#tech fix

Have any of y'all ever fixed the laser issue in a Sony CFD-S70? My partner has one and it just started skipping tracks on CDs. I cannot find a comprehensive guide on these things beyond a basic disassembly guide. Also I am not sure where to find a replacement laser.

Tech Fix

Firefox Is Back. It’s Time to Give It a Try.

By Brian X. Chen   June 20, 2018

Do you ever feel that the web is breaking?

When shopping online for a toaster oven, you can expect an ad for that oven to stalk you from site to site. If you have just a few web browser tabs open, your laptop battery drains rapidly. And don’t get me started on those videos that automatically play when you’re scrolling through a webpage.

The web has reached a new low. It has become an annoying, often toxic and occasionally unsafe place to hang out. More important, it has become an unfair trade: You give up your privacy online, and what you get in return are somewhat convenient services and hyper-targeted ads.

That’s why it may be time to try a different browser. Remember Firefox? The browser, made by the nonprofit Mozilla, emerged in the early 2000s as a faster, better designed vessel to surf the web. But it became irrelevant after Google in 2008 released Chrome, a faster, more secure and versatile browser.

Mozilla recently hit the reset button on Firefox. About two years ago, six Mozilla employees were huddled around a bonfire one night in Santa Cruz, Calif., when they began discussing the state of web browsers. Eventually, they concluded there was a “crisis of confidence” in the web.

“If they don’t trust the web, they won’t use the web,” Mark Mayo, Mozilla’s chief product officer, said in an interview. “That just felt to us like that actually might be the direction we’re going. And so we started to think about tools and architectures and different approaches.”

Now Firefox is back. Mozilla released a new version late last year, code-named Quantum. It is sleekly designed and fast; Mozilla said the revamped Firefox consumes less memory than the competition, meaning you can fire up lots of tabs and browsing will still feel buttery smooth.

Most notably, Firefox now offers privacy tools, like a built-in feature for blocking ad trackers and a “container” that can be installed to prevent Facebook from monitoring your activities across the web. Most other browsers don’t include those features.

After testing Firefox for the last three months, I found it to be on a par with Chrome in most categories. In the end, Firefox’s thoughtful privacy features persuaded me to make the switch and make it my primary browser.

Here’s why you should consider it, too.

Privacy Features

Both Chrome and Firefox support thousands of extensions, which are add-ons that modify your browsing experience. Chrome wins in terms of numbers, with hundreds of thousands of extensions compared with Firefox’s roughly 11,000.

But in months of using Firefox, there wasn’t anything I wanted to do on Chrome that I couldn’t also do on Firefox. Both browsers support 1Password, the popular password-management program. Both support extensions that prevent videos from automatically playing when you visit websites. And both support uBlock Origin, the ad blocker recommended by many security experts.

Mozilla also offers a Firefox extension called Facebook Container. Normally, Facebook can track your browsing activities even outside its social media site by using trackers planted on other websites like web cookies. With Mozilla’s extension, when you open Facebook in a browser tab, it isolates your Facebook identity into its own container, making it difficult for the social network to follow you outside its site.

Firefox especially stood out for some privacy features that are baked into the browser. Inside the privacy settings, you can turn on tracking protection, which blocks online trackers from collecting your browser data across multiple websites. With Chrome, you can install a third-party extension to block trackers — but the fewer add-ons you have to tack onto your browser, the better.

Security experts applauded Mozilla for stepping up its efforts on privacy.

“Firefox does seem to have positioned itself as the privacy-friendly browser, and they have been doing a fantastic job improving security as well,” said Cooper Quintin, a security researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights nonprofit. “On the other hand, Google is fundamentally an advertising company, so it’s unlikely that they will ever have a business interest in making Chrome more privacy friendly.”

Google said that privacy and security went hand in hand, and that it led the industry on both fronts. The search giant said it had the only browser with a method for reliably addressing Spectre, the security flaw that was revealed this year and that cannot be completely fixed. Spectre affects the microprocessors in nearly all of the world’s computers, and it can allow the theft of information from one application so that it can be shared with another. Chrome also includes a built-in filter that blocks inappropriate, malicious ads from loading.

“You can’t have privacy without security on the web,” said Parisa Tabriz, a director of engineering for Google who specializes in security.

In fact, both Chrome and Firefox have tough security. Both include sandboxing, which isolates processes of the browser so a harmful website doesn’t infect other parts of your machine. So if you loaded a website with malicious code, it would be contained within the webpage so it couldn’t infect your files, webcam and microphone.

Google said there was one thing it could do better on: the inclusion of privacy settings to block tracking technology, similar to the tools that Firefox includes.

“I think that’s something that we can improve on,” Ms. Tabriz said. “Firefox has some settings that we’re also exploring.”

Speed and Battery Tests

Which browser is faster?

Some benchmark websites, which determine the speed of a browser by measuring the responsiveness of different web elements, say Chrome is faster. But some other benchmark sites say Firefox is faster. In my anecdotal testing as someone who juggles more than a dozen web tabs at a time, both were very speedy. Let’s call it a draw.

Mozilla’s promise that Firefox consumes less computer memory raises hopes that it should also use less battery life. Yet in my tests on a laptop running a script that automatically reloaded the top 10 news sites, Firefox lasted only a few minutes longer than Chrome before the battery was depleted. On another test, which involved streaming a Netflix video on a loop on each browser, the battery lasted about 20 minutes longer when the Chrome browser was used.

Resurrection Is Just Beginning

Firefox is the No. 2 computer browser, with about 12 percent of the desktop browser market, lagging far behind Chrome, which has about 67 percent, according to StatCounter. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari browsers are even farther behind in the desktop market, with Explorer’s share about 7 percent and Safari’s about 5.5 percent. On Android phones, the Chrome browser is still far more popular than Firefox’s mobile browser. And only lightweight versions of Firefox are available for Apple’s iOS devices.

Yet the path forward for Mozilla looks increasingly promising for consumers.

In addition to the normal Firefox browser, Mozilla offers Firefox Focus, a privacy-centric mobile browser that blocks trackers by default and purges your web browsing history as soon as you close out of a page.

These are privacy-conscious web products that Mozilla is in a position to expand on in the long term. The nonprofit has no direct relationship with advertisers; it gets a small sum from search providers like Google and Bing when a search is conducted through their sites using a Firefox product.

For Mozilla, there’s a plus side to being the underdog.

“The advantage of when you get beaten down is you kind of drop some of your own ego around your decisions,” Mr. Mayo said. “We had a lot less to lose.”

Related Coverage

June 20, 2018   How to Organize Firefox Bookmarks

March 28, 2018  Starting Fresh With Firefox

April 11, 2018  I Downloaded the Information That Facebook Has on Me. Yikes.

Free Tools to Keep Those Creepy Online Ads From Watching You

This is definitely a new tumblr problem, checking the links myself it looks like they have some kind of different server(?) maybe.  I’ve gone and updated the links so that they now work with their new... whatever they use for this kind of hosting.

I’ve also included a Permalink in all of the posts to their respective alt host posts from my NSFW tumblr to hopefully prevent this bizarre image change in the future.

-Side stretches for 2 minutes each side. Imbalance work. Realizing if I put my bent side's hand on my thigh/hip I can get push and get a better stretch. Did these between a lot of sets also for only 10-30 seconds, but only to my left side.

-Over the Bar Forced Shoulder Blade Retractions. Put my feet up on the bench and held my body over the bar with my hands at the right width on the bar. Then I sunk down and contracted my shoulder blades into retraction and squeezed very hard. Added a band around my wrists later on. I think these helped a bit, but still I am thinking the main problem is with my slight tilt imbalance. Did these between most sets too. Later I will post my theory/way of thinking with long ongoing imbalances.

-Paused Bench Press 255 for 4, 3, 2 sets of 2 reps. 3 minute rests. These are okay. I guess taking into account that I really fatigued myself with the shoulder blade work maybe I would have gotten 5, which knowing my body would have me at around a 300 bench.

-Paused Slingshot Bench Press with Belt Added 295 for 5, 285 for 2 sets of 6, 275 for 5 or 6 reps. ~5 minute rests. Wew, these were hard, but they felt really good and I am really happy with the numbers. I had trouble unracking these because of the slingshot/no spotter, but that is okay, this really fucked me on 275. I thought the second set of 285 was 275, but I forgot to take off the 5's, so fuck yassss! I got a cramp on this, so I might have actually bench able to get 7. This was the only cramp this workout and this one was on the opposite side, so yay improvement.

-Dips +10 for 10, 7, 6 reps  Super set with BW Pullups for only 5 reps. 3 minute rests. Dips felt great for the fact that I really stopped doing them so far during February and I did way more volume than I had previously been doing before them. Pullups felt REALLY good. Even when I had been doing pullups with ~75? they did not feel this good.

Lots of snow shoveling, took 30 minutes and kept a very good pace. Low back was super pumped.

-Pushups from the floor then 10 on each levels of 3 stairs, total 40 reps. Just wanted to get the blood flowing back to the right muscles before eating, was still fasted at this point. Triceps cramped like crazy.

Shoulder blade wise the normal bench felt better, but only a bit while the Sligshot felt perfect. Only thing I noticed is now my left arm is locking out a bit higher.

Overall a very good lifting day. Night and day compared to my last two bench sessions.

Realized my bench is pretty narrow, just a little over 10 inches wide, so that might makes sense why my shoulder blades never feel right. I am probably going to grab a rogue one soon when I get the chance.

-1-Arm Band Pulldown stretch 2 sets of 1 minute on my left side and 3 on my right. -Trap Stretches, 2 sets of 1 minute on right and 3 sets on left with 42.5. Flipped the order for my bench day, but that possibly added to my subsequent low back crampage.

-Paused Bench Press 215 11, 7(fucking back cramp), 8, 7 reps. 3 minute rests. The 11 for the first set is not too bad, should have me still ~ 300. I totally fucked myself on the second set. I got a crap and so I thought it would be a good idea to put my feet up on the bench and I got pinned, so I had to end the set. Back cramp on the first set was fucking terrible, I do not know what I am doing differently, but it fucking sucks. Third and fourth set felt pretty good.

-False Grip Close Grip Bench Press 9 and 8 reps. 3 minute rest.  Fuck, I could not get my shoulders set at fucking all and fucking return of the cramp. Tried to keep these all touch and go, but pausing is a bit of a habit, I guess a good one to have. Not happy with these at all.

-Forced Shoulder Retractions. Kinda just a stretch, I put the bar at knee height then put my chest over the bar with straight arms and let my body force the retractions then contracted it myself.