Currently reading: The Summons by John Grisham

"Fix" apps with memory leaks with crontab

My aging work machine is a Mac Mini from 2018. Its hardware spec is fine if a bit sluggish these days. After a couple months of happenstance uptime, however, it was hard to ignore just how slow it had become. There were a handful of reasons for it, the likely principle of which was that the system and its 16 GB of memory had a 15 GB swap file. Constant swapping memory to disk and vice versa is a decidedly slow operation even if an SSD is in play.

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Get around inspector blocks by copying the DOM to your clipboard

Certain sites don't want you inspecting their DOM or various source codes for certain reasons. You'll know you're on one if pressing F12 does nothing or if right-clicking and choosing the "Inspect" option kills the site in some way. The most recent one I came across would send the browser to about:blank if it ever detected the inspector being open.

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YouTube is full of fake celebrity stories and gossip

And, my Lorde, do I hate it. People's inexplicable need for celebrity drama has created an ecosystem around videos about said drama. This isn't new, but it's gotten a lot worse since generative AI has become so accessible. Between fake celebrity news and right-wing misinformation hubs, I've had to tell YouTube to stop recommending me so many channels at this point.

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Make Firefox's vertical tab group headings full sidebar width

Tab groups and vertical tabs are nice, and I'm glad to see Firefox finally get on board with features other browsers have had for a good while now. One thing that's been bugging me, however, is the combo of these two features ⸺ specifically, the tab group labels, into which you can write a group's name, don't stretch to the width of your sidebar.

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An example of browser extensions gone awry

And by "gone awry" I of course mean "turned into malware". At the start of this year I wrote about how not knowing who's in charge of the code running in your browser extensions can lead to those extensions becoming malware behind your back. Well, recently one such elicit campaign turned over four million browsers into spyware.

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Remove hashed placeholders when debugging WordPress SQL statements

Sometimes some search or meta query you're trying to do refuses to cooperate and and return results. If you thus find yourself poking around WP_Query's request property, which is a copy of the SQL statement executed to create your query object, you may have noticed some odd and space-inefficient syntax when using the LIKE operator.

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Make VS Code slot a new file in the current directory

This isn't the default behavior for whatever reason, and it's something I've just silently dealt with for years. Because of this default functionality, instead of using [keys Cmd-N] I've always used the GUI buttons for creating new files while working on some project. I didn't think an alternative existed, but I've finally found that one does.

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Shorts are back in YouTube RSS feeds?

I thought had this bud nipped, but enshittification is everywhere and ruins everything in time. I had a mere six months with my RSS feeds free from the scourge of Shorts, so imagine my surprise and anger when they started showing up again. This time, however, I'm not sure there's a way out.

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