2026-10-31 08:00:00
There's a website you enjoy visiting, but it contains some elements that for whatever reason you don't like. Maybe they're distracting or you just find them ugly. What do you do? You could put up with it, but you can also take matters in your own hands and remove the annoying stuff yourself. I don't know that browsers can do this out of the gate, but there are extensions which can. Here are two I'm familiar with, and one of them you might already have installed anyway.
With uBlock Origin, which I can highly recommend anyway unless you love seeing ads, it's actually really easy. I'm doing this in Firefox, I assume it works the same in other browsers which support uBlock Origin.
Let's assume you'd want to remove the Links gif at the top of my weekly linkdumps. In uBlock Origin it's really simple, you go to the site which has the element on it you want to remove and click the extension icon in the browser toolbar.
Then you select the pipette symbol which allows you to pick the element you want to remove, and click the element on the site. A window pops up that tells you what will be removed and you can click preview to see if the effect is the one you want, and if it is, click Create and a filter will be created which removes this element from the website.
That's it, done. The element is gone.
To get rid of the filter, open uBlock Origin again, select the gears symbol and then click the My filters tab. There you can see the filter rule which was just created and you can modify and remove it.
Another extension which is more powerful but also more complicated to use is Stylus. This extension allows you to modify any CSS element of a website, giving you total control over the appearance of a site, but also requiring some knowledge about CSS of course.
In order to use Stylus, first you need to identify the CSS class or ID of the element you want to remove. You can either look it up in the site's source code or use the inspect tool of your browser. In the case of the gif on my site, it has the ID linkdumps_gif:
<img class="image" id="linkdumps_gif" alt="an animated 90s style GIF that has the word Links in green font on black background" src="/images/gifs/links.gif">
Knowing this, you can open the Stylus extension from the browser toolbar and click the plus symbol next to the URL, or the URL itself.
This takes you to the extension's page where you can add new CSS rules for the selected website.
Here, some CSS knowledge is needed, but in order to hide an element, it's usually enough to select the element and make it invisible with display:none. In the case of my site, this code snippet will do the trick:
#linkdumps_gif {
display: none;
}
This will hide the element in question. Save, and you're done.
So that's it, two ways to hide unwanted objects on a website. I'm sure there are many more, but these are the ones I know. Hope this is helpful.
2026-10-30 08:00:00
I usually write these posts at a local café, and my coffee of choice is Americano, black, strong. Today though maybe I should make this tea. Earl Grey. Hot...
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2026-10-23 08:00:00
So this week we had an internet-breaking PHP vulnerability AND an internet-breaking TLS certificate disaster. I'm glad I am not an IT admin, because I can only imagine the amount of stress this has caused in certain areas. This website here wasn't affected though, because it's just a bunch of HTML files in a folder. And because no sensitive information is collected or delivered, TLS is also optional and the site works over plain http too. Simplicity ftw!
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2026-10-16 08:00:00
There's a link below to a project where someone wrote a game for the display of an old Nokia phone. These displays are really easy to interface with from an Arduino, and there are libraries available to communicate with them. I remember 20 years ago when I was still in university I bought an old Nokia 5110 because I wanted to do something with the display; even back then these were known to be really hackable, and I had just learned how to work with microcontrollers, so I was curious if I could get that working. Sadly, I never did. Like so many of my projects, this one never made it past the "it would be really cool to do this" stage. I thought maybe I could look into it again, but I went through all my old boxes with random electronics stuff, and I can't find the phone anymore. I must have thrown it out or sold it on years ago. What a shame. You can still find them on eBay for very little money though, so maybe...
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2026-10-09 08:00:00
I've been sitting here for the past half hour trying to figure out what to write as an intro, but I really can't think of anything. I'm at a café as usual and I was kind of absentmindedly watching the people around me and I noticed how nice these public places are, because they bring people from all walks of life together. There are the two white haired old ladies who meet here regularly to gossip, there's a girl next to me writing in her journal, two students studying maybe for an exam or something, a guy reading a book, a woman feeding her newborn baby… and a guy putting together a blog post on an old laptop. All that with calm music playing in the background and a waitress who is just the nicest person ever. It isn't always this nice, but when it is, it's really nice. Hope you all are having a good day, too!
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2026-10-02 08:00:00
YouTube is planning to introduce a new feature that will allow creators to upload two different versions of the same video so they can A/B test which video performs better. It's already being done for thumbnails and titles, which is why for some videos you see the title change, sometimes more than once, during the first day or two of the video being uploaded. This is a really terrible idea, because it means that I can post a link to a video I like here and you might click the link and see a more or less different video. And neither of us will have any idea that the other person isn't watching the same thing. In a world where the truth is under attack from all sides already anyway, YouTube is now creating a situation where we can scream at each other "it was in the video!!" - "it was not in the video!!", and we'll both be right. And none of us will have the option to see which video the other person was shown. Once again, a social media company is treating their users (and society in general) as lab rats.
Maybe I should start doing this too. Write one post titled "AI Is Going to Kill Us All!" and another titled "Superintelligence Will Usher in a Golden Era for Humanity" and randomise which one you're going to see. I'm sure this is going to boost engagement tremendously. And that's what it's all about, isn't it?
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