So the Acer LCD monitor was getting harder to see (in spite of extremely successful cataract surgery on both eyes about six months ago), glasses or no glasses. Nothing wrong with it, just harder to read, not so sharp.

Off to Staples (needed ink cartridges), stop in the monitors aisle, wow, look at those LED things. Hm. Samsung, HP, couple of others.

Grabbed an HP Pavilion 23xi 23-inch Diagonal IPS LED Backlit Monitor (on sale, decent price). Brought it home, got all the parts and pieces out and together, plugged 'er in with the VGA cable, woo eee!

It's big, it's bright, it's beautiful (at native 1920x1080). I can see, I can see! Look at some high resolution images, wow. And this is with Intel graphics, no ATI, no Nvidea, no "proprietary drivers," no nuthin, just works (well I did have to press and hold the autoconfigure button for ten seconds, but what the heck).

Firefox has been sitting there blinking "waiting for..." for minutes. Time to blow away 10+ years of ~/.mozilla and start over. Didn't want to loose all the saved passwords and bookmarks so did a little reading and asking (at Mozilla) and saved
then blew away ~/.mozilla, started Firefox, yep, works, close it, copy the backed-up files into the profile directory, restarted, all the bookmarks, all the passwords, life is good.

Yeah, I did export the bookmarks to a JSON file, just in case, but turns out that what Mozilla says in their documentation actually works.

No more "waiting for..." No delays.

Installed NoScript and Adblock Plus; Adblock Plus has a new feature. When you install it, down the page that pops up a ways are blockers you can enable that block all that Facebook, Twitter and other social media bullshit that web pages seem to insist you need to look at (so you can "find us on blah"). That and malware (well, they do support Windows, so...) and some other crap blockers. Turn 'em on at install, bye-bye eye pollution.

Now I just have to go find the prefs.logo file so the Slackware logo will appear in posts... I know I've got that stashed somewhere around here.

Last thing is start experimenting with alternate monitor connections. The VGA is lookin' good, but, it's got a HDMI1 plug and it's got a digital plug (and some other stuff I've never heard of) and it's time to fiddle around and experiment a little (if, that is, the computer has those same plugs and they actually work, eh?).

Well, I guess it's a lot off-topic, sorry.

Isn't that what your LQ web log is for, then?..

1 members found this post helpful.

I like Adblock Plus very much too. The anti "social crap" function can also be enabled by subscribing to these protection lists:

http://adversity.uk.to/

It works and it seems that, without junk, pages are loaded a bit faster.

Please don't hijack my threads!

More seriously, you could give a go to qupzilla (same features than Firefox, less bloated and integrated AdBlock) and FbTerm that can display TTF fonts on the console (fully adjustable character size, very crisp display using e.g. DejaVu fonts).

Didier

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adblock: not necessary, get rid of this crap by using this hosts file: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

noscript: just browse the web with javascript disabled. if there is a page which *really* needs js, then its probably not worth reading it.

if you are looking for a decent, almost-except-the-rendering-engine bloat free browser: http://surf.suckless.org/.

unix is about combining the tools you have, no need to use a bloated browser like firesucks, including "plugins", which make it even worse.

Oh, I don't know about that -- NoScript lets me set which sites I'll allow (quick and easy) and ignore those that I won't allow. The ones I allow are ones that won't work without JavaScript enabled (like my banking and investments sites) the others I just don't care about (or temporarily allow all on this page which goes away when Firefox closes). It's convenient and not too annoying.

Same with Adblock. I don't see ads on any sites, don't care to either. It's automagic and I don't have to screw around to make it work, it just does. The longer I do this stuff the more reluctant I get when it comes to dealing with crap; if something works and eliminates crap, I'm good with that.

Thanks for the thoughts.

There is also a python script which uses additional sources:
https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts (However, I don't use it as I share this computer and some sites stopped working; also, I click Alien BOB's ads from time to time, so I stick with Adblock Edge …)

As for NoScript, using it with RequestPolicy you have a more fine-grained control about what to allow.

Also to consider: Running Firefox as Another User

Yeah, right. If there's anything bloated and ineffective it's that hosts file. Deities know why people keep promoting it... Using /etc/hosts for redirecting lookups like that is a crude, past millennium way of dealing with things. To be more specific it won't help with or can't parse Javascript fun or do path-based filtering, update incrementally, block ad-tracking cookies, block in-page ads residing in a path on the same server you visit, block ads from a hostname of which the domainname is the same as the server you visit, block ads presented through Javascript or Flash, block ads by host or path substring match, block only web bugs, set session-only cookies for a range of sites, selectively block popups, refresh-tags and redirects, keep images with specific sizes from displaying or block visiting domains based on content. On top of that you'll have a hosts file filled with sites you might not even visit, no insight in how filters get added and nobody to vouch for its contents other than this one person.

For effective, usable and efficient distro and browser-agnostic filtering you can't beat a filtering proxy.

5 members found this post helpful.

I too recently (welllll...about a year ago+/-) got my first LCD (LED backlit) 21" monitor. It was absolutely amazing how clear things were *supposed* to look after 15 years of CRT's! Not to mention breaking my back lugging those heavy-$!* crt's around!

Glad you finally were able to upgrade. Enjoy the sights!

even better: http://git.r-36.net/hosts-gen/. written in c, so it does not require python.

running surf as another user is on my todo list for a long time, i probably just forgot about that.

1 members found this post helpful.