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