Books read in December 2023

Reread:

 

1. Leverage in Death

2. Connections in Death

Horoscopes

My birthday horoscopes stopped being accurate with the pandemic, but here we go anyway

Toronto Star

You take great pride in your intelligence and ideas. You may even be a great educator or someone who enjoys solving problems. When you share your thoughts, you do it with integrity, and you make sure that you have the facts to back you up. Being authentic is important to you, and you thrive in connections with people who you can trust. Those who know you consider you to be generous, consistent and loyal. This year gifts you a chance to reconnect with yourself through experiences that foster confidence and excitement.

 

Globe and Mail

Mercury’s influence on your birthday will encourage you to chase after your dreams but you need to be aware that not all those dreams will be good for you. Target only those objectives that you know in your heart the universe wants you to pursue.

How to open the pump on Dove Advanced Care hand wash

Dove Advanced Care Deep Moisture hand wash has been a lifesaver as the eczema on my hands has gotten increasingly sensitive since this past summer. I'm no longer dreading washing my hands! (Although I still do have to be diligent about moisturizing after each and every wash.)

However, I find the pumps nearly impossible to open! I rotate and rotate and rotate them, but they just don't open like every other pump bottle I've ever owned has.

So after extensive trial and error, I've discovered how to actually open these bottles.

 

Where to grasp the pump

1. Unscrew the lid and pull the whole pump and tube out of the bottle.

2. Grasp the tube under the lid, where you can see a spring inside the tube.

3. Twist the top of the pump counterclockwise as directed.

4. Once the pump pops up, you can put it back in the bottle and put the lid back on.

 

 

Somehow, with this specific kind of bottle and pump, taking it off the bottle and grasping the part lets it open easily where my usual ways of opening these kinds of bottles don't work.

However, it would be better if the Dove corporation could adjust the kinds of pumps they use so they open like normal bottle pumps.

Books read in November 2023

1. The Crow Road by Iain Banks

2. Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640-1665 by Patricia Simpson

Firefox's translation feature needs to be suppressed on pages that already have an official target language version

Recent versions of Firefox have a "translate this page" function that pops up if it detects that the webpage is in a language other than the preferred language indicated in your settings.

They need to figure out a way to stop this from automatically popping up when an official version of the page exists in your preferred language.

 

For example, if I, with my default English settings, end up on the French version of the federal government's COVID wastewater monitoring dashboard, a conspicuous "Translate this page" bubble pops up front and centre. 

This is a problem, because an official English version of the page exists. You can access it by clicking the English link on the top right. And the automatically translated version is never going to be as good or as authoritative as the official English version.

Screenshot of linked page, with the English link at the top right highlighted

 

People outside of translation/language intersection spaces don't always know that pages with multiple language versions exist, but they are common, especially in institutional (government, education, etc.) spaces that provide official information.

 

Firefox's translation feature needs to avoid distracting these uninformed users from the existence of the official multilingual versions that they may not even know to look for.

So how do you do that from a programming perspective?

Preliminary idea to build on: what if the translation feature could detect the name of the target language in the target language? If the user has English set as their default language, it detects the word "English" on the page. Perhaps it could highlight it? Perhaps the translation feature could say "An official version may exist"?

This wouldn't catch every instance. Some websites use abbreviations (en, fr, de, es, pl) and some websites use flags. However, there may be a finite number of ways that these are coded, or commonalities to the scripts used to switch the language, or indicators in the metadata.

Another possibility would be to have the pop-up appear elsewhere on the page (maybe towards the bottom left of the visible portion?) so it's less likely to cover the link to the official version. 

In any case, however well-intentioned this automatic translation feature is, it needs to avoid making it difficult to find the official version of the page in the target language.