CHOKING THE FOX
I'm watching/listening to music videos on Rage from across the
room, between the sudden but occasional signal drop-outs that have
been happening all night. There was a great doco about China on ABC
earlier, the second episode of a series, "The China Century" or
something like that. It covered China's "miraculous" economic
advancement since the death of Mao, which no doubt isn't the
perspective that the Chinese government would like to encourage,
but pretty good stuff - packs a lot into an hour.
I finished one of my naked runs up and down the drive. I've been
slow to get back into the routine this summer, but I've kept up the
pre-bed push-ups even though lately there's been no need to warm
myself up to avoid a cold night, indeed rather the opposite some
nights. I'm liking the strong arm muscles, if only so I can imagine
impressing all of the girls in my life, who are easily impressed
thanks mainly to a lack of existance. Anyway I tired fairly early
tonight, but it's been a long day, I feel a bit like I need a
holiday, just as everyone else is finishing theirs.
Unfortunately the virus is exploding now in Aus, with so many tens
of thousands of cases per day, supposably under-reported anyway,
that it blows all the figures used to justify the restrictions over
the last couple of years completely out of the water. Before the
country was closing down due to restrictions, but now that the
politicians have had enough of imposing lockdowns the country is
instead closing down due to the actual fear and spread of the
illness itself. But all that really pisses me off is a) that I
still have to wear a mask (I'm still the only person I've seen with
a plastic one - still serving me well though the underpant elastic
is getting a bit slack), and b) that they're pushing hard about a
damn third dose of the vaccine, which I'm not going to have after
how sick the second dose made me.
So with all the virus fuss I don't think I'll holiday too far away,
but I should at least try one of my day trips somewhere next time
there's a cool spell, given that the Christmas/New-year holiday
traffic is over now. Hopefully my Jag is now no longer dribbling
oil as it goes, since yesterday I re-did the Automatic Transmission
Fluid (what's the difference between oil and 'fluid', by the way?)
change and hopefully didn't mess up the seal on the drain pan again
like I did a few weeks ago. The job is all about keeping things
clean, and clean really doesn't come easily in the partly-floored,
open-fronted (and partly blown-out rear), shed where I try to do
this work. Not to mention with all the dirt infused into the
surface of everything under the car from driving on the gravel
roads around here.
But you're not here for any of that, you're wondering what the hell
I'm doing to that fox that I mentioned in the title! Well that's
all quite simple. A while ago I complained about my troubles
upgrading Firefox and keeping things working with my 'internet
client' set-up where I access it in a remote X window over my LAN.
I settled on FF 96 beta, which didn't crash but was more laggy with
extra X-related network traffic than 78ESR. Long story short I
eventually tracked down an about:config setting that solves my
problem, thanks again to the wonderful Arch Linux Wiki, which
serves me remarkably well as someone who'se never even touched
their actual Linux distro.
'layout.frame_rate' is the magic setting, which overrides the
default 60Hz display update rate with the value that you set it to.
It seems the few people who have mentioned this setting online are
all trying to set it to the higher refresh rate of their monitor.
I, on the other hand, want to bump it way down to something that my
100Mbit/s Ethernet can actually handle without building up a huge
backlog whenever it decides that some animation like the tab
loading 'throbber' needs to be flashed at my eyeballs. This turns
out to be about 5Hz, which is actually fine for my FF-based
browsing, where I'm mainly just trying to do things like look at
junk on Ebay and manage PayPal transactions (for both of which I
_shouldn't_ need such a complicated, bloated, browser for in the
first place, but that battle is long lost). Maybe with gigabit
Ethernet the 10x speed increase would make 60Hz usable, but I won't
be upgrading to that any time soon since I gave up finding newer
second-hand routers that OpenWrt was friendly with.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/firefox
One note for all the non-existant people copying my 'internet
client' solution/minimalisation to hardware obsolensence: Firefox
does seem inclined to hang when you change the 'layout.frame_rate'
setting, so be prepared for needing to restart it. You can also
check the setting is applied in the "Target Frame Rate" field on
the about:support page (a page that I've become very familiar with
lately).
The difference between version 78 and the newer releases in terms
of performance at the default 60Hz rate seems to have been due to
the tab-loading 'throbber' (horizontal bouncing bar/ball in 96).
Curiously a lot more people seem to have concerned themselves with
turning this off in the past than in fiddling with the frame rate.
That hasn't (as usual) stopped Mozilla from breaking all the
methods to do so in about:config though, so now you have to put
".tab-throbber {display: none }" in
~/.mozilla/firefox/[profile]/chrome/userChrome.css, and then enable
userChrome.css with the
'toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets' setting in
about:config. This got rid of a lot of the problems triggered when
a page was loading, but the frame rate setting also avoids this as
well as problems due to other UI sillyness and also the Javascript
loading animations on web pages themselves.
So I can now "choke" down the X network traffic caused by Firefox,
and keep up my fight against internet-software driven hardware
obsolescence a bit longer. It's still not nearly as snappy as
Dillo though.
- The Free Thinker
