Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Specmaster]

No no, Firefox doesn't need 10Gb, it is much less as this test here shows, much the same is required for all of the top three browsers, with Edge just a fraction  less than both Firefox and Chrome.

Yes it does  ! 

I don't know about tests and other browsers. The only test that's worth something as far as I am concerned, is using FF on my machine, for many years now,  and seeing what happens. It happens that it can takes 10GB no problem, with only 60 tabs and 3 windows opened and just a few weeks or months running ! 

I did notice though that it depends heavily on how many tabs are open and what's in them. The biggest memory hog seems to be Youtube pages. I tend to have lots of YT videos/pages open, and I noticed that FF roughly uses 100MB or so of memory for each and everyone of them ! I don't know if it's FF or the crappy "Flash" plugins that it uses to read the videos, but it doens't matter sin one does not go without the other...

So to try to stay out of trouble, avoid running out of RAM and swap and having the computer freeze on me.... I try to discipline myself and not open too many tabs. Also, restarting FF after a few weeks helps a bit, I guess it clears some junk from memory.

Right now it pretty reasonable. Takes "only" 3.8GB spread over 9 different threads, for 22 open tabs including 5 Youtube pages.

Can't fight that, it's just the way it is. I hate it. I don't find it acceptable technically, but that's how it is so... unless I keep restricting myself to a small number of tabs, which I can't do, then the only option is to give FF what it wants : lots of GB of RAM, and unfortunately for me that means a brand new machine as it's 15 years old/obsolete so I can't upgrade any individual component, the entire thing needs to be replaced.

I am not crying, 15 years is pretty good life expectancy, much better than an Ipad or fancy modern Smarthphone ! 

HP Laserjet 6P at 24 years now and still going strong !!  I am sure it can manage 30 years, let's see ! 
Regardless, think I would buy a new printer. Would like a colour printer ! .... but no inket jet. A decent A4 laser colour, SOHO type, not the crappy consumer style built to a price with proprietary language, that fall apart after 6 months and small capacity toners that do very little pages and cost an arm per page.
Needs to be Linux friendly too, or else I cant use it.
I find it's still too expensive for me.. also would like an old / affordable A3 B&W printer, or better yet a little tracer, so I can print fold out schematics from service manuals, when I need to trouble shoot some my old Tek scoep typically...

Am I the only here who, when I come across a site that is genuinely useful, saves it as a bookmark? That way you call up that site by scrolling a menu and clicking on the site name when it appears, thus no need to have 60 bleeding tabs open at a time. Then you keep your memory usage that much smaller, thus freeing up RAM for other things.

[Specmaster]

Correct. Well spotted.

HP power supplies repairing an HP power supply 

Thread here from the distant past: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/hp-1740a-power-supply-burn-up/

this was one of my favourite repairs as it required some board rework and I found the culprit: a burned out bond wire in an LM723 (pictures in thread).

Yeah, I remember that one with the burnt connector, the same one that I had issues with the connector and Dave had the poor soldering on his bridge rectifier as well.

[Specmaster]

Tastes different in UK. US red bull is vile.

It's 'cause they use salty tea in the US version

Would that be the tea from Boston Harbour 

[med6753]

No no, Firefox doesn't need 10Gb, it is much less as this test here shows, much the same is required for all of the top three browsers, with Edge just a fraction  less than both Firefox and Chrome.

Yes it does  ! 

I don't know about tests and other browsers. The only test that's worth something as far as I am concerned, is using FF on my machine, for many years now,  and seeing what happens. It happens that it can takes 10GB no problem, with only 60 tabs and 3 windows opened and just a few weeks or months running ! 

I did notice though that it depends heavily on how many tabs are open and what's in them. The biggest memory hog seems to be Youtube pages. I tend to have lots of YT videos/pages open, and I noticed that FF roughly uses 100MB or so of memory for each and everyone of them ! I don't know if it's FF or the crappy "Flash" plugins that it uses to read the videos, but it doens't matter sin one does not go without the other...

So to try to stay out of trouble, avoid running out of RAM and swap and having the computer freeze on me.... I try to discipline myself and not open too many tabs. Also, restarting FF after a few weeks helps a bit, I guess it clears some junk from memory.

Right now it pretty reasonable. Takes "only" 3.8GB spread over 9 different threads, for 22 open tabs including 5 Youtube pages.

Can't fight that, it's just the way it is. I hate it. I don't find it acceptable technically, but that's how it is so... unless I keep restricting myself to a small number of tabs, which I can't do, then the only option is to give FF what it wants : lots of GB of RAM, and unfortunately for me that means a brand new machine as it's 15 years old/obsolete so I can't upgrade any individual component, the entire thing needs to be replaced.

I am not crying, 15 years is pretty good life expectancy, much better than an Ipad or fancy modern Smarthphone ! 

HP Laserjet 6P at 24 years now and still going strong !!  I am sure it can manage 30 years, let's see ! 
Regardless, think I would buy a new printer. Would like a colour printer ! .... but no inket jet. A decent A4 laser colour, SOHO type, not the crappy consumer style built to a price with proprietary language, that fall apart after 6 months and small capacity toners that do very little pages and cost an arm per page.
Needs to be Linux friendly too, or else I cant use it.
I find it's still too expensive for me.. also would like an old / affordable A3 B&W printer, or better yet a little tracer, so I can print fold out schematics from service manuals, when I need to trouble shoot some my old Tek scoep typically...

Am I the only here who, when I come across a site that is genuinely useful, saves it as a bookmark? That way you call up that site by scrolling a menu and clicking on the site name when it appears, thus no need to have 60 bleeding tabs open at a time. Then you keep your memory usage that much smaller, thus freeing up RAM for other things.

Nope, I use bookmarks too. And what's nice about Firefox is that you can have the bookmarks on a sidebar and it's totally customizable. No need to have dozens of tabs open and using up system resources. If you need something click on it and when done close it. Not rocket science.

[mnementh]

You need to be in the "problem solving mode" to open that many.

1. Find problem.
2. Google how to fix it.
3. Fix it and forget to close the tab.
4. Celebrate prematurely.
5. Goto 1

LOL.... there's a world of deep, deep truth in that. 

Most of my errant tabs are just that; stuff related to a "how do I fix...." search. Then another 5-20 tabs which are random stuff I found on the way and "want to revisit when I have time" (and sometimes, I actually do  ) and the usual 5 tabs of eMail/Bank/Music, 3-5 tabs of eevBlog, and from 2-20 tabs of Amazon and yoobToob.

What can I say...? I only deal with it as I absolutely have to.

I have even deliberately started over with 1 open tab when I felt it was easier to hunt out the stuff in my history that I actually GAF aboot than to close all those tabs. I call that process "natural deselection".

mnem
 

[tggzzz]

Am I the only here who, when I come across a site that is genuinely useful, saves it as a bookmark? That way you call up that site by scrolling a menu and clicking on the site name when it appears, thus no need to have 60 bleeding tabs open at a time. Then you keep your memory usage that much smaller, thus freeing up RAM for other things.

As far as I can tell, I have about 6k bookmarks - which is large enough to cause problems on its own

Most of them aren't 404s either.

[bd139]

I have no bookmarks other than the important shit:



Edit: life is too short to collect and curate bookmarks properly.

[Neper]

I bought a Keithley 197A off of Craigslist. ... Green backlight is pretty dim.

I'm having th same prob with another DMM from the same era. Lighting is by a PCB with dozens of microscopic SMD-LEDs, all of them covered in blobs of some transparent glue that has obviously hardened/shrinked and cracked most of those LEDs.

Ralf

[mnementh]

No no, Firefox doesn't need 10Gb, it is much less as this test here shows, much the same is required for all of the top three browsers, with Edge just a fraction  less than both Firefox and Chrome.

Yes it does  ! 

I don't know about tests and other browsers. The only test that's worth something as far as I am concerned, is using FF on my machine, for many years now,  and seeing what happens. It happens that it can takes 10GB no problem, with only 60 tabs and 3 windows opened and just a few weeks or months running ! 

I did notice though that it depends heavily on how many tabs are open and what's in them. The biggest memory hog seems to be Youtube pages. I tend to have lots of YT videos/pages open, and I noticed that FF roughly uses 100MB or so of memory for each and everyone of them ! I don't know if it's FF or the crappy "Flash" plugins that it uses to read the videos, but it doens't matter sin one does not go without the other...

So to try to stay out of trouble, avoid running out of RAM and swap and having the computer freeze on me.... I try to discipline myself and not open too many tabs. Also, restarting FF after a few weeks helps a bit, I guess it clears some junk from memory.

Right now it pretty reasonable. Takes "only" 3.8GB spread over 9 different threads, for 22 open tabs including 5 Youtube pages.

Can't fight that, it's just the way it is. I hate it. I don't find it acceptable technically, but that's how it is so... unless I keep restricting myself to a small number of tabs, which I can't do, then the only option is to give FF what it wants : lots of GB of RAM, and unfortunately for me that means a brand new machine as it's 15 years old/obsolete so I can't upgrade any individual component, the entire thing needs to be replaced.

I am not crying, 15 years is pretty good life expectancy, much better than an Ipad or fancy modern Smarthphone ! 

HP Laserjet 6P at 24 years now and still going strong !!  I am sure it can manage 30 years, let's see ! 
Regardless, think I would buy a new printer. Would like a colour printer ! .... but no inket jet. A decent A4 laser colour, SOHO type, not the crappy consumer style built to a price with proprietary language, that fall apart after 6 months and small capacity toners that do very little pages and cost an arm per page.
Needs to be Linux friendly too, or else I cant use it.
I find it's still too expensive for me.. also would like an old / affordable A3 B&W printer, or better yet a little tracer, so I can print fold out schematics from service manuals, when I need to trouble shoot some my old Tek scoep typically...

Am I the only here who, when I come across a site that is genuinely useful, saves it as a bookmark? That way you call up that site by scrolling a menu and clicking on the site name when it appears, thus no need to have 60 bleeding tabs open at a time. Then you keep your memory usage that much smaller, thus freeing up RAM for other things.

Yeah, sure... then I realized I had 20GB of bookmarks that were 90% out of date links going back decades. Shit, last time I shitcanned FF I had bookmarks going back to TriPod and GeoCities.    Worse, even recent bookmarks were mostly dead because of dynamic linking breaking them.

In all honesty, I find the screen real estate recovered by disabling the bookmarks toolbar much more useful than the bookmarks ever were.

mnem
 

[Vince]

Am I the only here who, when I come across a site that is genuinely useful, saves it as a bookmark? That way you call up that site by scrolling a menu and clicking on the site name when it appears, thus no need to have 60 bleeding tabs open at a time. Then you keep your memory usage that much smaller, thus freeing up RAM for other things.

Well,

1) All the tabs I have open ARE actively being used, I have no reason to close them ! It's like asking me to close the TEA tab every time I read a message, only to reload it 30 seconds later when I get a new notification e-mail...   

2) closing tabs means I need to reopen them, which takes work as I need to go to the book marjks menu and search for while to find it.

3) I don't have a fast internet connection. Loading a page takes a while. Keeping tbas open let me switch to any tab to view its contenct instantly, in half a second, can't beat that.

4) All my tabs are actually somewhat ordered. If I keep closing and reopening tabs, the order of tabs will constantly change. This disrupts my workflow, is confusing, wastes time for no good reason, and just irritates...

5) I don't have anything better to do with my RAM. It's there precisely to let me have all these tabs open. Freeing RAM for the sake of it is non-sense, might as well not buy that RAM then if you don't use it to do the things that you want to do...


But yeah, of course if I find a site I want to remember but have no business  working on at the moment and not in the short term, then yes of course I bookmark it and close the tab.

I do understand your point of view or Med. Actually I know of people worse than you : you and Med keep 2or 3 tabs open, that's still something.. I have a friend who close the web browser each and every time he is done looking at a webpage ! Fires up the bvorwser, looks at one page, as soon as he is done, close the browser. 10 seconds later fires up the browser again to look at some other page... when done closes the browser again etc... I was stunned ! 

Or my brother ( a year older than me) who admittedly knows squat about computers. When I was like 18yo, we had a computer with Win 3.1
He would open Word to do something, then close it to paste some text into Excel or I can't remember what other program.
When I told him "but why the hell did you close Word before opening that other program ?! You know you can have BOTH running at the same time ?? ". His reply was : " Eh, Really ?! "   

[med6753]

Yeah, sure... then I realized I had 20GB of bookmarks that were 90% out of date links going back decades. Shit, last time I shitcanned FF I had bookmarks going back to TriPod and GeoCities.    Worse, even recent bookmarks were mostly dead because of dynamic linking breaking them.

In all honesty, I find the screen real estate recovered by disabling the bookmarks toolbar much more useful than the bookmarks ever were.

mnem
 

Well, what happens if you don't clean your house at least once a week or so? You know, sweep, hoover, dust, etc.

Same with bookmarks.

[mnementh]

The difference is I actually give a flying fuck aboot my house. The contents of my bookmarks, not so much. And the older my bookmarks get, the worse the SNR gets, therefore the lower my GAF quotient gets.

I have the RAM; I'm gonna use it where it does the most good: saving me assache and needless tedium. Otherwise I may as well just use my smartPwn for everything.

mnem
For a hundred different reasons... fuck dat noize.

[mansaxel]

I just keep opening the fuckers all day here. 150 is amateur territory.

The work machine has 64Gb of ram for the tabs and electron apps.

Well call me a total neophyte. I rarely have more than 3 tabs open. 

Same here, I don't see how you can keep a track on them all, or know where one you want is 

Mostly lots of red bull, coffee and practice.

The search function in current Chrome releases is quite nice.  I've got around 40 usually, and 40 more on the work computer.

[med6753]

I do understand your point of view or Med. Actually I know of people worse than you : you and Med keep 2or 3 tabs open, that's still something.. I have a friend who close the web browser each and every time he is done looking at a webpage ! Fires up the bvorwser, looks at one page, as soon as he is done, close the browser. 10 seconds later fires up the browser again to look at some other page... when done closes the browser again etc... I was stunned ! 

Then you'd be shocked at me. This laptop is generally set to go into sleep mode after 3 minutes non-use. Although during the day I may let cook. Before letting it go to sleep I close ALL programs, including my browser. If you don't have all kinds of crap constantly running in the background and have a reasonable internet connection when you return open up a fresh browser in about a second and back on the air.     

[xrunner]

I do understand your point of view or Med. Actually I know of people worse than you : you and Med keep 2or 3 tabs open, that's still something.. I have a friend who close the web browser each and every time he is done looking at a webpage ! Fires up the bvorwser, looks at one page, as soon as he is done, close the browser. 10 seconds later fires up the browser again to look at some other page... when done closes the browser again etc... I was stunned ! 

Or my brother ( a year older than me) who admittedly knows squat about computers. When I was like 18yo, we had a computer with Win 3.1
He would open Word to do something, then close it to paste some text into Excel or I can't remember what other program.
When I told him "but why the hell did you close Word before opening that other program ?! You know you can have BOTH running at the same time ?? ". His reply was : " Eh, Really ?! "   

Ha - my neighbor is about the same. Closes tabs when he just goes right to them back a few minutes later. I'm the person who 'splains  computers to him (or tries to) and fix what I can. He doesn't really understand to this day certain things, like his email messages. He wants to know if he gets a new PC how to get his messages to the new computer. I try to explain that they aren't stored on the computer. He asks where are they then because I see them on the computer screen. I say well they are on the cloud, like, well, um, ... never mind just trust me they will be there. 

But you think you get frustrated, you got nothing. I have to watch him type things on one hand (left) using one single finger.

THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH HIS HANDS!

 

[Specmaster]

I have no bookmarks other than the important shit:



Edit: life is too short to collect and curate bookmarks properly.

[mansaxel]

I do understand your point of view or Med. Actually I know of people worse than you : you and Med keep 2or 3 tabs open, that's still something.. I have a friend who close the web browser each and every time he is done looking at a webpage ! Fires up the bvorwser, looks at one page, as soon as he is done, close the browser. 10 seconds later fires up the browser again to look at some other page... when done closes the browser again etc... I was stunned ! 

Then you'd be shocked at me. This laptop is generally set to go into sleep mode after 3 minutes non-use. Although during the day I may let cook. Before letting it go to sleep I close ALL programs, including my browser. If you don't have all kinds of crap constantly running in the background and have a reasonable internet connection when you return open up a fresh browser in about a second and back on the air.   

I exit my browser when it wants to upgrade. Otherwise not. I log out when I have to reboot. Otherwise not. I reboot when it really can't be avoided anymore, and then I first procrastinate for a while trying to delay the inevitable. What can I say?

Noli tangere circuli mei!

[tggzzz]

Tonight's unmissable bundle is only £49, but at least he is honest....
OSCILLOSCOPE Job Lot Spares Repairs Parts Only Hameg Scope Bundle
For parts or not working
“These Have Been Used As Parts To Repair Other Oscilloscopes.Please See The Photos For What's ”
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/324771116900

[Vince]

Then you'd be shocked at me. This laptop is generally set to go into sleep mode after 3 minutes non-use. Although during the day I may let cook. Before letting it go to sleep I close ALL programs, including my browser. If you don't have all kinds of crap constantly running in the background and have a reasonable internet connection when you return open up a fresh browser in about a second and back on the air.   

Not shocked at all Med ! 

You just do whatever suits your habits and desires best, like everyone else ! 

For me desire is to have the desktop computer  (don't have a laptop) running 24/7 as I spent so much on it. Do'nt want to have to wait for it to power up every morning either, neither do I want to wait for Firefox to load 20/40/60 tabs all over again every day, whch would take like an hour on a good day, because crappy 4G internet box here, no ADSL nor fiber. Just got the copper wires installed a couple months though, so I am planning on subscribing to ADSL in teh coming months. Fiber is well on its way in my village too, my street should be connected this year probably. However I don't need the speed of Fiber (and you never actually get the advertised speed anyway), ADSL is plenty fast enough for what I do. Wirse I need is watching YT videos in 240 or 480p and I mwitnessed it requires only 150KB/s or so, which is peanuts even for ADSL.

Anyway, I keep the computer and tabs open 24/7 because I do use them all the time, can have them open thanks to enough RAM, and because I am not prepared to wait for them all to load every day on my slow connection, especially since I don't have to.  However as I said I do have to limit myself to 20+ tabs to limit RAM usage otherwise with 60 tabs it does not go well atl. So I am already making compromises here, and making efforts.

As for sleep mode, well the whole point of it is precisely to let you recover all your programs very quickly, while still saving lots of power. RAM stays powered to maintain the state of your desktop. If you close all your programs before going to sleep, then might as well pwoer it off to turn it off for good and save on power.

15 years ago I did try the " Hibernate "feature", as a compromise.. before going to bed I would hibernate my desktop (dumps all the RAM contents into the swap partition) so that I can turn it off completely, hence save power, yet when you turn it back on, it restores teh desktop in the same state you left it in, i.e all your apps and tabs are still there 100% like you left them.
Sounded like a good compromise. Sadly it never worked well nor reliably. At least on Linux which I was using (still am) at the time : when powered back on, 80% of the time computer would freeze because the graphics card driver would not play well at all with the hibernate feture ! Or when the video did work, then it's the desktop /  user interface that failed to restore properly the apps and their contents.

So I gave up on hibernating the computer.... and just leave it on 24/7.


It all depends on your use case... the less you use something, the more you are prepared to work and wait to recover it... the more you can afford to tunr it off and put it away.

So everyone has different threshold.... for example following what you said, I might ask you

1) Why is it that you don't store Tek scopes in your toilet cabinet ?? It's like RAM. 99% of the time you are not using it, so it's wasteed space no ? So might as well use that precious space to store Tek scopes ! 
but you don't do that (well I don't know... just assuming  ), because although you spend very little time in the loo, WHEN YOU DO, you want it to be immediately available, and you are not prepared to spend an hour emptying it from all its Tek scopes, never mind the effort it represents...
You want to get to the loo... RIGHT NOW !   

Same for my computer.. I decide that I am not prepared to wait not make any effort every time I want to access it. I want it to be readily available, so that it can serve me rather than me having to work it before it can work for me...

Same goes for your Civic !  You don't use it much, certainly not 24H/7, so why not use it to store Tek scopes as well ?  When you need your car, you "just" need to unload the scopes and there you go ! 

So it's only a matter of where people draw the line, depending of their circumstances, habits, wishes, what they are willing to put up with....

[Specmaster]

I do understand your point of view or Med. Actually I know of people worse than you : you and Med keep 2or 3 tabs open, that's still something.. I have a friend who close the web browser each and every time he is done looking at a webpage ! Fires up the bvorwser, looks at one page, as soon as he is done, close the browser. 10 seconds later fires up the browser again to look at some other page... when done closes the browser again etc... I was stunned ! 

Then you'd be shocked at me. This laptop is generally set to go into sleep mode after 3 minutes non-use. Although during the day I may let cook. Before letting it go to sleep I close ALL programs, including my browser. If you don't have all kinds of crap constantly running in the background and have a reasonable internet connection when you return open up a fresh browser in about a second and back on the air.   

I exit my browser when it wants to upgrade. Otherwise not. I log out when I have to reboot. Otherwise not. I reboot when it really can't be avoided anymore, and then I first procrastinate for a while trying to delay the inevitable. What can I say?

Noli tangere circuli mei!

Closing your browser down when not required is a major step in preventing unauthorised access to your computer by viruses and hackers alike, how long does it take for your browser to open and make connection when you need it?

[mansaxel]

Then you'd be shocked at me. This laptop is generally set to go into sleep mode after 3 minutes non-use. Although during the day I may let cook. Before letting it go to sleep I close ALL programs, including my browser. If you don't have all kinds of crap constantly running in the background and have a reasonable internet connection when you return open up a fresh browser in about a second and back on the air.   

Not shocked at all Med ! 

You just do whatever suits your habits and desires best, like everyone else ! 

For me desire is to have the desktop computer  (don't have a laptop) running 24/7 as I spent so much on it. Do'nt want to have to wait for it to power up every morning either, neither do I want to wait for Firefox to load 20/40/60 tabs all over again every day, whch would take like an hour on a good day, because crappy 4G internet box here, no ADSL nor fiber. Just got the copper wires installed a couple months though, so I am planning on subscribing to ADSL in teh coming months. Fiber is well on its way in my village too, my street should be connected this year probably. However I don't need the speed of Fiber (and you never actually get the advertised speed anyway), ADSL is plenty fast enough for what I do. Wirse I need is watching YT videos in 240 or 480p and I mwitnessed it requires only 150KB/s or so, which is peanuts even for ADSL.

My eyes hurt if I have to watch anything less than 720p.

Bandwidth at home is limited; I am a scrooge and pay for only 100Mbit/s. Apparently I can get it:

Code: [Select]

nuca$ wget -O /dev/null http://speedtest.tele2.net/1GB.zip
--2021-08-30 23:31:36--  http://speedtest.tele2.net/1GB.zip
Slår upp speedtest.tele2.net (speedtest.tele2.net)... 2a00:800:1010::1, 90.130.70.73
Ansluter till speedtest.tele2.net (speedtest.tele2.net)|2a00:800:1010::1|:80... ansluten.
HTTP-begäran skickad, väntar på svar... 200 OK
Längd: 1073741824 (1,0G) [application/zip]
Sparar till: ”/dev/null”

/dev/null                100%[==========================>]   1,00G  9,84MB/s    om 98s     

2021-08-30 23:33:14 (10,5 MB/s) - ”/dev/null” sparades [1073741824/1073741824]

In the colo, it's better:

Code: [Select]

jaja$  wget -O /dev/null http://speedtest.tele2.net/1GB.zip
--2021-08-30 23:36:29--  http://speedtest.tele2.net/1GB.zip
Slår upp speedtest.tele2.net (speedtest.tele2.net)... 2a00:800:1010::1, 90.130.70.73
Ansluter till speedtest.tele2.net (speedtest.tele2.net)|2a00:800:1010::1|:80... ansluten.
HTTP-begäran skickad, väntar på svar... 200 OK
Längd: 1073741824 (1,0G) [application/zip]
Sparar till: "/dev/null"

/dev/null                 100%[==========================>]   1,00G   108MB/s    in 9,5s   

2021-08-30 23:36:38 (108 MB/s) - "/dev/null" sparades [1073741824/1073741824]


[bd139]

Closing your browser down when not required is a major step in preventing unauthorised access to your computer by viruses and hackers alike, how long does it take for your browser to open and make connection when you need it?

Nope. If someone wants to own your machine from a remote web site it'd require a zero day hole and visiting a site which exploits that explicitly. 99% of these things are people downloading, opening and clicking shit which is dodgy. User initiated. Use an ad blocker and windows defender and you're probably good.

At worst you get some additional energy consumption. Leaving your brower tabs running doesn't even make any difference these days on that side of things either as most of the browsers shank the unused tabs after a bit.

[Vince]

I exit my browser when it wants to upgrade. Otherwise not. I log out when I have to reboot. Otherwise not. I reboot when it really can't be avoided anymore, and then I first procrastinate for a while trying to delay the inevitable. What can I say?

Noli tangere circuli mei!

100% same here !

Whenever Ubuntu download some "system" update and asks me if I wnat to reboot now or later, I always say LATER, and I never reboot.

20 years ago I was dual-booting Windows XP and Linux, as I was evaluating Linux. I would spent most of my time on XP and dabble/discover Linux progressively. After a few months I realized I was liking Linux 10 times more than XP and that I was seldom rebooting XP. So at that point every time I needed/ to reboot to get to Windows, I was reluctant, didn't want to close all my programs and documents then spend time rebooting, do whatever for just 5 minutes in WinXP, then reboot again, open all my programs and documents again..... I quickly said FUCK THAT, I am staying on Linux now. So I just installed WinXP inside a virtual machine in Linux, so I can stay all the time in Linux and get to Windows every now and then when needed, withOUT having to waste time rebooting nor disturbing my workflow in Linux.

Have not rebooted the machine to get to WinXP in lke 15 years now I think ! SO the other day when I wiped Ubuntu 16.04 to try 20.04 to get the latest Kicad.... I though hey now is the time ! So I rearranged my partition table. Got rid of the ancient WinXP partition, freed some space for the root partition for Linux which was only 10GB and causing me problems sometimes as too full to install some programs and do a network upgrade to a newest Ubuntu release !
Also got rid of old extra root/home partitions which I used to use 15 years to test development version of Ubuntu. Haven't tested any beta version of 10+ years now. When I want to upgrade to a new version, I test it in a virtual machine like XP. If I like it then I burn the ISO on a CD and try the "live" CD... it the hardware works well with it then yeah I might install it.

Not disrupting my workflow without a very, very good reason. Really when I have no choice... and always reluctantly.

[Cerebus]

OK, I was just buying some dual banana plugs on Aliexpress. I've brought a few things on there in the last couple of weeks and I just scrolled through my purchase history to see where they'd got to. I got all the way to the bottom past connectors, chips, and some assorted mechanical things like an ER20 collect set but nothing that might have connected me to purchasers of the first item here in the "People who bought this also bought these box":



Now, most of those things have some sense - but who buys cheap connectors and hardware and then splurges out on a £5000 1/3 scale catwoman statue?

[mansaxel]

Closing your browser down when not required is a major step in preventing unauthorised access to your computer by viruses and hackers alike, how long does it take for your browser to open and make connection when you need it?

In very, very short summary: No, you are wrong. You are equally vulnerable both cases, because it has nothing to do with how long you do what you do, it is 100% about what you do.

I've had users who got infected the minute they logged in, because they did not understand that going to the malware-infested gambling site in M$IE was going to own them in like 300ms, or whatever the pageload time was. Once they'd been there  the payload is resident, and will start as soon as they boot the computer up.

And the fucking idiot did go back there three times when he'd gotten his laptop back from the corporate purge-and-PXE grinder; the last time I was involved I simply walked to his room, unplugged the computer and walked away with it. Didn't say a word. Wrote his and my boss an email saying what I'd done and why I'd done it. Never heard anything about it again...