T w e n t y S i d e d
A few announcements:
1) Annotations are “fixed”.
By annotations I mean these thingsHi there!. And by “fixed” I mean they work for me in both IE and Chrome. Wait. I don’t have Firefox installed? Since when? Odd. I always have a version of Firefox installed. And unusedBecause as much as I worry about dystopian mega-corps of the future, I just… like Chrome slightly more, ok?.
Let me know in the comments if annotations are still malfunctioning.
2) No Spoiler Warning this week.
Josh is pretty sure our next session will be our final visit to Skyrim. Sure, we could pad out the season with sidequests and DLC, but I think we’ve all had our say and we’re starting to suffer from Bethesda fatigue. It’s time to move on.
But we don’t want to wrap up the season unless the whole cast is there. Rutskarn and Mumbles couldn’t make it this week, so we put the whole thing off. It might take a few tries to make it happen.
3) No Diecast this week.
With just Josh, Chris, and myself, we didn’t have a lot to talk about. The mailbag was kind of empty. (Except for questions for Rutskarn.) We hadn’t been playing much in the way of games, or at least not anything we’re ready to talk about. So a Diecast would have been an hour of Josh talking about Dark Souls while Chris and I tried to change the subject.
We’ve got content this week (coding and my Escapist column) but not the usual multimedia content. Just text. I’m sure we’ll pull through somehow.
Footnotes:
[1] Hi there!
[2] Because as much as I worry about dystopian mega-corps of the future, I just… like Chrome slightly more, ok?
This Game is Too Videogame-y
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Fable II
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
Good to be the King?
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?
Was it a Hack?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
I, for one, welcome our new plaintext overlords.
Not me. I’m starting a riot.
*Throws trash can through window*
Pay no attention to the man defenstrating the curtain wall.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajU2aVn-ses
Long live the plaintext overlords!
All hail our plaintext overlords! Hizzah!
This totally means Josh has time to finish his CK2 writeup then, right? Right?
Someone should just sent this question to the Diecast. Multiple times. And also ask about Shogun2.
And ask about 8 by zombies part 2. And about re-uploading some of the video’s viddler ate. And about some other things I forgot about because he’s a cool dude in the grand scheme of things.
I’m glad someone mentions this in the comments every once in a while because it means no one’s waiting on ME for that, since I think I signed up to go not long after him.
I’ve yet to play through more than the first 2-3 hours of Dark Souls. PC controls are terribad, and I’ve yet to connect successfully the PS4 controller I have :(
Also, annotations work OK now.
I’m using a noname gamepad with 360 controler emulator and I have no problems with Dark Souls. And I’m new to gamepad controlers. So you might want to try connecting your gamepad via an 360 controler emulator.
I dunno, a PS4 gamepad emulating a native PC USB gamepad emulating an Xbox gamepad, might be asking for trouble with that much complexity, since I assume software is available to skip the middleman (which I imagine is the thing that’s not quite working right now?).
PC games being programmed with gamepad brand exclusivity in mind is infuriating though.
That is the only reason I have never bothered to play Dark Souls. I hear it is really frustrating with mouse/keyboard, and since I cannot operate a controller due to disabilities, I have just avoided it.
Dark Souls (and it’s sequel) do look like really good games though.
I found DS2 to be playable with M&K. Not quite as good, but not horrible either.
So what’s the secret? What do I need to know to play well with PC controls? In fact, what do I need to know to be able to progress through the game, other than how to parry/dodge/roll etc?
Personally, I had no problems once I installed all the fixes. Takes getting used to, but otherwise felt pretty good to control. Maybe I just can’t compare since I haven’t done it with controller, but I didn’t have many (or any) deaths/issues caused by the control scheme (and I’ve just recently beaten the game).
This helped me a lot in getting things setup. Perhaps the only issue I had initially was not knowing all the controls, but a quick google search cleared that up quick.
(NOTE: In case it’s not clear, I am only referring to DS1. Don’t have 2 yet.)
(Firefox, Windows 7) Weirdly, the annotations here have two distinct areas. The [1] area have a “hand” cursor, but the area just under the text has a “question mark” cursor.
Probably not important enough to worry about.
Opera has that same thing.Clicking either gives the same result though,so I agree,not important,only odd.
Same thing for me in Win7 Chrome. Hadn’t noticed that before. Thanks for pointing it out.
Antique WinXP and Chrome just gets me the question mark cursor.
As an aside Feedly show the numbers but not the notes. So using annotations will encourage me to stop being lazy and click through to the site.
Why are the boxes yellow on Firefox now? They didn’t used to be yellow on Firefox. I feel like a rock of certainty has crumbled away.
Nothing to talk about?Not even the giant bo….oh,right,we dont talk about the F thing anymore.
Sorry, what’s that a- ah, put the abbreviations together just as I started typing. Yeah, shame they don’t talk about F
rankfurtersmore often. Makes for interesting discussion.What kind of world are we living in when the two youngsters are too busy to play games,while the two responsible old timers are free to screw around?
Also Josh something something.
“So a Diecast would have been an hour of Josh talking about Dark Souls while Chris and I tried to change the subject.”
…And the problem with this would be…?
By the way,why dont the three of you do some half life episodes as a spoiler warning special?Or maybe portal?
If they filmed now I doubit it would come up before next week.
Yes,but since they are unsure if next week they will finish skyrim,no harm in having this.
My preference? More hangouts!
I would like to second this, and suggest more Monaco! Because that was hysterical and I want more.
Monaco is “complete” now in that the final campaign has been added and the original levels have been revamped to remove the annoying and unfun design mistakes in them. So a game that was comfortably my game of the year beforehand is now even better.
Haven’t tried to finish Zonaco though….
Could we have a diecast where Rutskarn just tells us more tails from his roleplaying escapades?
Yeah, this needs to become a thing.
The Rutskast ….or indeed the Buttskast.
I don’t think Ruts is old enough to have gotten any tail from his games.
“Because as much as I worry about dystopian mega-corps of the future, I just… like Chrome slightly more, ok?”
I have the exact same relationship with my browsers. I want Firefox to be better, but it feels like such a step backwards after trying Chrome.
And I know full well that Chrome only exists so that Google can more efficiently harvest everyone’s browsing data. They just make the poison koolaid so very tasty.
I managed to pull the Chrome plug after they introduced that little notification icon.
I mean, giant dystopian mega-corps harvesting our personal private data like we were so much virtual Soylent Green? Meh, whatever.
Mess about with my systray without asking? THIS WILL NOT STAAAAAAAND!!
The thing with chrome though, is that it also sends your “remembered password” to cloud. Some people say there’s a setting to disable that, but last time I tried to set chrome to forgo updates it still keeps updating itself. So now chrome sat behind the firewall (because I only installed it for bug testing) for me.
I’m very close to the end of my rope with Chrome. I like it far more than Firefox, but I was just about done after Google decided that I cannot be trusted to install extensions that aren’t on their store, even manually. I’ve switched over to the dev version of Chrome which still allows this (because the beta build of your browser should have functionality that will never be added to the release build apparently) but it’s also highly unstable and irritating to use.
I just wish Firefox was better.
This is the place where I would usually plug opera,buuuut….
New opera versions suck ass.Probably because they are trying to copy chrome.And the old version,while it still kicks ass,is ridiculously unstable now.So unless you are willing to reinstall it about once a month,you are in for some serious memory leaks,which can lead to freezes and even blue screens of death.
Soooo,yeah,we are going back to the dark ages of browsing.
I’ve actually gone back to using Seamonkey. The UI looks ugly and dated, but it it gets out of your way and lets you get your work done, unlike Opera 15+, Chrome and now Firefox. And most FF plugins work with it, certainly the most popular ones and Lightning works with it (the calender plugin), so I don’t need Thunderbird any more either. So it’s a win all round
It’s weird that I’d be going back to what is effectively Mozilla Suite, after swearing never to touch it again. It’s as clunky as ever, but sadly it’s far more usable than the alternatives.
You’re all noobs. Just use Lynx.
Emacs w3m ftw lol
It’s a reasonable OS. Too bad it’s missing a good text editor.
:-P
(Says the guy who’s written a “web browser”, after a fashion anyway, in shell. (echo -e -n “GET / HTTP/1.0\\r\\n\\r\\n” >&3 ; cat <&3) 3/dev/tcp/whatever.hostname/80 works, as long as you're using bash and your distro hasn't disabled its network redirection. …And you put a backslash in front of the "r" and "n" in that echo, since the commenting system seems to be eating them. Let's see if two levels of escaping work.)
Yeah, I love Opera. I used opera for years (probably 10 or so) and then there was some update that forced me to switch between firefox (which is super slow on my old Linux box) and Chrome came out and wasn’t slow. Switching back and forth all the time got irritating so eventually I just stuck with Chrome. Though more recently Chrome has started crashing at random and Firefox is STILL slow so may have to install Opera and see how it is doing and what I can use it for.
Eh,its ok.Its just sparse.All the options that once existed are gone now.You have to dig just to get the bookmarks (sort of) back.
Noob question. What about Chromium? Because I have both installed.
And it just seems to me to have all the advantages without the overlords part.
It’s the next thing on my list to take a look at.
The “no extensions not from the Chrome store” just killed corporate acceptance of the browser. So many large companies use collaboration extensions (screen sharing and teleconference stuff mostly) that come from vendors that charge per seat, so they’re not gonna put their extensions out in Google’s hands to review and manage.
I had to stop using Chrome after it began crashing every thirty minutes practically on the dot. I did not notice any significant difference when I went back to Firefox.
The really dumb thing for me is I run NO extensions, and FF still sucks digital spheroids for me, mostly in regards to flash and memory consumption. It’s like leaving the San Diego Comic Con attendees in charge of food rationing during a siege where they’re lobbing anime, CCGs, and coupons for 50% off all trade paperbacks in over the walls.
Chrome is… hrrrmph. I hate that I can’t customize the tabs page, I don’t like how it forgets which of a hundred bookmarks in a folder I last selected so I don’t have to scroll down the list again to get to the same one, and if I CAN get fixes for these that DON’T involve loads of machine-slowing malware but I have to go through Google Play, forget it. I’d sooner use IE.
And this is after getting PayPal’s app to work on my Nexus by side-loading it. You can manually enter CC numbers and get it to work, but since their card reader won’t work with the headphone jack (it needs mic support to send data to the tablet), Google Play and/or PayPal won’t let you install it. Instead, we have this security risk where if you’re not careful, you could download the “app” from some shady part of the ‘net and get something that steals every number you run through it.
I really wish these App stores ran like Steam. If you buy it, you have it, whether or not your device is officially supported. I wanted to buy Minecraft Pocket when it was a ridiculously low price (I think a buck), but none of my gizmos were supported. Nevermind I’d buy a better one someday, oh, no… can’t have that…
Since the NSA filter rules got published (anyone who ever visited certain websites relating to safe browsing is “targeted” now…), and I realised they applied to me, it’s only Firefox with https anywhere and Adblock for me:
http://boingboing.net/2014/07/03/if-you-read-boing-boing-the-n.html
In that vein: Shamus, how much work would it be to have the site served via https?
I’m actually not quite sure what the advantage of Chrome is. Usage-wise, the old Opera was my favourite, but it’s gone now, and whenever I use the new Chrome-based version I get upset because some small functionality that my fingers still remember is gone now …
For me, the “advantage” is memory consumption and, if it’s important to you, the sharing of bookmarks/browsing history/etc. across several devices (PC, phone, tablet). I’m sure there are plugins for other browsers that let you do it, but this is all tied in with Gmail and what-not from the get-go. If that’s cool, it’s got some advantages.
On my phone, I wish the browser I found that was supposed to save on memory still worked. I think it was called UT Browser or something similar. Anyway, they updated it, and now all I get are blank websites and I have to go back to the stock browser with its never-ending security certificate warnings.
Firefox also has sharing/syncing between devices, though I don’t know if I can compare it to Chrome’s. It works for me, at least.
The memory is still an issue, though, but I pulled up a small addon that shows used memory next to the address bar and lets me reset the browser by clicking it. Not perfect, but works well enough for my purposes.
Yeah, Firefox has a syncing thing as well.
In Opera, I used to “sync” devices across the LAN simply by having the data folder (bookmarks, addresses, mail, user settings…) in a shared drive between all computers, but these days with phones and stuff that’s not quite doing it anymore.
Still, I’m not prepared to put this type of data on other people’s servers:
https://xkcd.com/1150/
=> I won’t use neither Firefox sync not Chrome’s stuff.
As of now, Firefox is running well even on the older laptop, but I might give Chromium a try. That seems to not be tied to Google servers.
“Speed” is something I’m seeing in Browser PR sometimes, but I don’t believe any browser will make my internet connection any faster, and diesplaying HTML is mostly trivial. That really only matters on smartphones and such, at lest as far as I can tell.
I’ve got a seriously radical view on the whole issue. I want to be tracked. I want to be tracked better, and to have the advertisements that I need to put up with to be more relevant and interesting. I want to live in a world where everything I’m offered is something I could conceivably want or need. I want to see adverts for bare-boat charters, and video games, and high-end first aid kits, and fiberglassing supplies, vacation destinations, computer parts, restaurants both in my neighborhood and in places I’m planning to travel to. Why the HELL doesn’t Google know I’m going to Ft Lauderdale in December and feed me adverts for yacht brokers and tourist spots in the area? It’s not like I’ve not been doing research that Google can see..
I DON’T want adverts for diapers, mortgage refinancing, or soda. I do want advertising for new whiskey brands. I don’t want ads for fast food places, but do want ads for cocktail bars. I don’t want ads lawn care, but I do want ads for sheets and towels. Why can’t I get that? Track me BETTER, dammit!
I always seem to get ads for things I just looked at and things I just bought. Seems like a waste of an ad.
And now,because of this post,google will start giving you ads for tracksuits and racing tracks.
… because Big Data does not work?
They find correlations, but most of them are spurious. Then they use them, and they use them for their own advantage, not yours.
So if something good for comes out of it, then that’s alright, but it’s not the aim. The aim is to make money. And if someone pays Google to show you ads for diapers, then that’s what they show you.
You will not see ads for local cocktail bars unless all relevant cocktail bars in the area pay Google to show them to you. I.e.: Unless Google owns 100% of the advertisment market, and no business can afford to not have advertisment on Google. And you can probably guess what other thing that means …
EDIT: The best way to find a Yacht Broker in Ft Lauderdale is to search for it:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Yacht%20broker%20ft%20Lauderdale
That page has much more information than the average ad, you don’t have to give any information away to get it, and you don’t even have to encourage Google to get more information from me.
Now, if I could have a thing in my browser that knew my preferences and could steer search results my way … I think I’d go for that.
But if Google knew me well enough to do this, they’d know me (and everyone else) much better than can be good for any society.
Oddly enough, your argument has merit. If you are going to bother to track behavior, at LEAST do it PROPERLY.
Me (like most, I suspect), I prefer not to be tracked. If I want whiskey, I’ll effing ASK for it. If I want bath towels, I’ll ask. If Company X (you know who you are) cared so much for my privacy, they’d give me an option to not be effing tracked AT ALL.
I realize NSA and GCHQ more than likely don’t see it either way, but how often do you hear of a government organization doing something right?
EDIT: If anyone from NSA or GCHQ is reading, I bid you welcome – Shamus has a cool blog – and I hope you don’t find our discourse too boring. By the way, just so you know, your organizations will have their names taken in vain, in spite of any good work you actually do. Its just the way of the world, which you already know.
On the flip side, I want to support the websites I visit, so I don’t mind seeing ads if they’re relevant to me.
That said, I think there should be other flags, like, “even if this YouTube account belongs to a 40+ year old man, he has a kid, so maybe we shouldn’t show a trailer for Deliver Us From Evil before a Pocoyo cartoon, since its his child that’ll likely be seeing it.”
Also, I think they hold web ads to a MUCH higher standard than other forms of advertising, which often means the sites showing ads to help support themselves aren’t given a whole lot of $$ for their trouble.
In my experience Chrome is a lot more resource hungry than firefox. Probably related to the million tabs I always have open but I find firefox’ cpu and memory usage to be a lot better.
Lessee, what hasn’t been mentioned yet… Midori, Rekonq and Konqueror.
I’m using Palemoon now as my browser and liking it a lot. It is a fork of Firefox without the bloat or the slowdown.
I got ticked off at Firefox when I upgraded it and it decided to destroy my customized layout just because. Unlimited themes and they just had to overwrite whatever someone was using? Grrr. Not the first time Firefox did that either. I have a pet theory open source software projects get infested with trolls once they get too popular. People who just want to insert something into the project for the sole reason to claim they worked on it.
Palemoon = Firefox if it was better.
I don’t think that this is exclusive to open source software, though. Opera did the same to me (both: make stupid changes and get infested with trolls), and proper commercial software does silly things as well. Anyone remember Windows 8? Ribbons? Made lots of people angry.
I think the problem is that software _must_ change to adapt to new developments but the decision on how to do that will always be controversial; sometimes more, sometimes less. In commercial software companies, there might be a manager who thinks they know it better, in OS software there might be a very merited programmer to whom nobody wants to object, at Opera it was the new board who had no knowledge of or respect for Opera’s history and turned it into a “least common denominator” experience…
Actually it’s a bit like that band you used to love before they started to make meaningless happy pop. It happens, and it’s sad, but it probably can’t be prevented. And it’s of course always a matter of personal taste as well.
For development I prefer Firefox, but I also use Chrome a lot. Ad I test in Opera and IE.
But here’s the thing folks, check your browsers on this https://panopticlick.eff.org/
On my system IE leaks the least privacy info and Chrome is just mind boggling (the plugin list is huge).
I have also switched from Google search to DuckDuckGo.com as my default search engine.
Firefox do get bogged down and slow at times and if it hits the 2GB limit here pages start going black. I do not have Flash installed, if I really need to surf a flash site i use Chrome (which comes with flash).
Chrome also has like 2 or 3 instance of a Chrome updater on the sytsem sometimes after a install.
Firefox seems to have it’s shit together (which is nice considering their updating was messed up if you did NOT run as a admin a few years ago)
Opera sometimes takes ages to start, possibly due to checking for a new version (this really should be a background task), only software I can recall with super slow startup due to checking for updates is VLC, that one is horrible.
I do dig how tight the title bar of Firefox is now however compared to previously, and with the Firefox button gone it’s really slick looking.
IE is lagging behind a bit there with a bit of deadspace along the top; but otherwise IE runs fast and smooth here (IE11).
I wholehartedly recommend Duckduckgo. Not just muuuuuch better privacy-wise (they don’t store searches
and work nicely with https), but usually gives me much better results.
Some searches give you a disambiguation list, relevant wikipedia extracts, a list of embedded youtube videos (so you can look at the thumbnails directly and decide before you click anything) … and other nice things. Like it.
Firefox can just use it as a search engine from the search field, the new Opera needs to install the plugin which is suuper-roundabout to use. The old Opera, of course, invented the search field, so that’s even easier than with Firefox. Can’t speak of other browsers.
So if there’s only 60-70 mins of SW Skyrim left, I take it you won’t get onto finishing up the Civil War quest? Though I suppose screwing the Empire over at the peace talks is a fitting “ending” for Reginald Catbert.
The annotations previously were working for me on both the main page and within each article. Now they appear to have vanished entirely.
The annotation markers show up a little funny in the RSS feeds: “By annotations I mean these things3.” If you could somehow cause the feed to put sup tags around the numbers it would make it clear what they are, as well as easier to read.
Not that the feed ever shows the annotations themselves, but having the superscript numbers means I at least know they’re there and can hop over to the site to check them out.
In the RSS feed, I see the same thing, just a number, but I can hover over it to see the alt-text of the annotation. Somehow, I almost like it better than click-to-view from the actual site.
On the annotations:
When I first read the article, the number of the annotation showed as mouse-over text, now my mouse pointer becomes a question mark. Actually, I had hoped that the mouse-over text would just be the annotation itself (no need to click the note) — but I guess that wouldn’t work well on touchscreens?
I remember back in the day on Windows 95 how the help files had mouse-over textboxes to explain some of the technical terms in them and thought that this would be a really cool format to publish technical writing or some of my rather convoluted reasoning in. HTML would do as well. But somehow it has not only not caught on but is still difficult to do. Weird thing.
Not difficult to do (if using a modern browser) a few articles ago I posted some code that did this automatically, no need to click.
The problem however is varying browsers, inconsistent behavior and possible conflicts wit existing styling or code of WordPress and WordPress plugins.
BTW! Windows help files that end in .chm are actually HTML files with CSS styling.
Oh, that’s nice to know!
The thing that’s still missing (or at least I missed it) is a good tool to make these things.
I’m currently writing some documentation in Zim (which I recommend), then exporting to HTML (and sometimes to PDF from there), but Zim’s markup does not allow for mouse-over text or footnotes. Most PDF readers will jump to a footnote (exported from Libre or MS Office) if you click it, not show it in a pop-up, so you’ll need to scroll back afterwards, which is annoying. So … I guess typing in Office and exporting to HTML could work, but that’s not quite it.
I don’t have anything interesting to say, but making comments is what made the annotations break before, so I’m making a comment for purposes of troubleshooting.
EDIT: Yeah, everything seems to work fine in Firefox too.
I’m using FireFox 30.0, and the annotation ‘link’ gets the arrow with a question mark on it. clicking it brings up the annotation, but now I have to click on the annotation or link again to close; clicking on the body of the page no longer closes it. Probably just means I need to not move my mouse between clicks, but thought the behavior change worth noting.
Having it close if clicking on the page would need some extra javascript, or changing the way the CSS is done.
You can close it by clicking anywhere on the box itself though I’m sure touchscreen folks like that feature.
The current behavior also have the benefit that you can have multiple annotations open.
Just click on the [1] and the [2] without closing either.
I have no idea what the use that could be but hey, it’s possible.
Maybe if you want to highlight some text elsewhere on the page while reading the note?
Or those with touch screens may accidentally click on the page while trying to scroll so the box remaining up despite clicking on the page elsewhere is a benefit in that case.
There are pros and cons to either behavior (actually there’s like 4-5 ways to do this “simple” annotation box popup.
Also for those curious, if you really want to use HTML5 to give semantic meaning to the annotations, then one could use the <aside> tags instead and style those in pretty much the same way.
I’m just damn glad I’m not a browser developer, it’s a pain in the ass enough to make webpages, trying to interpret them must be a nightmare.