Modern Web Woes - I'm mad at the internet

[AmpleApricots]

I don't think I mentioned it yet, but I hate sites that rely on third party/external site resources. My webmail provider uses something called fontawesome and it sometimes slows down the login process while it loads from what looks like its own separate site. Looking nice may be important, but not at the expense of performance.

Fontawesome is often used for symbols, I'm pretty sure kiwifarms uses it too. To avoid this external loading you could install it locally as font on your machine.

Also why do y'all let your printer go online to begin with? My printer isn't allowed connection to the internet by my router. If It'd require this connection to function, I'd get a different printer.

 

[BIG BILL HELL'S]

Count another vote from me for Brother printers. I got a multifunction color laser last year, and with one exception*, it's worked really well.

*For some reason, if I tried to make duplex prints from my desktop, the back page would always get printed upside down. Irritating, but not the end of the world, because I could print from my laptop or tablet just fine, and the problem fixed itself anyway when I reinstalled Windows a few months ago.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I hate it when a webpage disables scrolling with the arrow keys in one way or another. Especially when there's no place to click on the page to re-enable the scrolling because links everywhere.

 

[The Lawgiver]

Youtube's finally started just redirecting to a page that says "oops something went wrong" when I try tampering with settings after redirecting to the page that shows up when I use anything other than google+. It claims my browser is not a verified/supported browser despite it literally being on the list of supported browsers, I've been over that before in here I think. Part of me is starting to wonder if this shits an intentional choice by the algorithm based on whatever personal marketing data it accumulated from me watching shitpost videos.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

profit

Youtube

Seems every Western YouTube video thumbnail and title I see now screams "HEY LOOK AT ME!" - often with some bearded guy making a soy face. Titles of such videos always have CAPS and look like they're trying to sell you something. In the past, it used to always be descriptive titles and the thumbnails were screenshots.

I too miss when the internet was more about sharing than selling. Looks like the "marketing" internet is as Current Year as "social" media, Ford Transit Amazon Prime vans, and "face masks".

 

[Never Scored]

Seems every Western YouTube video thumbnail and title I see now screams "HEY LOOK AT ME!" - often with some bearded guy making a soy face. Titles of such videos always have CAPS and look like they're trying to sell you something. In the past, it used to always be descriptive titles and the thumbnails were screenshots.

I too miss when the internet was more about sharing than selling. Looks like the "marketing" internet is as Current Year as "social" media, Ford Transit Amazon Prime vans, and "face masks".

The thumbnails I always get down the side are stuff like a woman with her big titties hanging out who is nowhere to be found in the video.

 

[Temporal Refugee]

The thumbnails I always get down the side are stuff like a woman with her big titties hanging out who is nowhere to be found in the video.

If anybody doubts Google's focus on making money and their disregard for user experience, the thumbnail system is great proof of both. There's something very pleasing about nice templated thumbnails for video series, but giving content creators the ability to bait & switch like that is an asshole move.

I for one think there should be an option to report misleading thumbnails, and after enough reports the thumbnail should revert to a random frame from the video itself.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Fontawesome is often used for symbols, I'm pretty sure kiwifarms uses it too. To avoid this external loading you could install it locally as font on your machine.

Also why do y'all let your printer go online to begin with? My printer isn't allowed connection to the internet by my router. If It'd require this connection to function, I'd get a different printer.

I don't know if this is an old fever dream or not, but I'm pretty certain a friend bought a printer where the software bounced the print job against the cloud. Computer connects to "[User] HP Cloud" that then sends it to the printer sitting two feet away. I ran away instead of investigating so something else might have been going on but it looked retarded and I fear fixing printer issuses like werewolves fear silver.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

I don't know if this is an old fever dream or not, but I'm pretty certain a friend bought a printer where the software bounced the print job against the cloud. Computer connects to "[User] HP Cloud" that then sends it to the printer sitting two feet away. I ran away instead of investigating so something else might have been going on but it looked retarded and I fear fixing printer issuses like werewolves fear silver.

Absolutely horrifying. If you can't assign a printer a static DHCP assignment, then set a fixed IP on the actual printer to ignore DHCP, then only set up the printer on clients with that direct IPv4 address (no hostnames or IPv6) you might as well just start sleeping on top of a cheesegrater.

 

[Irrelevant]

You shouldn't be installing printer drivers in 2020. When you buy a printer look at the spec sheet for the following.

Ports: 80/443 for IPP and to a lesser extent 9100 for raw if you have a print server or desktop that can handle some pre-processing.

Languages: Until 5+ years ago you were stuck and had to pay out the ass for real PostScript support or go with HP's PCL which wasn't so bad since they have OK Linux drivers. However since every printer now supports some form of mobile printing it means they have to support at least one of PWG/DirectPDF/PCLm under the hood which are all open formats (but sometimes low end printers will only support them over WiFi Direct to get the mobile certification but won't let you use them over the regular network or USB so sometimes you'll get cucked even if the spec sheet looks good).

If your printer meets these specs you have a "driverless" printer. There is similar less standardised stuff for scanners too but I've never had to use it.

The last thing to do is is to give your printer a static IP (and remember to update the printer properties on your OS to talk directly to the IP). If you rely on mDNS/DNS-SD/Bonjour/Avahi/etc it will often disappear off the network or take minutes to print. With a static IP it will always be found and work instantly.

Generally speaking even <$100 HP printers will now meet these specs and they are the best driverless, open source compatible printers. Stay away from Brother, Lexmark, etc as they're still all proprietary shit until you get to the high end. Brothers are only the cheapest to run until you find out they haven't built a driver for your architecture and now you need a whole new printer (which is maybe not a problem if you plan to always stick to x86 Windows).

tl;dr Apple pushing AirPrint for iOS inadvertently revolutionised printers again and you no longer have to pay $1000 for a PostScript printer if you want one that supports open standards (AirPrint itself isn't open but it's built on IPP/PWG so it usually means both are supported).

E: Better explanation/comparison of the driverless languages: https://openprinting.github.io/driverless/01-standards-and-their-pdls/

I skimmed over it but old school port 9100 with PostScript or PCL isn't driverless but it is "open" and you can build the drivers for any platform. A lot of ancient 15 year old HP printers can be setup this way. On Windows you can usually get them working by manually setting up a network printer and selecting the correct PCL version driver that comes with Windows.

If you're taking a risk on a cheap driverless printer then HP is best because even if you get cucked by WiFi Direct you can probably still use PCL over IPP or 9100.

E2: Also noticed that link says CUPS 2.2.2 added support for Apple's URF raster so AirPrint is now "open" too? I haven't really done this shit for 3-4 years so I don't know the current situation.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

It can suck being stuck on a toaster. I can't update my browser on this thing. And more and more sites are getting less and less functional - or not functional at all - as they replace HTML with JavaShit that needs the latest browser to work right. Like that "Pleroma" thing that replaced KF last night was just a blank white page.

Also I don't like how Mac has such shit compatibility. Unless one is running 10.10.10 National Park or whatever it is now, the latest software won't even run on even slightly outdated versions of OS X.

 

[Jones McCann]

Here's one of my fears for the future: I like to say nigger online. I really like to say it. I also really like not being a social outcast for saying it. How long until these two things are incompatible? How long until this entire scheme of collecting everything everyone has said is used against everyday people in a more concrete way and not just to serve people advertisements? It's only a matter of time. It's amazing how fast social media went from "hey we can talk to our friends online" to an entire generation of people publishing every intimate detail of their lives. If the television was a great invention in the way of entertainment and of propaganda, the mobile phone will be remembered as the watershed moment. No longer a screen to watch movies and propaganda on, but a beam into the mind of every individual.

 

[Stasi]

Came across something interesting recently - a guy on youtube created a couple of sites that massively simplifies the modern web so you can surf on vintage computers

http://68k.news/ pulls articles from Google and converts them to simple text with some compressed images as separate links.

http://frogfind.com/ is a search engine that strips down the results to basic HTML and has a classic search engine feel. You can click through the results and go deeper into sites and it will give you simplified pages without modern bloat.

Sadly it seems to struggle with the farms, you can go as far as a subforum and then it breaks.

Its really awesome that you can still use 30+ year old computers to browse the web, just show you 95% of modern webpages are useless trash. Would honestly like to see this expanded so its good for general use and not just tinkering with vintage computers. I guess you can achieve similar results with something like umatrix (and RSS for sites you already use) but I find umatrix too cumbersome and I'm not autistic enough to use it.

 

[Maurice Caine]

Came across something interesting recently - a guy on youtube created a couple of sites that massively simplifies the modern web so you can surf on vintage computers

http://68k.news/ pulls articles from Google and converts them to simple text with some compressed images as separate links.
View attachment 2097478
http://frogfind.com/ is a search engine that strips down the results to basic HTML and has a classic search engine feel. You can click through the results and go deeper into sites and it will give you simplified pages without modern bloat.
View attachment 2097483
Sadly it seems to struggle with the farms, you can go as far as a subforum and then it breaks.
View attachment 2097487
Its really awesome that you can still use 30+ year old computers to browse the web, just show you 95% of modern webpages are useless trash. Would honestly like to see this expanded so its good for general use and not just tinkering with vintage computers. I guess you can achieve similar results with something like umatrix (and RSS for sites you already use) but I find umatrix too cumbersome and I'm not autistic enough to use it.

It looks decent, I'll give you that.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

One thing I don't like about the internet of Current Year is how it can seem to be too full of "this is bad", "that is wrong", or "here is how you suck" - it can be very draining if you listen to it too much.

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

Websites like kiwi farms, ED, 4chan, and 8chan (8kun) are what keeps our modern wide web from being completely corporate. Honestly though, it seems like free no-nonsense websites are slowly dying into obscurity

We started off in obscurity, and remain in obscurity. The main 'internet' that we know and love died a long time ago. It's essentially just a giant money-making system now for people. I know a ton of people that use the internet for nothing but shopping and other commercial avenues.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

It looks decent, I'll give you that.

>all that bright white

It'd be nicer if it was the even older internet look with the grey background.

Or light text on a dark background.

 

[Maurice Caine]

>all that bright white

It'd be nicer if it was the even older internet look with the grey background.

Or light text on a dark background.

That's more of a browser thing, would guess Netscape displays it differently

 

[Coffee Shits]

Advanced Custom Fields, one of the most popular WordPress plugins, passed its tenth anniversary mark last month. In celebration, the author announces he's sold out. (archive)

Frankly, I avoid it where I can, but that is not the case for most WP sites. The core WP team is far too busy negotiating pronouns and pushing Gutenberg on unsuspecting victims to improve their Settings API at all, so ACF is essential for most mid-tier, mid-wit developer types. It's another step down the road of centrally-controlled software for WordPress as a whole.

 

[stares at error messages]

1. JavaScript is becoming like Java Web-applets.
2. Ziabatsu keep trying to re-invent plan9.
3. The Internet is ran by snake-trannies.
4. The government is USA is retarded.

Not always....
View attachment 1065178

Irony everywhere but Germany.