Social time: last.fm

Alright, social time:

Why would one want to use last.fm? I'm sure there are reasons, I just don't know what they are.

But I'd like to. I've got a last.fm account, but no real idea why. I think I use it as a "junk I've listened to" list, currently; but I don't think that's a 'good' use of it/ think that's under-using it.

Make like a tree this holiday season #showkindness @kohls

Hey, advertisers, make a note of this:

I used to consider adblock 'only' "really nice". Then I got hit by an auto-playing video ad in another tab. Adblock is now considered mandatory.

(Get adblock plus: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/

"oh, crap", as it were

Are we really up to 4x04 already?! I haven't even finished season three yet!

[spoiler]
Twilight still has wings, I see. Mind you, I'd probably be griping if they hadn't kept them, too. It's not like you can just retcon something as major as apparently changing the species of the closest thing you have to a main character.
[/spoiler]

I only know this much because I wound up on this blogspot after doing this image search.

Firefox 25 raw first impressions

With all the brou-ha-ha about firefox 25, and all the unfortunate changes that were supposedly coming, I wasn't sure what to think.  So I snagged a copy to play around with, before updating all my devices.

Basically... I can't tell that anything changed.  Certainly nothing I care about, that I can see so far.  I haven't started a new profile yet, but I think many of the changes I'd already be patching around with other addons anyways.

When I first opened my old profile, I couldn't use the address bar.  At all.  Disabling the Omnibar and Background Tabs addons let it work again, and it still works after re-enabaling Omnibar.  I don't know if "just" disabling Background Tabs would have done the trick.

All my other addons seem to be working.  One of them is evidently stopping the 'hide forward button' so-called feature, I wish I knew which.  I _hate_ that 'feature'.  Maybe it's a setting somewhere in about:config instead.

The 'magic' stop/reload button behavior is still in evidence.

As far as I can tell, new toolbars are still an option.  I haven't tried anything even more exotic yet.

The addons 'Tree-Style Tabs' and 'Vertical Toolbar' still work fine, so far as I can see.

Using slock

I've been using slock¹, from the suckless tools collection, to lock my computer recently. And I gotta say, it's really doesn't suck. Using it literally couldn't be any simpler: at any command prompt (ie, in a terminal emulator, awesomeWM's "run" box), you type "slock".

And that's it. Your computer is now locked. Mouse input is ignored, to unlock it you simply type your password at the blank screen. There's no password prompt, no screen saver, no options to mess with, nothing. Just your locked computer and a blank screen. If you're worried about burn-in, turn your monitor off---you should be doing that anyways.

¹Getting slock: slock is part of suckless tools, from suckless.org. In Ubuntu, it's part of the package suckless-tools:
sudo aptitude install suckless-tools
It's probably in the same package for most Ubuntu or Debian derivatives.

What's the thing with microkernels anyways?

I've recently been reading wiki (both pedia and C2[1]) on microkernels and exokernels, and... I'dun get it.