Tor has grown easier

For the last couple of days I’ve been using Tor for general browsing again. It seems to have gotten a little easier. My work email is on Google Apps, and it was previously almost impractical to use Tor with Gmail. I think some people object that it defeats the purpose of Tor to use it for sites like Gmail, but I’m not aiming for total anonymity, just better privacy than I ordinarily have. Now the Gmail issue has gone away, it’s no longer necessary to divide my time between it and another browser.

While updating a website today the exit node I was connecting through was blacklisted, but it was enough to change the Tor circuit in order to overcome that.

Tor has also proved to be fast enough for my needs. Something about it may eventually iritate me; but for now good.

Managing browser bookmarks

I use many browsers and don’t know of any service or addon that permits me to keep bookmarks in sync between one browser and another. There are online bookmark managers and I have an account at Pinboard.in, but that does not really solve the problem for day to day use.

But there are some points of light. It used to be that browsers were less standard in the way they handled bookmarks. I remember being able to import bookmarks into Opera, but not export them. There were even different formats for saving bookmarks. Perhaps there still are – I haven’t used Microsoft’s browser for many years. There were browsers that had folders in the bookmarks bar and those that didn’t.

Fortunately all the browsers that I use now permit the import and export of bookmarks as an html file, and all have bookmark bars with folders. So it’s easy to create a standard usage for bookmarks, back them up frequently and then import the backup file every time I start to use a new browser. To keep things tidy, I first delete any previous bookmarks, so I always have only the most up to date version of my bookmarks stash.

Because it’s so easy to maintain bookmarks now, it also makes sense to invest a little time in organizing them. So all my bookmarks are under folders and subfolders that I keep in the bookmarks bar itself. I have master folders for News, Email, Services, Forums, Social Networks, etc. and then subfolders of those. I don’t claim to have perfected the perfect organization yet, and of course it depends on my personal use case, but I can say that I’m a lot more organized than before, and it’s thanks to the fact that browsers themselves are more standardized in the way they handle bookmarks.

I still use Pinboard.in, but mainly for individual news articles that interest me, and to which I may like to refer later for one reason or another.

I don’t so much use sync between browsers on different devices. Mainly because I don’t really need that and partly because it means creating a cloud copy of everything and then trusting the browser company to safeguard that information.

“Social Media Has Hijacked Our Brains and Threatens Global Democracy”

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjy7ez/social-media-threatens-global-democracy

“Those who celebrated the Facebook revolution and the Twitter revolution were celebrating the replacement of (relatively) calm reflection with the politics of reactivity and passion… The question that remains is whether democracies have both the will, and the means to bring considered thought back to politics, or, whether digital technology has made politics impossible.”

Currency Calculations in LibreOffice Writer Tables

LibreOffice has some nice features that are not always so well-documented. Here’s one for performing currency calculations that I discovered and found useful. Typically a table might have a column in the local currency, and then require a column for the same figures in another currency. That’s where it’s useful to calculate the figures automatically, based on a given rate. If the current rate changes, the foreign currency rate will automatically update, based on a new figure that is placed in the cell from which the conversion will be performed. That’s as long as the document is saved in .odt format. If the document is saved in .doc or .docx format, only the values will be preserved, meaning that the document should look fine, but it will not be possible to perform an automatic update of the fields based on a new currency rate.

Choose a cell for the currency rate and place there the currency rate there, which can be obtained from xe.com
Obtain the cell references from the status bar at the bottom of screen
Place cursor in the cell in which the calculation should appear.
Get the formula bar by pressing F2
Insert the formula as (example) =<C3>/<D1> and click on check mark (where D1 is the cell reference for the currency rate and C3 is the currency from which the calculation should be made).
Change the number format of the cells to reflect the currency that is being converted to. (Table, Number format, choose currency and format for expressing it).
Another way to get the cell references is to click inside the cells while the formula bar is operative, and simply type between them the operator (/ or *)

China’s panopticon

WAPO: China’s Watchful Eye

Moved blog again

This blog goes back to 2003, though I’ve made most of the early posts private. Over this period it’s been on various blogging platforms on a number of hosts. Sometimes I’ve taken it offline, or marked the whole thing as private. I also do quite a lot of writing offline, in text files or in paper notebooks. For the last few months I’ve been doing the latter. Then I learned about Nearlyfreespeech.com, and decided to move it there. It was a little hard to set up, but certainly wasn’t the hardest hosting arrangement I’ve struggled with, and the transfer went smoothly. I thought about buying a Genesis theme that I fancied, then decided to use Weaver Extreme. Weaver really offers a flexible and easy framework and is fine especially for the minimalistic look I want, with a separation between different post categories. For now, I’ve removed the photo albums I’d started to establish, in order to keep storage space down and the hosting cheap. For now, I’m happy with the result. I’ll probably do a couple of other things later, like adding a Let’s Encrypt certificate.

Workers held captive in Indian mills supplying Hugo Boss

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/04/workers-held-captive-indian-mills-supplying-hugo-boss

“Luxury fashion retailer Hugo Boss said it has found cases of forced labour, a form of modern slavery, in its supply chain. Young female workers have been held captive behind the walls of garment factories in southern India and prevented from leaving the premises at any time.”

… around Tirupur, Palladam and Dindigul in Tamil Nadu. Sulochana cotton mills and Sri Shanmugavel mills.
From The Hindu: HC direction to govt. on ‘Sumangali’ scheme “The Madras High Court has directed the State government to analyse the conclusions and recommendations given by District Monitoring Committees, which have suggested strong measures against the alleged practice of camp coolie system in the name of Sumangali system in textile mills across the State.”