The Technology Vent and Rant Thread - Page 245

Quoth · 10-06-2026, 12:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The calibre plugin Hyphenate This! will using a hyphenation dictionary and insert soft hyphens.

Which is a broken thing for epubs. Only hyphenate for print/pdf, or have the ebook renderer do it, or search may break.

BetterRed · 10-06-2026, 04:41 PM

From latest Firefox Release notes:

Quote:

"Fixed the Restore from Backup option not appearing during onboarding on Windows."

I have no idea how to 'onboard' Firefox or anything else on Windows, nor on Linux, IOS and Android. I thought 'onboarding' was an obscurantism for employing someone.

BR

DNSB · 10-06-2026, 06:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I have no idea how to 'onboard' Firefox or anything else on Windows, nor on Linux, IOS and Android. I thought 'onboarding' was an obscurantism for employing someone.

At my last place of employment, we used onboarding to refer to the process of integrating a new software package into our environment. This involved setting up a test environment, doing some basic testing, migrating a copy of live data, doing more testing, configuring any setup items that we could push during the install and pushing the install. After the install, we would do a rollout by enabling the software for selected people/groups and doing some training which all too often was just a video tutorial. Once the test group was happy, the package was made available to all who would be using it.

ownedbycats · 10-07-2026, 03:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BetterRed

From latest Firefox Release notes:

I have no idea how to 'onboard' Firefox or anything else on Windows, nor on Linux, IOS and Android. I thought 'onboarding' was an obscurantism for employing someone.

BR

I think they're referring to a wizard that pops up when you launch FF for the first time.

JSWolf · 10-08-2026, 11:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quoth

Which is a broken thing for epubs. Only hyphenate for print/pdf, or have the ebook renderer do it, or search may break.

When you do it for KF8, search still works and the hyphens are properly displayed.

BetterRed · 10-14-2026, 07:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I wish software vendors would issue a warning when they decide to break something. M$ broke File History in the September Patch Tuesday Update.

Actually the problems started long before September… looks like it started to fall apart in March if not before.

But I've found what looks like a better alternative ==>> AJC Active Backup.

Does all that File History promised to do, but without assumptions about what to include and exclude directory-wise, and filetype-wise - not free.

Not an alternative for periodic backups - they have other products for that: AJC Sync and AJC Server.

BR

DNSB · 10-19-2026, 04:50 PM

I am so very tempted to hit one friend's son over the head with a cricket bat. His father purchased a new computer to replace his old one that was not able to run Windows 11. The son offered to help install the new computer and backed up the old computer's hard drive to the son's brand new 32TB drive. Yeah, the same ones that if you do a search on, you get a fine collection of warnings that they are not real.

I got called when they went to restore the backup and nothing was restored. Fortunately, the old hard drive was able to be used in an external caddy and we did the restore from there. At the same time we opened up the external drive. Hmmm... a tiny board with a black µSD card attached to the USB-C connector and 3 chunks of metal glued to the case just to add weight. Just for the heck of it, we installed a 128GB µSD card and it reported it's capacity correctly when connected to the son's laptop. Reinstalled the original µSD card, and the capacity was reported as 30.1TiB which was an immediate red flag since 32,000,000,000,000 divided by 1024⁴ is 29.1TiB. We then tried copying some files to the drive. As soon as we stored over ~56GB of files, things broke horribly.

Hopefully, the lesson learned was worth the price.

John F · 10-19-2026, 05:41 PM

Amazon Support, several days ago...

So I used to get notifications/video on my Firestick when there was motion at the door or the doorbell rang.

I try to figure out why I'm not getting them (go through the doorbell, Alexa, and Firestick settings). No luck.

Call Amazon support. They have me go through settings on all three. No luck. Then they ask me for my Firestick version. They tell me that my version doesn't support notifications from the doorbell. I complain that it used to, and now it doesn't, and please pass my discontent up the chain.

So I take another look at some settings, reboot the Firestick, and now I get the notifications.

And no followup email from Amazon.

Also, since they keep changing the UI, googling for instructions/answers is hard.

Cactus Chef · 10-20-2026, 11:53 AM

The enshittification of all things continues. I can no longer even look at Amazon Reviews without being signed in. Can't have those AI bots scraping our previous user reviews! says Amazon.

howyoudoin · 10-20-2026, 01:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

Was recently trying to cleanup some TV show episodes downloaded from The Internet Archive in the time-honored '[uploader_name]the.show.name.episode.01.title.of.the.episode.[extraneous_crap].mkv' naming scheme, and get it into a format that my Kodi media player would properly recognize and scrape metadata for. I love Kodi, but the fact that it needs that strict '[Show Name] (Year) - S01E01' file-pattern to work properly is still a PITA.

I spent several hours searching online in vain for a tool that was free, Linux compatible, and didn't have some stupid restrictions on the 'free' tier (like '15 renames per day') in favor of a paid/subscription tier.

Finally I threw up my hands in frustration and just asked had Gemini help me write a short, bespoke shell script to do the renames via perl or sed. It's not highly reusable, but, screw it--I'm not gonna pay $XX/mth for a glorified file-rename-as-a-service that I'm gonna use maybe twice a year.

There’s a program called filebot that can rename video files in bulk according to your own scheme

Cactus Chef · 10-20-2026, 02:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by howyoudoin

There’s a program called filebot that can rename video files in bulk according to your own scheme

Proprietary/paid application with a subscription license.

I am not opposed to paying for software, but my local media collection is mostly complete at this point and I only add new media to it (particularly TV shows) maybe once a year. So that's a pretty steep cost for a once-a-year batch rename of some files.

ownedbycats · 10-21-2026, 10:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

The enshittification of all things continues. I can no longer even look at Amazon Reviews without being signed in. Can't have those AI bots scraping our previous user reviews! says Amazon.

Google Maps doens't allow to view more a handful of reviews without logging in. Can't link directly to Goodreads review either. I hate everything

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10-19-2026, 04:50 PM	#3667
DNSB Bibliophagist Posts: 55,309 Karma: 182532776 Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: Vancouver Device: Kobo Sage, Libra Colour, Lenovo M8 FHD, Paperwhite 4, Tolino epos	I am so very tempted to hit one friend's son over the head with a cricket bat. His father purchased a new computer to replace his old one that was not able to run Windows 11. The son offered to help install the new computer and backed up the old computer's hard drive to the son's brand new 32TB drive. Yeah, the same ones that if you do a search on, you get a fine collection of warnings that they are not real. I got called when they went to restore the backup and nothing was restored. Fortunately, the old hard drive was able to be used in an external caddy and we did the restore from there. At the same time we opened up the external drive. Hmmm... a tiny board with a black µSD card attached to the USB-C connector and 3 chunks of metal glued to the case just to add weight. Just for the heck of it, we installed a 128GB µSD card and it reported it's capacity correctly when connected to the son's laptop. Reinstalled the original µSD card, and the capacity was reported as 30.1TiB which was an immediate red flag since 32,000,000,000,000 divided by 1024⁴ is 29.1TiB. We then tried copying some files to the drive. As soon as we stored over ~56GB of files, things broke horribly. Hopefully, the lesson learned was worth the price.

10-19-2026, 05:41 PM	#3668
John F Grand Sorcerer Posts: 8,350 Karma: 72602129 Join Date: Feb 2009 Device: Kobo Clara 2E	Amazon Support, several days ago... So I used to get notifications/video on my Firestick when there was motion at the door or the doorbell rang. I try to figure out why I'm not getting them (go through the doorbell, Alexa, and Firestick settings). No luck. Call Amazon support. They have me go through settings on all three. No luck. Then they ask me for my Firestick version. They tell me that my version doesn't support notifications from the doorbell. I complain that it used to, and now it doesn't, and please pass my discontent up the chain. So I take another look at some settings, reboot the Firestick, and now I get the notifications. And no followup email from Amazon. Also, since they keep changing the UI, googling for instructions/answers is hard.

10-20-2026, 11:53 AM	#3669
Cactus Chef Guru Posts: 983 Karma: 12345678 Join Date: Apr 2019 Location: East Coast, United States Device: Kobo Sage, Kobo Clara HD, Galaxy Tab S5e, Kindle 4th Gen	The enshittification of all things continues. I can no longer even look at Amazon Reviews without being signed in. Can't have those AI bots scraping our previous user reviews! says Amazon.