Grom_PE

Linux:

Compose key, period, period = ellipsis …

Compose key, period, equals = bullet •

Compose key, period, minus = interpunct ·

Compose key, !, ? = interrobang ‽

For comfortable reading, I just had to figure out what on this webpage causes Chromium to drop subpixel rendering, and it's not this:

    html { -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; }

it's this:

    #TableOfContents { backdrop-filter: blur(3px); }

A panel that overlaps content only on narrow screens disables subpixel rendering for the entire text. Thanks Chromium. Not an issue on Firefox, btw.

What the hell.

Just now I learned of "font-family: monospace, monospace" hack. Indeed, browsers will render the font smaller with just one "monospace".

I've never run into it before because setting explicit font-size in pt or px avoids that weirdness.

Maybe if you look at it from far away enough.

Watermarking tries to resist image data manipulation. Smuggling data is concerned with preservation of bytes.

Though if we're executing arbitrary code on the target anyway, ways of embedding data in an image are vast, including watermarking/steganography.

It isn't necessary to use Exif to embed arbitrary data inside an image. Could as well use PNG extra chunk, JFIF app marker, or simply append data to the end of the file.

It would be more interesting to devise a method that survives all extra data stripping and re-encoding, perhaps taking advantage of deterministic encoders, assuming they don't randomize pixel data on purpose.

In other words: turning the image data stream itself into a polyglot.

On Windows, I've mostly avoided CRLF by configuring text editors and git to use LF, and writing text files in binary mode.

The only places that still forced CRLF were batch files and clipboard.

At least they aren't intentionally breaking Win7 support by using some random later version API function unconditionally.

Some developers seem proud doing that, somehow feeling that extra 5-10 lines of code for backwards compatibility is too much.

Since those people don't care about privacy and anonymity, perhaps they are also willing to trade by verifying for someone who does care?

I generally never want programs to go fullscreen because I like to keep taskbar shown, so I can keep track of time, notifications and whatnot.

Well designed video games that rely on fast and precise mouse input capture the cursor during the gameplay until menu is shown.

The only times I have to go fullscreen is for the games that fail to capture the cursor and where accidentally clicking outside of the game window leads to a loss.

Can't imagine a non-game program other than a video player that I would want fullscreen.

I was worried about .NET sending telemetry once I found about the existence of the DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT env.

Thankfully, the dotnet package installed by package manager on Arch Linux disables telemetry by default. I left the env set just in case.

But my trust towards "modern" software has lowered. I default to run CLI tools, especially those built in JavaScript or .NET with network disabled:

    firejail --net=none

For ilspycmd, for example, I had to defuse its default "update checking" behavior:

    alias ilspycmd='ilspycmd --disable-updatecheck'

This is what I'd call user-hostile defaults.

Just bring back opposable thumbs on feet.

In my 25 years of using Windows I've grown so much disdain towards annoying, broken, slow installers that I started to instead extract them like zip archives, using various tools: 7-Zip, UniExtract, Observer plugin for Far Manager, sometimes even manual carving.

Most things just worked after being extracted like that. Some things needed a few registry entries, or regsvr32 some dll files.