Firefox Sync and temporary containers fix

My synchronized Firefox items got out of sync. Here is how I fixed that.

  1. Log out of Firefox Sync on every machine that has Firefox.
  2. Backup your profile on your master machine.
  3. On every machine except the machine I want to keep as master, delete all temporary containers.
    1. This is most easily done with 
      about:preferences#containers
    2. Click on the remove button for all the temporary containers that start with tmp.
  4. Go to 
    about:support
    in Firefox on the master machine.

    1. Click the Open Directory button to open the profile directory folder.
  5. Click the Open Directory button to open the profile directory folder.
  6. Copy the 
    containers.json
    file to an external file share of some sort. It could be a USB key, or Nextcloud, or email it to yourself and use webmail to get a copy of it.
  7. Go to 
    about:support
    in Firefox on the slave machine.
    1. Click the Open Directory button to open the profile directory folder.
    2. Exit Firefox.
  8. Copy the 
    containers.json
    file from the external share to the opened profile folder. Yes – replace the file.
  9. Start Firefox on the slave machine, and log in to the containers you have set which need to keep their login state.

  1. Log in to Firefox Sync on the master machine. You can do this, though it will only really help with keeping bookmarks in sync.
    1. Note that it sent me a confirmation code to my email address.
  2. Log in to Firefox Sync on all the rest of the machines.
  1. Note that if in Step 2, you have too many containers to click the remove button on: Navigate to 
    about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox
    1. Scroll down to Temporary Containers and click “Inspect” to the right of it.
    2. Click “Console”
    3. Insert into the console

const containers = await browser.contextualIdentities.query({});
await Promise.all(containers.map(container => {
if (tmp.container.isTemporary(container.cookieStoreId)) return;
const prefix = 'tmp';
if (container.name.substring(0, prefix.length) !== prefix) {return;}
return browser.contextualIdentities.remove(container.cookieStoreId);
}));
console.log("done");

Credit where credit is due: https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers/issues/371

SO, I’m trying to use a WordPress plugin that lets one copy the code above to the clipboard. However, what then got pasted into the Firefox console was “helpfully” upgraded to UTF fancy quotes instead of the simple ASCII ‘ and ” characters. Please stop helping … or at least give me a way to override.

And of course … it does not work.

I have a set of temporary containers on my master machine, but, my other machines will not copy that list.

At least the slave instances don’t wipe out the master list.

I’ve updated this post with instructions that do copy the containers list to the slave machines. I don’t expect that Firefox Sync will be able to keep them in sync, though.

Microsoft idiocy again

Work wanted to implement Windows Hello. We got cameras, and it seems like a good idea.

First problem: during setup, it tells me I need to install Microsoft Authenticator, and leads me to the Microsoft App Store. Authenticator is only available for smartphones, and this is a laptop. Y’all couldn’t tell that?

Second problem: I click Logout, and Windows Hello logs me right back in. So, no-one during product testing considered that I might need to log out so I could log in as someone else?

Ah – my mistake was assuming Microsoft does product testing. They don’t need to test; they have 100 million users who will test for them, for free. Of course the hidden cost is that their idiocy is on full display with this scheme.

Back to Windows Hello: instead of logging out, you choose Switch User. Okay, do that. See some software on the box I don’t need. Try to un-install it.

“There are other users logged on to this computer. To properly uninstall this program, switch to and log off each user before you continue.”

Thank you for telling me to perform an impossible operation (logging off) when Windows Hello is installed.

Idiots.

Follow up to “Microsoft is bad at software” – as a matter of fact, Microsoft is REALLY bad at software

In my previous post, one of my complaints was that I had deleted a journal mailbox connector, yet the email kept flowing out the connector to the partner organization.

The problem is that new Exchange Admin Center –> Mail Flows –> Connectors shows you an administration interface that appears to let you administer your connectors. You can create a new connector in the new Exchange Admin Center; but you cannot delete it. Well, the new Exchange Admin Center will show you that it is deleted, but the mail will continue to flow out of your network.

The only way to stop the flow of email out through the connector is to switch to the classic Exchange Admin Center.

Then, when you go in to classic Exchange Admin Center –> Mail Flows –> Connectors you will see that your connector still exists and is pumping out your email.

The particular deliciousness of this failure is that as of the end of last week, classic Exchange Admin Center –> Mail Flows –> Connectors shows only a message that to manage the connectors, you have to switch to new Exchange Admin Center.

Microsoft is bad at software

These past few years at work, we moved from Novell to Microsoft. It has definitely been a move for the worse.

NovellFeature -poorHigh qualityLow expenseSecurity: low profile
MicrosoftFeature -richLow qualityHigh expenseSecurity: target rich environment
Comparison between Novell and Microsoft

I’m just going to say that I dearly love (not):

  1. That Exchange Online has a new command New-DistributionGroup -RoomList which cannot be seen in admin.exchange.microsoft.com. New feature? Microsoft says Yay! Actually making it available to end user administrators? Ain’t no-one got time for that. Certainly this has been vetted thoroughly for security, too.
  2. Exchange Online –> Mail Flow –> Connectors –> Status set to “Off” does nothing. Mail still kept going to the partner, a week later.
  3. Set-Place command for adding the rooms to the RoomList – error! No worky! How to fix? Reboot the PC I was trying to run the PowerShell script on. Now it works. This is just so impressive. Have you tried turning it off and back on again? It’s two decades into the 21st Centrury – shouldn’t someone up there be ashamed?
  4. User asks for help, so I get delegate rights to her mailbox. The delegates rights are present (I run a script to check) but never did her mailbox populate so I could see what was going on in her mailbox. I deleted my own OST cache file just to make sure it wasn’t my machine. Ultimately, I had to use Outlook Web Access to see her mailbox.
    1. Every week we get multiple help desk tickets about folders not populating or visible for delegates.
  5. Exchange search is awful. Admittedly, I am coming from a GroupWise experience where search was great. But as important as search is, I would have thought that Microsoft could at least have pulled off “competent” – nope. I particularly like (not) that OWA has a drop-down for “search all folders” but the search only searches the current folder. What a bunch a maroons.

These were all in the last three days. I’ve seen nothing but this sort of low quality software for so many months now. Don’t even get me started on SharePoint.

Don’t forget – Microsoft will break your stuff if you do business with a competitor.

Dear Lord I wish I could retire tomorrow.

I’m not finding Rimworld to be very fun

It got an “Overwhelmingly Positive” score on the Steam store, and I bet for younger players it is great. But I’m old, so my brain does not move as fast as young peoples’ do.

This means I lose a lot. Half of the time I have two of my four man crew in the hospital (the room I set up to be my hospital). Pretty much as soon as people are healthy, the AI throws another rabid schnauser / deer / antelope at my crew.

The AI in this game is supposed to be really good (by reputation I have read). But for me, it never lets up and there aren’t any easier / lower settings I can set. It is simply unrelenting and oppressive.

I want to like this game; I’ve never played The Sims but I imagine this is like The Spacefaring Sims On Another Planet. It has goals and objectives – and it applies pressure to get there. So it’s not bad at all. I also really like that it has a Linux native version. The soundtrack is really good.

There are supposed to be quests in this game, where I send off people to accomplish whatever goal. I lose (or nearly lose) so many rabid animal fights (or malevolent humans) that I cannot afford to send people on the quest. So then I’m told I failed yet another quest.

But if the only thing that ever happens in this game is that my pawns* die often, then I’m going to be sad I spent the money on it.

I’ll try some more; but I hope fun shows up soon.

*that’s what the game calls them.

How to highlight text using The GIMP

This is ridiculously awful.

Think of buying a yellow highlighter and then using it. That’s all I wanted to do, but digitally. There are features in other programs where you can highlight text or an area; my freaking email client has this feature, with drag-and-paint, too.

But in The GIMP, it is a simple six step task with at least one “gotcha”.

Google offers gobs of YouTube videos about The GIMP, but trying to find this simple “how do I put a yellow highlight on an image using gimp” shows me pretty much anything but. There is one result new the top, but it is about using the text tool, typing text in, and “selecting” the text within it. I have an image I need to highlight some text on; but the image and text are pixels within the graphic image.

Enough blather!

  1. Open the original image and convert to RGB mode.
    1. Image –> Mode –> RGB
    2. This was the “gotcha”: What I had done was converted a PDF to PNG, and the PDF was generated in grayscale. When I was trying to do color fills (yellow is a color) with the Bucket Fill tool, the color picker had these weird corners in pink or magenta. Nothing on screen gave me any indication why those weird corners were there. Whenever I did actually do a fill, it was filling with white (apparently grayscale yellow is white) which was what the background was – so it looked like every click was useless. FML
  2. Create a new blank layer
    1. Ctrl-Shift-N is the keystroke for doing this, although I use Ctrl-L to open the Layer dialog box and click the button at the bottom to add a new layer.
  3. Use the selection tool of your choice to create the area you are going to fill with the highlight color.
    1. I do like the fact that the rectangle select tool lets me specify rounded corners.
  4. Change the foreground color to what you want. BTW, HTML yellow is ffff00#
  5. Use the Bucket Fill tool to click inside the area selection.
    1. Note that at this point, your highlight has obliterated the image underneath. Proceed to the next step.
  6. Change the layer to show the image underneath.
    1. For me, the best was to change the layer from mode “Normal” to mode “Darken only”.
      1. I suppose if your background was black instead of white, the mode would be “Lighten only”.
    1. I’ve seen a suggestion to change opacity on the layer to 30%, but that put the black text in yellow too.

Amazon Music fails gapless playback

Not that long ago, my desktop install of Amazon Music Player (which is really their web app inside a Windows .exe wrapper) asked if I wanted to update to the latest version. I did, and that was a mistake. The new program turned on “gapless playback”. This would be nice if Amazon hadn’t fouled up the implementation. I’m not against gapless playback; I’m against gapless playback done badly.

The two problems are:

  1. Gapless playback cannot be disabled.
  2. The gapless settings are per-song, and are sometimes wrong.

Problem Number One is annoying, but can result from an immature developer, or someone on the design team who deep down inside is fearful that people don’t respect them. Because people do not do what he or she wants, he or she becomes a bully. Either way, the implementation of a new feature without the ability for the end-user to turn it off is arrogant.

One of the Tenets of IT is “Have the user show you the problem, often it is the user doing something in an unusual way.” Weird things happen. So to implement a new feature without giving the user the option to turn it off is the assumption that the developer is smarter than God, and things could never be imperfect, so no, plebeian, you don’t get a choice in the matter.

In this case, it isn’t the user doing something in an unusual way; it is Amazon’s algorithm for tagging the end of the song for gapless playback that fouled up.

I know that mistakes happen; this is normal. This is not a surprise. Therefore robust programming behavior is: make new features optional. Or at least have a back-out plan, for when things break instead of getting better. Amazon did not do that here.

Like I said, arrogance.

Problem Number Two wouldn’t be a problem if Problem Number One weren’t present.

Problem Number Two means I get a better music experience from YouTube than from Amazon Music Player. I paid you money for this song, Amazon. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

The problem showed up immediately after I did the suggested “upgrade” of the new version of Amazon Music Player on Windows. A quick search indicated that yes, gapless playback is a new feature that was added, and, no end users do not get a choice for this breakage to be enabled or disabled. It is enabled, end of story, go kick rocks if you don’t like it.

I should spell the problem out fully.

Context: I have playlists defined, and I start a playlist while working from home. It’s a particular set of songs with no vocals. It’s also a long playlist, since I don’t want to hear a song too many times. Sometimes I click the “randomize” button instead of the “play” button. Five or six hours later, I need to start the playlist over again.

Problem: After the “upgrade” some of the songs in the playlist are truncated by a large number of seconds, as the playlist advances to the next song early. Instead of a zero second gap between the next song and the current one, it’s a negative number of seconds. 30 seconds? 45 seconds? 60 seconds? I don’t know. It’s not like five (or less).

This did not happen prior to the “upgrade”. It does affect particular songs, whether the playlist is in order versus random play mode. I notice it in two or three songs (of 105 in the playlist I play); but with the one song, it is extremely noticeable because the song is great, and it has a nice ending – which I never get to any more! This song comes on, I’m rocking out, and pow – next song without warning. Man I hate this.

The version prior to the upgrade was better, because every song ended after it fully played. There wasn’t gapless playback, though. There was about a one second pause between songs. I understand that for some music, gapless playback is super; I just don’t happen to have any of those albums. My gapped playback was fine for me.

I also have this same song in another playlist, and it gets truncated there too. This is why I think the end-of-song tagging is connected to the particular track.

This does not happen if I play the song on my iPhone (not in a playlist). It does not happen if I play the song from my Amazon Echo. It only happens in the Amazon Music Player on Windows.

I did open a few enhancement requests / feedback comments (and even put a request in Amazon’s public forum), but it’s been almost two months and nothing has happened.

So here we are; me whining on the Internet. Yay (not).

Overall, I really like Amazon Music. I like that I can buy an MP3 file and download it. I can copy it to a USB stick and plug that into my car. I can wrangle a snippet of an MP3 into an iPhone ringtone. The playlists are not terrible to manage (although they must be managed on my iPhone) (which isn’t a great interface because the screen is too small to make things easy).

Anyway, if you want to hear a song with a great beat (without getting cut off early), here it is on YouTube: Timmy Trumpet and Scndl – Bleed It’s in the category of EDM (Electronic Dance Music) so it might not be to everyone’s taste; but I love it.

I can’t link to it on Amazon because you’d have to sign up with Amazon’s Spotify clone to hear it. I bought the single from Amazon, so that’s how I have it in my playlist.

This also happens on Harold Faltermeyer – Axel F

Another song it happened on was Old Skool. I watched the Amazon Music Player, and it cuts over to the next song with 25 seconds to go. In other words, Amazon Music Player knows the song should be 3 minutes 44 seconds long, but at the 3:19 mark, it skips to the next song.

Another song that fails is Crab Rave by Noisestorm. This one is truncated 12 seconds from the end.

It is information that Amazon Music Player playback failures (truncation time) differ per song.

Dear Mozilla, please stop copying Google Chrome UI changes into Firefox

I don’t know why Firefox dislikes Bookmarks. Perhaps they are a pain in the ass, and the Mozilla people hope they will go away? I understand why Google would dislike them; if you use a bookmark, you are not using the Google Search Engine. Google’s primary source of revenue is advertising, ergo, search is good and bookmarks are bad. But Firefox? What excuse do you have for making your user’s lives worse?

UPDATE: there is a fix; add in about:config an item “browser.toolbars.bookmarks.2h2020” set as boolean False.

The beef I have at the moment is that I wrote a script to take screenshots. It’s the old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words”.

But the bookmarks toolbar is noise/clutter in this situation. So the simple solution is a keystroke that toggles the bookmarks toolbar on and off. Trivially easy to do, and doesn’t distract the tech support person I’m going to sending the screenshots to. Doesn’t leak information to their tech support about which web sites I log in to often.

This keystroke to toggle the Bookmarks Toolbar used to work. Now, the keystroke is still mapped, but not to the toggle function.

Firefox has now copied Google Chrome to turn the bookmarks toolbar off with that keystroke, and you have to use the freaking right-click mouse menu to turn it back on. Or there is a three menu deep regular mouse click path to get there.

What was wrong with having a toggle?

Mozilla Firefox Team: you did not make my life better by copying Google Chrome; you made it worse. I’m using Firefox because I think it is better than Chrome. Please stop downgrading it into being a clone of Chrome.

I can’t imaging anyone in the Firefox world thinking to themselves You know what I need? I need the Toggle Bookmark function to stop working, because being able to get to my bookmarks toolbar should become a pain in the ass.

The Bookmarks Toolbar was always about ease of use. It doesn’t get easier than having a button on the top of the page to click on, to instantly transfer to that site. But apparently ease of use is bad now?

Sigh.