dr_jekell

Times have gotten rough for a lot of us and as a slave to a feline one of the things that I have found that has gotten completely overpriced is flea treatment.

I normally purchase Bravecto plus (3 month) and the average price is getting close to double what it was a few years ago (averaging $90 for each 3 month treatment).

Kitty was facing gaps in treatment due to other bills taking precedence but thankfully I came across a Tauranga vet service "MyVet" who are selling most of the common flea treatments (and other treatments & prescriptions) for about half the price of everywhere else.

In January I used some holiday pay and brought a years supply saving about $150.

Which may not seem like a big saving but it buys a whole lot of cat biscuits and soft food.

• Cat tax provided.

Her name is Matilda Sassy Pants, she is a tortoiseshell seal point tonkinese who I took in after my mum had to go into a rest home.

If you have just recently received an update to Firefox on Android, you may find that all of your bookmarks now have sorting enabled with no option to turn it off.

There is a way (at the time of this post) to turn off this function.

Instructions for disabling automatic sorting currently:

1. Open settings.
2. Tap on About Firefox
3. Tap on the Firefox logo 5 times to enable developer settings.
4. Back out to the main settings menu, scroll down to Secret Settings, and tap on that.
5. Find the 'Enable Compose Bookmarks' toggle and turn it off.

It looks like it's something the Firefox dev's have decided that everyone needs this without any other alternatives.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/restore-ability-to-preserve-desktop-bookmark-order-in-firefox/idi-p/83114

To save others from a bit of confusion I will make a post here.

The method to change the Web UI is "sudo pihole setpassword"

It will then prompt you for a new password.

There is something I have been wondering.

Various manufacturers regularly put out new notebooks with specialty covers either as a yearly special or a limited edition product.

My question is, why don't they start making covers instead/as well?

Hobonichi, Midori, Kokuyo and some others make basic covers but none make decorated paper, plastic, vinyl or fabric covers that can be moved between notebooks.

It would be nice to be able to get a fabric cover printed with something like Van Gogh's Starry Night.

Just a PSA: for anyone using a MikroTik router, using it for their DHCP server and are having issues with their devices not using Pi-hole.

If you have set the IP of your Pi-hole as the DNS server and are seeing entries in "dynamic servers" then the router is using your ISP's DNS server causing it to bypass your Pi-Hole.

You need to go to the interface that is supplying your internet connection (PPPoE client, DHCP) and turn off the option "use peer dns".

This will disable dynamic servers and route everything to your Pi-hole.

I was looking through my Pi-hole logs and a strange URL is regularly coming up that I can't figure out what it is used for.

ap.syncforreddit.com

Does anyone have any insight?

I have the search bar added to the toolbar which I use to either search straight from it or use it to bring up google.

It looks like in the latest update you can no longer select the text box, hit enter and get taken to the search page.

You have to enter some text before it does so.

Does anyone else have the same issue?

I have recently upgraded my router from a nearly 7 year old consumer "gaming" router to a Mikrotik RB960PGS router.

So far I have been able to:

• Remove all configurations
• Set a long admin password
• Create a bridge
• Setup DHCP server
• Set up NAT
• Set up Spark NZ fibre connection
• Update to latest stable firmware (7.15.2)
• Set up basic IPv4 & IPv6 firewalls
• Setup NTP & disable cloud/update time
• Set DNS to my Pi-hole
• Disabled the following IP services API, API-SSL, FTP, SSH, Telnet, & WWW-SSL
• Turned off "detect internet"
• Turned off "use peer dns" so all DNS goes through the Pi-Hole instead of the ISP's DNS servers.

Is there any other "gotcha's" or things that I should be setting up?

I brought a TWSBI Go with a fine nib a while ago.

From day two it had issues with the feed drying up extremely quickly when using Diamine Scribble Purple ink.

It dried out slightly slower when using Lamy black ink but for some reason it would fling out drops of ink when uncapped or jostled (so much fun finding random ink blobs on your dark mouse mat).

Tried flushing the pen with water, taking the nib out and cleaning it with soapy water to no effect.

I was about to return the pen but I found a random post that suggested flushing the entire pen with soapy water and cleaning the nibs slit would fix the issue.

Seeing as I had nothing to loose and doing so wouldn't damage the pen I gave it a try. I ended up using some cotton sewing thread to clean the slit as that was all I had to hand.

After cleaning the pen with soapy and clean water, cleaning the nib, drying, reassembling and reinking I gave it another go.

And to my surprise it writes like a dream now and has no random ink going flying.

While I know how I went about fixing the pen wasn't the best method I thought I would post about it anyway.

What books have you read recently &/or are reading?

So a while ago I thought that I would get a Lamy fountain pen to see if it would help with my handwriting.

So off I go looking around at what is available and find the Lamy Safari, then I find the Lamy Al-star which cost a bit more than the Safari and I prefer metal pens due to my gorilla sized hands.

So I buy the Lamy Al-star with a fine nib, some Lamy blue black cartridges and a converter.

Wasn't really happy with the blue black ink (wasn't dark enough) so I went looking and found the Diamine blue black ink which is my new fave.

Got a small bottle of that plus a bottle & cartridges of Lamy black ink and a EF nib for the Al-star.

Time goes on and I see people talking about the TWSBI ECO and the Platinum Preppy pens.

So after some debate I visit my local fine pen and stationary shop (kind of dangerous to my wallet) I am now the owner of a TWSBI ECO with an EF nib, a PP with EF nib, Platinum Pigment Carbon Black Cartridges & a A5 Rhodia Webnotebook.

All was good for a while then I had a need for a better pen to carry in my bag.

So today I purchased an Kaweco AL Sport with EF nib, another Platinum Preppy with a fine nib, a box of Kaweco perl black cartridges and a box of Diamine blue black cartridges.

Hopefully I have enough pens for now but something tells me that I don't.

Just a PSA for anyone beating their head against a wall trying to figure out why snaps are not working on their Manjaro stable install.

The current top kernel (6.8.4-1) is bugged and causes snaps to give this error:

error: system does not fully support snapd: cannot mount squashfs image using "squashfs"

Apparently the newer version of the 6.8 kernel available in Manjaro testing works fine.