Today I was doing some paywall hopping and wondered why there wasn't a 12ft.io bookmarklet to make it a little easier.

So I whipped up this little 5 second bookmarklet for anyone who hasn't bothered to do it themselves yet.

Just make a bookmark with the code snippet below as the URL.

javascript: (() => { window.location.replace("https://12ft.io/" + window.location.href)})();

I tried to make a link here that could be dragged and dropped directly into a bookmark bar, but it's disallowed.

I used to use a random FOSS Python program to manage my blog. The software honestly wasn't the best (partially my own fault for not setting it up super well) and I stopped using it, lost my blog's source code, and haven't updated the blog in a long time because of that. So I'm looking for a static site generator that is simple, well maintained, and no-frills.

So I wanna purchase a domain for my personal website (just a WordPress thing), and I wanna pay for three years in advance (I have my reasons). Which domain sellers are reasonably priced, trustworthy, and more likely to assist a less technical, non-developer user like myself?

Thanks!

There was a very brief period of time in the late 90s early 00s when the word “webcam” had just started existing and entering the popular discourse; and where that word was practically synonymous with “sex show”.

I think around the time I first heard that word, having a webcam usually meant you would use it to do nude shows with.

They weren’t integrated with computers back then (laptops were super expensive and not popular yet, and they weren’t a mainstream laptop accessory until way later). So if you had a webcam, you had to really seek it out and pay quite a bit of money for it. It made little sense for people to buy them just to use them for personal reasons and most jobs didn’t have a utility for them.

… except sex work. Live, paid access cam shows immediately caught on. And people would see those in ads (ads tended to be trashy with zero quality control back then, even automated. Worse than now, I swear), and associate “webcam” with “webcam show”.

There was no reason to otherwise hook up a camera to a computer if not to stream its contents to the web, anyway. The first webcam, that famous coffee pot, was just that: a web-connected camera. Web cam. Wikipedia talks about “Jenni cam” — I wasn’t on the anglosphere’s internet at the time so this escaped me, but it does seem to agree that the concept entered the mainstream not via videoconferencing, but via cam girls.

Is anyone here familiar with crawling the web? I’m interested in broad crawling, rather than focusing on particular sites. I’d appreciate pretty much any information about how this is usually done, and things to watch out for if attempting it.

This is a webpage for a courier company. This screengrab is the whole page as served to me. If I want to track my parcel I have to enter the details into the pretend phone on the right and pretend to use it like a phone, complete with tiny screen and fiddly controls.

I get that they would like me to install their app but this is almost offensively user-hostile design, and pretty much ensures I'll never install anything of the sort. I might consider installing the app of a company who deliver to me regularly and have a good track record of being good at their jobs, if that app offers useful functionality which can't be offered via a web page - but even that's unlikely. But these guys who I have never heard of until today and are pulling this nonsense? No way.

I've recently experienced something multiple times and wanted to see if others are seeing this. I'm seeing various news articles where the first few paragraphs basically say the exact some information over and over again 3 or 4 times in slightly different ways. My most recent experience was this article about some hackers selling information on billions of Facebook users.

The article starts off with the title "Personal Information of More Than 1.5 Billion Facebook Users Sold on Hacker Forum". Straightforward and to the point. Next we get this paragraph in bold:

The private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a popular hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally.

Next is a bullet list of the highlights of the incident:

Highlights:

• Data scrapers are selling sensitive personal data on 1.5 billion Facebook users.
• Data contains users’: name, email, phone number, location, gender, and user ID.
• Data appears to be authentic.
• Personal data obtained through web scraping.
• Data can be utilized for phishing and account takeover attacks.
• Sold data claimed to be new from 2021.

This rehashes the number (1.5 billion) and place (Facebook), but does contain new information like what was leaked, and some unsubstantiated claims about whether it's authentic and how it was obtained.

The next paragraph repeats the 1.5 billion number a fourth time, and repeats that the data is available on a hacker forum. Two paragraphs later, we get another list of bullet points which are identical to the 2nd bullet point above; namely that the info contains:

According to the forum poster, the data provided contains the following personal information of Facebook users:

• Name
• Email
• Location
• Gender
• Phone number
• User ID

At this point I stop reading because I mistakenly think that I'm re-reading the same paragraph over and over again. It's an incredibly unpleasant experience.

Is anyone else seeing this? I've been seeing this not just on smaller sites like the one linked here, but on major news sites like CNBC and CNN, too. I know that news sites are having their budgets slashed, etc., but I literally can't read articles like this. I mean my brain just won't let me complete them because it thinks it's caught in a loop or something. It's hard to describe.

Weird question, but does anyone know of a simple tab viewer or organizer for Firefox (bonus points if it works on iOS)? I have... way too many tabs open, and I want to see what I can bookmark before closing rather than having to either close everything or manually check each tab.

I've been working on some music, and while I'm not quite ready to show it to the world, I might be in the near future. I was curious where other musicians are putting their music? I've checked out both SoundCloud and BandCamp, and they both seem reasonable. Any pros or cons to using one over the other? Any other places you upload your music for streaming and/or purchase?

Suggestions from the comments:
BandCamp : Hosts and shares your music
SoundCloud : Hosts and shares your music
DistroKid : Distributes your music to various services†
TuneCore : Distributes your music to various services†
OneRPM : Distributes your music to various services†
AudioMicro : Sells your royalty-free music and sound effects
Jamendo : Hosts and shares your indie music or royalty free music

† Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Tidal, Amazon Music, TikTok, Pandora, iHeartRadio, Deezer, Instagram, etc.