Okay, I finally got through all the open tabs from the week I was away! Let’s see if I can do this linkspam thing. (spoiler: I can’t.)

These were all linked via my reading page in the week I was offline, and I feel kind of bad that I can’t credit who posted them first, but there is no way I will be remembering that, and also, some of them I had to go through three or four layers of links already to get to the actual content.

• I used the web for a day with Javascript turned off

This is part of a genre of articles with the theme "I tried giving up a terrible internet thing for a day, and it was so hard not being able to do the things that I wouldn’t have been able to do five years ago anyway, so I had to turn it back on." It is one of the better ones I’ve read in that genre though, and it gives real thought to accessibility in particular.

But when I read it, I had 100 tabs open, mostly from crufty news sites, and my browser was so slow that I was spending more time waiting for browser than actually closing tabs. But I got to this one and I thought, wait, I bet if I turned off Javascript all the cruft would go away and the web would actually work again. And it did work again! And nothing of value was lost. Then I discovered that Vivaldi (and maybe other Chromium-based browsers?) lets you whitelist javascript on only certain domains and turn it off everywhere else, so now I have whitelisted about a dozen trusted websites where I actually care about interactive features and/or audiovisual media, and no javascript anywhere else, and you guys, the web is so much more pleasant now.

For some reason a bunch of news websites won’t show the pictures without javascript (no alt text either of course) but all the ads disappear (although more likely to have alt text) and also all of the autoplay video and most of the subscription-blocks have also disappeared, and the article text reads just fine, so I think I’m ahead on that tradeoff. And for the sites where I do want to do something interactive one time but don’t want to bother whitelisting, I just open them in Firefox instead.

Things that were cool enough I went and loaded them in a javascript-enabled browser:

• Ancient Earth map - put in a city, and it shows you how its land has changed over the entire history of Earth. (Alas, only goes in fifty-million-year increments, and much more focused on continental shifts than biogeography, but still cool.)
• Recipes out of Bilibid - there was an article linked multiple times about the way people in concentration camps and prison camps in terrible conditions put together recipe books of foods they remember from home, and that the people who put them together aren’t always the people society expects to make cookbooks, either. This is a scanned version (via Hathitrust) of a cookbook written by an American soldier in a WWII Japanese prison in the Philippines, that’s extra interesting because he made an effort to collect recipes from prisoners from other countries, too.
• River maps from Grasshopper Geography - look, river maps that are actually good! I can see my creek in one of them!

( The rest of these work without Javascript )