jesse_the_k | Entries tagged with how to computer

I want to believe that I can outwit scammers, but even true cybersecurity experts like Troy Hunt have been fooled. I'm tech support for some of my age-mates, so I needed to write this anyway, so I'm sharing it.

Just got an SMS/text in Messages on my iPhone

( screenshot )

which claimed

1-727-241-1788
Text Message • SMS Apple Notice: A charge of $157.89 was deducted from your Apple ID via Apple Pay. If this was not done by you, Call support now 1-833-869-3310.

This failed the “smell test” five ways

SMS not iMessage. Apple invented the iMessage protocol to provide Apple-specific features, including fun visuals. All other platforms now have fun visuals, and Messages can send via other protocols, but when Apple contacts me, iMessage appears above the text.
Lacked official Apple info. When Apple contacts me via Messages, I see an official Apple Badge such as the white and gray items with Apple logos in the image.
Message via wrong channel. Apple emails me receipts; I didn't find the dollar amount in my email. I have my Credit Union push a notification whenever my Apple Pay–credit card gets charged, and I didn’t receive any notice from them.
No Apple Pay charges at official site https://support.apple.com/en-us/118212 explains how to check all Apple Pay charges from the web with any device, as well as specific instructions from an Apple device. No charge appears there.
Wrong terminology. Apple changed the branding on usernames. It used to be "Apple ID," but it changed to "Apple Account" in June 2024.

How do you recognize scams?

The MacMost site offers bite-sized tech help for Apple users. Even though I’ve been using Apples since 1984, I always learn something there. Recently, Gary offered 36 ways to type more easily on the iPhone keyboard. Transcript and video at https://macmost.com/36-iphone-keyboard-tips.html

I learned three things that made me happy. Writing them down helps me remember, so here are the summaries:

( Specific advice for iOS, general approach may also apply to Android )

Do you have any tricks to make mobile Dreamwidth posting easier?

Today I learned about the excellent fandom resource from ao3commentoftheday and memorizingthedigitsofpi

How to AO3

https://archiveofourown.org/series/1854832

as of 1 Aug 2022, the series includes

Tags for Beginners
How Tags Work
How to move a work to a secondary account
How to add a link anywhere
How to file an abuse report
Blocking on AO3
Blocking User or Work
How to get Dark Mode
Finding Fics
CSS snippets for Readers

as well as two unrevealed works. I can't wait!

What AO3 tools do you use?

Metafilter mentioned Lil Nas X in full lilac jumpsuit on the cover of the NYTimes Sunday Magazine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/magazine/lil-nas-x.html

Followed the link and I hit the pay wall: "sign in to your account or subscribe.*"

I do pay for local publications. I won’t pay for the NYTimes because then I’d read the NYTimes and my mental health would plummet.

My workarounds in order of use:

Try another browser
Wayback Machine
Find another archive
Use my local library’s subscription

( my four workarounds )

...after the election I let all my news wall filters go down.

It felt great to be *f*r*e*e* but I encountered lots of toxic stuff that made me anxious as fuck. So I raised my walls a little bit, but still wasn't sleeping well, unable to focus on things I'd formerly liked to do.

Now I've found a balance which works for me.

I've set up my net filtering software -- Freedom.to -- to create cracks large enough to hunt down information, and scheduled to minimize plunging into driven doom-scrolling.

News sites are only available between 11:30 and 11:59 am.

Twitter is only available between 12:30 and 1pm.

I can't follow news links from Twitter -- have to wait a day. Mostly, that's fine. Happily MyGuy, who's connected to the original streaming service (radio) has promised to let me know of anything vital.

I'm here to kvell about a nifty browser extension, StopTheMadness

(Everything except the name, which I could do without. More accurately, it's GiveMeBackControl).

StopTheMadness wrests control back from websites, so I can always right-click, copy text/images, prevent opening in new pages, prevent media autoplay, and much more. Visit site for full marketing info:

https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/

It's currently available for Chrome (and Chromium browsers) on Windows, Mac, Linux.

For Mac/Safari it's a full-fledged app (as now is required for Safari extensions) with even more benefits.

I can assign browsers to domains and apps to URL schemes.

The social media giants seem to optimize function for Chromium-based browsers. So in my case, I always use Brave (with its robust privacy features) for FB, IG, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Gmail and YouTube. Any cookies left by those sites are isolated to those sites, with my principal work remaining in Safari.

URL schemes means I control which apps open feed://, mailto: etc.

It also offers domain-specific implementation of styles if I use the Safari style sheet option -- it's not a full replacement for Tampermonkey yet, but who knows? The dev, Jeff Johnson, has been steadily adding features.

Sadly, it's not available for iOS (yet?)

Many thanks to pauraque for introducing me to turingfest, a fanwork exchange for robotic characters, which are defined for this purpose as "characters in the realm of AIs, robots, androids, mecha, machines, cyborgs, and any other technology-focused characters." The author reveals are up now; here are the 2020 contributions:

https://archiveofourown.org/collections/turingfest2020

I particularly loved ‌Welcome to Windows 95! by izayoi-no-mikoto

https://archiveofourown.org/works/24073393

It’s a horror story told entirely in Windows 95 first-boot screen grabs. Since I’ve used Apples all my computing days, I can’t vouch for how true-to-life this portrait of an OS as a controlling bastard is. Fundamentally inaccessible, and I want to podfic this by creating the appropriate screens and feeding them to Jaws 1.0. Anyone ready to assist? ( samples and two other links )

When I visit any LJ user/community, just as the content finally fills up my screen the page reloads. Over and over.

Happens in both Safari and Brave (Chromium). I do have Adblock at the system level on my macOS Catalina laptop; I do have livejournal.com whitelisted for AdBlock.

Today I learned about fabulous specialist search engines, including MillionShort. It lets lets you hide the first 100, 1000, ... 1,000,000,000 search results, as well as suppressing e-commerce sites. It provides you with an anti-search engine optimized view on the web! SEO can be helpful when I'm looking for a product, and can get in the way when I want honest user opinions on something.

Visit

tozka for finding the old internet.

Many academic libraries/databases have been made world-readable in the past few months while students lack campus library access. Curiosity led me to the Association for Computing Machinery’s digital library (open access until 30 June 2020), where I was delighted to learn of the journal called ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

Use the advanced search interface if you’re ready to go diving.

I found research explaining why automatic captioning is so unsatisfactory. "Word Error Rate" is the metric YouTube and other automatic speech recognition systems use as they trumpet their production of "automatic captions." Deaf & HoH users often call them "craptions." Total number of incorrect words divided by total number of words displayed doesn't map on to the info we need to understand spoken language visually. Some words we can easily infer; when names, locations, and crucial verbs go missing, comprehension plummets. This article explains in great detail, and proposes alternative metrics which could measure whether automatic speech recognition is good enough.

Predicting the Understandability of Imperfect English Captions for People Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

SUSHANT KAFLE and MATT HUENERFAUTH, Rochester Institute of Technology

ACM Trans. Access. Comput., Vol. 12, No. 2, Article 7, Publication date: June 2019. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3325862

abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has seen major advancements in its accuracy and speed in recent years, making it a possible mechanism for supporting communication between people who are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) and their hearing peers. However, state-of-the-art ASR technology is still imperfect in many realistic settings. Researchers who evaluate ASR performance often focus on improving the Word Error Rate (WER) metric, but it has been found to have little correlation with human-subject performance for many applications. This article describes and evaluates several new captioning-focused evaluation metrics for predicting the impact of ASR errors on the understandability of automatically generated captions for people who are DHH. Through experimental studies with DHH users, we have found that our new metric (based on word-importance and semantic-difference scoring) is more closely correlated with DHH user's judgements of caption quality—as compared to pre-existing metrics for ASR evaluation.

And isn’t it weird that academia is still using obscure abbreviations like ‌ACM Trans. Access. Comput. when nothing’s printed so there’s no space to save?

tozka posted: how to download old icons that are being held hostage by photobucket

Step 1: Download Photobucket Embedded Fix addon for Firefox. (There's a Chrome version as well.)

Step 2: Clear your browser cache and then reopen the page. Ta-da! It's fixed!

Details and pictures at the original post.

…with support for macOS and iOS.

I’m paying for Dropbox now but they no longer support rendering images in HTML.

It’s possible to publish photos on iCloud as "public websites," but I don’t see where to get the photo’s link. I know that dealing with the macOS and iOS insistence on managing iCloud files in its own way confuses me a lot.

I’m willing to pay for a straightforward system.

I'm reluctant to use Google because Big Google scares me and they have form on dropping support for nifty services.

I like having a written record of what happened, to supplement my memory.

I switched form Eudora to Mac Mail in the last millennium. I've had at least a dozen email addresses. I've faithfully downloaded everything to my local Mac (IMAP, not POP--I may be old fashioned but I'm not a masochist). I'm more cavalier with my iOS Mail since I know the master version will be on my Mac.

I have 7 gigabytes of *.mbox and sipped *.mboxes.

I know that Mail will be happier if I have fewer "active" messages. Can I somehow export and then delete emails from Mail without losing them?

My search has found no massively helpful article. I want "Take Control of Archiving Your Email" to exist. Can you point me to a step-by-step, handholding resource that will slim down current Mail while still permitting me to read that email I sent to my doctor in 1999?

Bookmarklets are programs that live on your browser’s Favorites (aka bookmarks) bar. Where standard bookmarks have a name and a web address, bookmarklets have a name and a tiny Javascript to make life simpler. I just stumbled on a tool that let me combine a number of bookmarklets into a menu!

https://w-shadow.com/bookmarklet-combiner

Here's my "lucky star" ★ menu, which offers three functions I use all the time

!css strips out all styles on a web page, permitting me to see my preferred, large font and pink background. Unlike reader mode, the no-styles version still lets me make comments.
wbm save sends the current page to Archive.org’s Wayback Machine, saves the URL, and loads the future-proofed version, ready to copy into a post.
boost puts your current selection in a new DW post with an attribution and link to your source. This is ljwrites’ fork of the signal boost tool from astolat and melannen.

Once installed, clicking the star brings up a little menu to perform one of these tasks.

To install the ★ menu in your browser:

Adjust preferences to display your Favorites Bar
Visit my Star menu page
Scroll to the Star icon at the bottom of the page (search on the string "result" and tab once)
Drag the star to your Bookmark Bar (I put it on the left edge). If you’re using Safari & a keyboard, command-1 will bring up the menu.

Hooray for an easier way to make usernames appear here! Simply type
@username
and you’ll get the right user head:

for people:
@jesse_the_k becomes jesse_the_k

for communities:
@access_fandom becomes access_fandom

for official communities:
@dw-nifty becomes dw_nifty

@ Shortcut for other sites

The @ trick also works with the two dozen external sitenames DW supports: use @username period sitename

@dreamwidth.twitter becomes dreamwidth
@dreamwidth.github becomes dreamwidth

( All the details )

Bypassing the @ Shortcut

Dreamwidth makes any characters right after an @ sign into a username. To make the @ sign simply display

precede the @ with backslash:
\@WordNextToAtSign
in HTML, use the character reference &commat;

~~ETA BUG ALERT~~ never mind, they fixed the bug!

Current Mood: accomplished

ljwrites does a much better job explaining this!

https://lj-writes.dreamwidth.org/2019/03/02/alt-text.html

lightgetsin relies on image descriptions, and her thoughts are crucial

https://lightgetsin.dreamwidth.org/308442.html

For sighted people, images can communicate a lot in a short time. On the web, tho, images come with a cost: bandwidth. Folks who don’t or can’t view your image can still get your message when you use image descriptions. "alt text" is the HTML tool to hold your image descriptions.

Web Accessibility In Mind — WebAIM — is an outstanding resource for ensuring that all users can appreciate your web content.

Spend twenty minutes at WebAIM to gain a confidence in applying the principles of alt texts. Their tl;dr about the content of alt texts: ( open me )

Read Markdown Simplifies Formatting Your DW Posts for an introduction and the formats you'll use daily.

This sequel covers the rest of Dreamwidth’s Markdown support. ( 1100 words )

I love being on Twitter. Constant stimulation. Jokes zinging right and left. Art and photos from around the world. Checking in with people who I only see once a year at WisCon if I’m lucky.

I hate being on Twitter. Constant stimulation. Terrible things happening world wide, curated for my attention by people I like. As of November 2016, I've been on a total newsfast to maintain my sanity, and there's a LOTS of content that's toxic.

Therefore: three tools that help me interact with Twitter manageably.

Thread Reader App

( read and save threads off site )

TCHAT.io

( real-time at your own pace )

Tweetlogix

( superlative iOS client )

I've been browsing the "tumblr purge" tags at latest things (as you do) and have stumbled on two wonderful resources:

For Android Users: Close to a Mobile App with Hermit

https://bluewinged-songbird.dreamwidth.org/tag/tutorial

bluewinged_songbird provides the step-by-step, with pictures!

For all of us: If you're used to Tumblr, how you do it here

https://potofsoup.dreamwidth.org/tag/dw+how-to

potofsoup has, of this writing, fourteen step-by-step tutorials, with pictures!

I learned new things, even after being here since 1-May-2009. It also made me better understand how Tumblr works.

Create a text editor in your browser with this bookmark ( step by step by step )

accessibility [38]
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audio [27]
beadwork [16]
bodymind & impairment [276]
capitalism [19]
classism [37]
climate [24]
clouds-clouds-clouds [16]
comics [38]
communal living [11]
computer hardware [22]
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covid-19 [24]
cultural appropriation [12]
design [13]
disability
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disablism [66]
doctors [25]
dogs [57]
dreamwidth [18]
family [63]
fandom [28]
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fanfic [42]
feminism [13]
food [51]
friday five [17]
geek [21]
gender [13]
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help wanted [19]
history [16]
home in msn [51]
how to computer [25]
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human rights [26]
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ios [19]
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lazyweb [89]
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memoir [174]
meta [55]
metaphor [27]
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moving with purpose [31]
music [37]
myguy [71]
photo [93]
pod* [29]
poetry [11]
political rhetoric [16]
politics [18]
poll [13]
ponderments [56]
power [27]
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queer [12]
race [11]
racism [62]
radio [20]
rave [70]
reading [92]
rec [51]
review [41]
rhetoric [26]
science fiction fantasy [33]
science is fun! [18]
sex [15]
sexism [13]
signal boost [257]
snowbirds [23]
software [17]
tea [12]
technology [15]
trans* [16]
transit [13]
travel [67]
video [88]
visibility [13]
white privilege [14]
writing [12]

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adventures with Jesse the K

Entries tagged with how to computer