In the latest version of Opera desktop Web browser, a widget pops up whenever you want to upload a file to WordPress or a service. It adds an extra distraction and a ‘dismiss’ click, on the way to seeing your actual Windows Explorer view and your target file. This unwanted pop-up-like widget is going to become very tiresome. So let’s turn if off…

1. Go to Menu | Settings.

2. In the top-right search-box, search for “Show pop-up with clipboard and recent downloads when uploading files”, or just a fragment such as “pop-up with clipboard” will do it.

3. Turn this feature’s control-button off, via the blue button-slider.

That’s it. Exit the browser’s Settings, and your Opera browser should be back to normal.

Stanley Lim’s free UserStyle to UserScript Converter as a Windows .EXE file. Version 1.5, 2017. Download, unzip, drill down to ..\CSStoUserScriptConverter-1.5\CSStoUserScript\bin\.. and run.

My test-convert of a two column layout I cooked up a while back. Works fine. Although the column-splitting method used may be Opera / Chrome specific, as well as the conversion.

eTools is especially useful now that DuckDuckGo searches turn into irrelevant mush 60% of the time.

Google Search results are becoming an increasingly dangerous place, once you get past the first page or two, and for even the most experienced and protected surfer with Safe Surf enabled in both search-engine and browser, and various blockers running. There can be times when the searcher, on a perfectly normal search, finds that a simple click has ‘trapped’ them on an unwanted page.

Why “trapped”? Because some rogue pages give you what appears to be a regular browser alert, this spurious alert being deliberately triggered to prevent your exit. It prevents you using the usual ‘Back’ button. Behind its CSS styling, that alert button could be anything, and if clicked will likely spawn another and another alert… and thus drive the clueless surfer into a panic where they will click on anything. In such cases the savvy surfer will know not to click on the first alert, for fear of triggering further problems, or giving the rogue site some unwanted permission or data such as geo-location.

Best then just to kill the browser. So you Crtl Alt Del and… oh, wait. The Opera browser is running as 32 x Task Manager instances of Opera.exe. You thus have to click down each one and every one to kill the browser. There is no shift-select available, to select them all at one go. (You may have a few less instances than I do, depending on how many CPU cores your desktop PC has).

Right then… so let’s go with ‘the nuclear option’ for such rare cases. A Windows .BAT file. This then is what your .BAT file’s lines should look like….

Type the lines exactly into a normal .TXT file, save to your desktop. Rename it there as a Windows .BAT file. When you find yourself at such a rogue page, click the .BAT to kill the Web browser immediately. “Immediately” here means… in a micro-second.

In practice I find that just one termination of opera.exe is enough to kill it instantly, rather than 32. I’ve no firm idea why, when it takes multiple clicks in the Windows Task Manager. I guess it just keeps on closing instances of opera.exe until there are none left to close. So just one works via a .BAT file, and the opera_crashreporter.exe goes automatically when it no longer has an opera.exe to work with.

The above should also work for other Web browsers on Windows desktops. Just change the name of the .EXE file.

Can Screaming Frog SEO Spider be used as a Linkbot Pro replacement? SEO Spider is mature desktop PC software meant for SEO-focused webmasters that, in its free form will check 500 Web URLs at a time. Are they broken or moved, and if the latter then where are they now?

Yes, it can be used in this way, and here’s a short tutorial for absolute beginners who wouldn’t know the difference between SEO and a sea-otter.

1. Extract a plain-text list of Web URLs from your source page of bookmarks, or find the URL list you’ve already prepared and cleaned. Sobolsoft’s “Extract Data & Text From…” will extract without fuss from a saved HTML page and give you a one-per-line list, but there are also various bits of Windows freeware to do it.

2. Install Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Turn off: Top menu | Help | ‘Auto Check for Updates’.

3. Now whitelist SEO Spider in your Firewall, so the new software can access the Web…

C:\Program Files (x86)\Screaming Frog SEO Spider\jre\bin\javaw.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Screaming Frog SEO Spider\ScreamingFrogSEOSpider.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Screaming Frog SEO Spider\ScreamingFrogSEOSpiderCli.exe

4. Set Screaming Frog SEO Spider user-agent (i.e. its internal Web browser) to emulate Chrome. Top menu: Configuration | User Agent | Chrome. This is apt as its main internal browser agent is actually Chrome, in the form of a headerless Chrome browser driven by SEO Spider. To a web server, SEO Spider now looks like a normal Chrome browser.

5. Enable Always Follow Redirects in SEO Spider, so we have the required redirect details in the results. Top menu | Configuration | User Agent, as seen here…

6. While you’re in that panel also ensure HSTS is off (otherwise you may get SSL security certificate errors). It should be off by default. Having this off enables the Chrome browser to still grab the status and redirect URL, even if it can’t otherwise access the https:// website due to a squiffy SSL certificate. It’s the only link-checking software I found that can do this.

7. On the top menu bar, find the “Mode” item and use this to switch to List mode. This will enable you to load your list of Web URLs to be checked for viability. By default it is set to a zero depth for following links, except when Always Follow Redirects is on. In that case it makes an exception for redirects.

8. Load and then run the list, by pressing the “Start” button.

9. Let it run until completed. Now filter the results by the Response Codes tab. This removes a whole lot of unwanted columns from the results table.

10. Then adjust the table’s columns so you only see the columns you need. Which in this case would be…

Address | Status Code | Status | Redirect URL

11. Just the one time, then save the current UI configuration as the Default. Top Menu | File Configuration | Save as Default. Now, when you switch through to the Response Codes tab in future, you should see the arrangement of columns you just saved.

12. Nearly done. Now sort the “Status” column by clicking once on it, so all the various status codes are grouped thus…

And save the project file for later reloading, or passing to a colleague for manual checking, as needed.

You can also do things like have a Dark UI (Config | User Interface | Theme | Dark). It appears you can’t make the font a touch bigger, but you can get a .CSV out which you can then do what you want with. That’s done via Top Menu | Reports | Redirects | All Redirects.

So basically SEO Spider is now Linkbot Pro, albeit with the regrettable loss of that fab 1996 Windows UI feel. It has nice new touches such as ignoring SSL errors, and even the ability to check (one at a time) for presence of the URL on Google Search…

I finally made the move from the trusty old FeedDemon to QuietRSS. Both are free desktop PC feedreaders for RSS feeds, but FeedDemon is increasingly old now (2013) and was starting to refuse to acquire perfectly valid Atom feeds. QuietRSS is maintained (Jan 2021) and has no such problems. It does however take some initial wrangling to set up — in terms of font choice, font sizes and CSS styles — to get it looking good and working as required. The basic steps are:

1. Tools | Options | change Font types and sizes. Arial Unicode and Segoe UI work well together.

2. Then View | Applications Style and choose a new CSS style for the UI. A number of pre-made CSS styles ship with the software, and ‘Dark’ will be the choice of many. This can then be opened with Notepad++ and hacked re: changing colours. There’s also an online ‘replace theme’ utility that can extend the Dark theme by writing a new variant of it.

3. You may find the dark blue ‘new items’ links stubbornly remain, even with a new CSS style, and thus ruin your tweaked colour scheme. Note that there are also font colours to hack in the QuiteRss.ini file, but the easier way is to use the tab tucked away at the back of the Fonts.

4. It appears the only way to compact the database is to have this done automatically at each shutdown. FeedDemon could do it manually, and compacting is important because it speeds up a feedreader running many feeds and keeps it fast. In QuietRSS the switch for compaction is reached via Tools | Options (or just press F8), and then you work through to this tab. Enable cleanup on shutdown, and also DB optimisation on shutdown…

It usually takes some time for a database to ‘learn’ what’s new and what are old posts dredged up from the past, and for the feedreader to settle down into showing you only the most recent posts.

There’s now a manual workaround to fix the important all-Windows ‘PrintNightmare’ security hole, at least for domestic and standalone PC users who don’t need to print over a network.

See the official Microsoft Workarounds / Option 2.

Stop the Print Spooler as a Service.
Change the PC’s Group Policy to block “inbound remote printing operations”.
Restart the Print Spooler.

This will “will block the remote attack vector”. Yup, it seems the fix is that easy.

Although… some versions of Windows do not have the required Group Policy Editor. In that case AskVG has instructions for Home users.

Update: Cancel that. Ten days later and another hole has been found, which for now means that the Windows Print Spooler service should be stopped totally even on domestic and standalone PCs. From some software you may still be able to “Save as PDF” but not always. There’s now a massive commercial opportunity for someone to develop a way to print on Windows, without the Windows Print Spooler service being active. Someone is going to make millions from that, as Microsoft doesn’t seem to be interested in the possibility.

I finally made the move from the trusty old FeedDemon to QuietRSS. Both are free desktop PC feedreaders for RSS feeds, but FeedDemon is increasingly old now (2013) and was starting to refuse to acquire perfectly valid Atom feeds. QuietRSS is maintained (Jan 2021) and has no such problems. It does however take some initial wrangling to set up — in terms of font choice, font sizes and CSS styles — to get it looking good and working as required. The basic steps are:

1. Tools | Options | change Font types and sizes. Arial Unicode and Segoe UI work well together.

2. Then View | Applications Style and choose a new CSS style for the UI. A number of pre-made CSS styles ship with the software, and ‘Dark’ will be the choice of many. This can then be opened with Notepad++ and hacked re: changing colours. There’s also an online ‘replace theme’ utility that can extend the Dark theme by writing a new variant of it.

3. You may find the dark blue ‘new items’ links stubbornly remain, even with a new CSS style, and thus ruin your tweaked colour scheme. Note that there are also font colours to hack in the QuiteRss.ini file, but the easier way is to use the tab tucked away at the back of the Fonts…

4. It appears the only way to compact the database is to have this done automatically at each shutdown. FeedDemon could do it manually, and compacting is important because it speeds up a feedreader running many feeds and keeps it fast. In QuietRSS the switch for compaction is reached via Tools | Options (or just press F8), and then you work through to this tab. Enable cleanup on shutdown, and also DB optimisation on shutdown…

It usually takes some time for a database to ‘learn’ what’s new and what are old posts dredged up from the past, and for the feedreader to settle down into showing you only the most recent posts.

In recent days the snippet text in the Google Search results has been squished down in its line-height. Here’s how to fix it in a Stylus script…

#search .g {
line-height: 1.4; !important;
}

I simply paste this into my already-installed Classic Links fix, which runs inside the browser add-on Stylus.