)
In a few summarising sentences, what did Popper say as per you? And why should the first-order predicate calculus have been invented in the middle ages? What seemed to be leading up to it? What necessitated it? Or what would have been the benefits, had it been invented?
(Mind you, in my native language it's a strict impossibility to use "invent" in this way. Logic and its glory can only be a discovery, not invention. To speak of invention here is like saying that Columbus invented America.)
Do numbers "exist" before they are constructed? Was the square root of two (or negative one) an entity before someone considered them? Consider π: We do really know that it is an irrational and transcendental number. (Don't we?) And that it is merely the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter… (Not an unusual nor certainly bizarre notion!) Why is it thus?
It's to do with the nature of things. The ratio of the circumference to the diameter is what it is independent of your opinion. It also stays as it is regardless of your inventions, reinventions and attempts to improve it.
Have you recanted your belief in Platonic ideas, and accepted the Nominalism of common sense?
Can you state the basic tenets of Nominalism and explain in a few words why it's better than Platonic ideas? Then I will follow up with questions how and why nominalism should be regarded as common sense.
Error 8 The specified configuration cannot be used.
Also some kind of network error, but with added nastiness - the tab becomes unusable. To still go to the address in the address field, the workaround is to duplicate the tab.
Isn't 15 kb too small for anything really? What's the point of attachments? How to use them?
To me they look useles, so I suggest either removing the functionality until it becomes useful, or to beef it up somehow. Is it possible to divert attachments functionality to use the space in some other service, such as someone's dropbox?
UEFI seems to be a quirky modern design for what used to be straightforward BIOS. A bit more than a year ago the single laptop I possessed had a regular BIOS. Now the laptops I have come with UEFI, meaning it's possible to do something called UEFI install, i.e. install an OS the UEFI way.
What is the UEFI way (in my mind, I pronounce it "weffy way") of installing an OS and what is it good for? And I mean good in an ordinary practical sense, not something about larger than 2TB hard drives that the Wikipedia page mentions repeatedly. The hard drives on any of my machines are not 2TB and even none of the externals approaches that size. Any other good purposes for UEFI?
And how do you make a UEFI install? There's a Samsung Ativ Book 9 Lite in my possession whose Win 8 is getting on my nerves. When I boot Linuxes from USB on it, sometimes it ("it" meaning the UEFI boot section) offers "Generic Flash USB Device", sometimes "UEFI: Generic Flash USB Device". The latter means, I assume, that the Linux on the stick at that time offers an opportunity to install the UEFI way.
When I make a live boot selecting "UEFI: Generic Flash USB Device", everything just works normally.* Doesn't seem to make any practical difference. Is it so that when I make a live boot selecting "UEFI: Generic Flash USB Device" and then choose to install the system, then that's it - a UEFI install? I find it hard to believe that it's so simple...
*Or doesn't - Ubuntu-based Mint fails to boot on that hardware either way, both UEFI and non, whereas Debian-based Mint (which offers no UEFI) has no problem. Manjaro and Netrunner offer UEFI and have no issues going to live boot.
1. Go to Preferences --> Advanced --> Keyboard 2. Under Action Shortcuts, select Default setup 3. Press Clone next to it 4. Accept the name change 5. Select the renamed setup and press Edit next to it
Now you see a bunch of actions and you can personalise the keyboard shortcuts To make sure that Otter uses the customised setup, move it upmost in the table.
Hopefully more actions and macros will become visible as the development progresses.
Surely it's no secret that I don't like how the design of this forum is, specifically how the tints of the logo ended up.
There has emerged a volunteer proposal to do something with the design https://dndsanctuary.eu/index.php?topic=352 From this proposal it's not clear to me if the volunteer wants to design this forum or otter-browser.org, but I have this idea:
Why not give Ping sections each their unique design? At least an opportunity to style themselves? I believe this should be technologically possible - the General section in one style and each Ping board their own style. It should be possible to apply specific CSS to each Ping board separately.
My screen of Manjaro Netbook Edition after a weekend of tweaking
Comparison with Manjaro Openbox Edition a.k.a. Manjarobox
LOGIN MANAGER
The login manager is MDM, known from Linux Mint. In my opinion it's too heavy for netbooks. In Manjarobox you get Slim, which is much more appropriate. This was the first thing I changed to reflect Manjarobox after I installed the Netbook Edition.
DESKTOP
Manjarobox features Openbox, which is a light desktop. Light basically means that there are no desktop icons and the apps menu opens with right-click on the desktop, instead of having a dedicated taskbar button. Still, for example the invaluable systray is there.
In comparison, Netbook Edition features Xfce, a full-featured desktop environment, but with some important alterations specific to Netbook Edition. In normal Xfce you expect desktop icons. These are not available in Netbook Edition. The rest is pretty much there, even the new feature of window snapping-and-tiling-by dragging. (In Manjarobox this last functionality is available with keyboard shortcuts after some hacking.)
The most visible departure from the usual Xfce is the central taskbar in Netbook Edition. The central taskbar is replaced with DockbarX. The taskbar in normal Xfce behaves like in XP, whereas DockbarX always iconifies the open apps. When hovering the mouse pointer above the icon in DockbarX, you see the list of open windows with an opportunity to switch to them or close them with precision. Right-click on the icon provides you with some actions, such as pin, (un)maximise, and close the application - Win 7 style.
There's a unique default behaviour configured into Netbook Edition's desktop environment: Apps start up with maximised window. I was wary of this behaviour at first. This was one of the reasons why I didn't try Netbook Edition on my netbook sooner. However, now I have seen it in action and it seems that this behaviour makes kind of sense in netbooks.
Some oddities occur due to this maximisation behaviour, for example when you copy files in Thunar, a full-screen progress window pops up instead of a small progress bar. Still, by default you have the well-considered unmaximise button on the taskbar. It's also possible to easily configure a keyboard shortcut to toggle window maximisation in Xfce, so in the end this is not a problem. It's a feature.
CHOICE OF APPLICATIONS
Compared to Manjarobox 0.8.8 which was very minimalistic, Netbook Edition comes with more apps, such as Midori browser (versus no browser in Manjarobox 0.8.8), Xfburn (I don't know why this is here; how many netbooks have a DVDRW drive?), Audacious, VLC.
I liked the lack of apps in Manjarobox better. Manjarobox 0.8.8 even lacked the graphical applications manager (Pamac in Manjaro), so that you had to know the command-line way of adding apps at first. To compensate, Manjarobox comes with some important installation scripts in the apps menu - menu items to install the graphical applications manager, office software, printers' drivers, multimedia codecs, and more.
Manjarobox's installation scripts is something that is in turn missing in Netbook Edition and this is a serious miss in my opinion, because, for example, even though some multimedia apps are there in Netbook Edition out of the box, not all codecs are there.
SOME PERSONAL STUFF
In my screenshot above there are some visible additions to the default selection of apps in Netbook Edition: - Artha (the Wordnet dictionary with some added features) - Seamonkey - Skype - Otter browser (the pointer icon in the centre of the taskbar; Otter browser does not really have an icon, but this is how I made it to look like for now) - Xfce goodies, such as the CPU graph and Clipman; this is another miss in the default selection of apps in Netbook Edition in my opinion. To me, these goodies are inseparable from Xfce.
THE BEST IN NETBOOK EDITION
In comparison with Manjarobox, the screen lock and suspend at lid-close is configured properly out of the box. This how it should be in any OS version specifically catering to laptops and similar.
For this edition, the developers have optimised the kernel (for the i686 architecture version; Netbook Edition with x86_64 architecture doesn't have this). I am too dumb to understand the benefits of the optimised kernel, but there's more: Also Flash plugin, which I thought inappropriate for my netbook and I didn't even try in Manjarobox, is specifically optimised and works like a snap in all browsers!
Now, disappointingly again, these optimised packages - linux312-netbook and flashplugin-netbook - don't seem to be readily available in the repositories. Manjarobox users would really appreciate them.
I am a Skype user, so a remark on this too. In Manjarobox, Skype tended to crash in the middle of some kinda hot webcam sessions. Without much research I thought it can be blamed on hardware weakness. Now on Manjaro Netbook Edition these crashes do not occur. Either I got lucky or something's truly optimised here :)
CONCLUSION
All-in-all, there are some important things in this edition that make it worth trying, such as the optimised Flash plugin and considerately pre-configured lid-close. The misses are minor and easily remedied. If you have a netbook and some experience with Manjaro, give it a try.
My netbook has 1 GB RAM and Intel Atom CPU N450 (-HT-) clocked at Min:1000.000Mhz Max:1666.000Mhz. Netbook Edition's Xfce desktop works here almost as snappy as Openbox that I tried earlier. I was perfectly satisfied with Openbox, but I like some of the added functionality in Netbook Edition, such as the window tiling by dragging, and I have learned to like the auto-maximised windows. With less RAM and weaker CPU however, Openbox would still be a smarter choice considering the resources.
ersi-dnd An otter:config page would be nice as a perfect mirror of otter.conf
Emdek about:config
Emdek closed this
ersi-dnd Thanks. Then, how about some more obvious access to it, such as Help > Config ?
ersi-dnd I mean, default access so that people would not have to ask about it.. I wish things were easier to find. I think of myself as pretty knowledgeable about Opera, but Otter is still difficult to navigate.
Emdek @ersi-dnd, I'm not sure if we really need action to open it, other browsers use the same address and AFAIK none links to it from GUI. Also these URLs are auto completed (so far only in-line).
I realise now Help > Config does not make sense. A link to the config page is not for everyone in the first place, and it's not a Help thing.
It's a config/preferences/options thing, so the link to "Advanced configuration options" could be located in Preferences dialogue.
Another broader issue is that I simply can't find things in Otter. Opera is very much self-evident to me and I find myself using Opera all the time rather than Otter. For example there's an autocomplete in address bar for about:config as I found out now, but there's no autocomplete for history or bookmark items - which I have been intensely looking for and wanting to activate - so it was not even evident that any kind of autocomplete was there.
Not sure how to organise these issues and questions that I have. I guess a thread per detail will be most noticeable.
Since I haven't tried this feature at all, the questions are simple but overwhelming: What does it do? How does it work in terms of notification? Is there just one feed or are there feeds per board and thread too? Are there also feeds per users? Has anyone tried it? Is the feature documented on some help page?
(I have them all the time. Must hold myself back not to write too much.)
Should I start a ticket in Github?
