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While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

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Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#72
post #33

True story: One day, Windows wouldn't let me type the letter p. I was trying to log back in from the Windows lock screen. Typed my password, got it wrong. Typed it again, got it wrong. Eventually got locked out of my account, despite being extremely careful to type my password correctly. Went to IT and had them unlock my account... Went back to my PC and tried to log in again. Typed my password very carefully, letter…

Windows 10 has this funny bug where sometimes for some reason your individual windows don't get focus any more. You can click at their title bar, and they'll be drawn as-if they have focus (darker shadow and foreground titlebar), but no window actually accepts or processes any user input (while updating normally in the background, and also redrawing). The only way I know how to fix this is to go into the Ctrl+Alt+Del…

Could you have something running with an invisible window, e.g. keylogger? Less scrupulous friends from way back used to talk about writing such things.

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#73
post #33

True story: One day, Windows wouldn't let me type the letter p. I was trying to log back in from the Windows lock screen. Typed my password, got it wrong. Typed it again, got it wrong. Eventually got locked out of my account, despite being extremely careful to type my password correctly. Went to IT and had them unlock my account... Went back to my PC and tried to log in again. Typed my password very carefully, letter…

You can get into a similar state on MacOS by pressing a key multiple times in a row (option I think). It just quietly disables a large number of keys. I figured it out by accident one day because I assigned the key as my "push to talk" on Discord. That was a fun hour trying to figure out what had happened.

On MacOS if you remap your capslock to control there is a race condition on the login screen. If you use the control/capslock key to wake up your laptop and manage to time it right, you can enable capslock but not have a way to disable it (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?)).

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#74
> the same site that then fixed that bug and forced all blog descriptions to be utf-8, but then implemented size limits as a number of bytes. > so they truncated mid-utf-8 character, which made parsing the XML A REAL FUN TASK LET ME TELL YOU

How is this a problem unless you do UTF-8 validation when parsing the XML, in which case stop doing that for data you don't control.

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#75
post #66
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many times I've started typing in bash, and then realised that my focus has been on a website instead, which starts doing some ridiculous stuff in response. There's no way to discover hotkey functionality otherwise, of course, because "thou shalt not discover" is a modern UX guideline.

A non-zero number of websites have followed web twitter in making '?' produce a hotkey display. Naturally tumblr isn't one of them.

Except now how am I supposed to know '?' brings up this display?

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#76
post #7

> tumblr is fractally broken. it's not wrong in any specific way, it's wrong at every possible scale.

This line is likely inspired by the concept of "Fractal Wrongness": https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fractal_wrongness and 2012's "PHP: a fractal of bad design": https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

I believe so too. Love the definition here though!

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#78
> god I love tumblr. it's one of the best social networks on the internet because it's just a complete fractal dumpster fire

Couldn't agree more. Everything is just so awful I can't even imagine the staff turning it into some boring Twitter like dumpster fire all about sucking up to celebrities. They have chronological post order by default, that makes it instantly better than nearly all other social networks.

It's unsalvageable and due to that, an accidental refuge from the current mess of the Internet.

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#79
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Foone is a they.

This sounds wrong too. Maybe, "Foone is they"? You don't want to misnumber them, though; maybe "Foone _are_ they"? That makes them sound epic, though: Foone are legion! Changing language is hard, whether done organically or initiated intentionally and for a purpose.

I'm following a pattern used in casual English, exemplified by the sentence: "Is your dog a he or a she?"

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#80
post #7

> tumblr is fractally broken. it's not wrong in any specific way, it's wrong at every possible scale.

Once, many years ago, my company was working with Tumblr on some kind of integration, and for some reason, the engineer I was working with emailed me a filed called something like tumblr.php that was the “show the main blog page” source. It was one of the most spaghetti-ish overly-long unreadable pieces of shit I’d seen in decades. So this excellent set of tweets does not surprise me in the least.

I remember visiting tumblr.com once a long time ago and they were actually serving the index.php file as a download rather than rendering the homepage. It was indeed a several thousand long file of spaghetti code.
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