PrintNightmare – manual fix

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.

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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.

The new-look DOAJ

The DOAJ site has had a design makeover. On the front page they’ve gone for a 1964 home-decor ‘modernist abstraction wallpaper’ look, which will likely have nostalgic connotations for Baby Boomer librarians, and perhaps a few who recall the early arcade videogame Pac-man, but will mean nothing to most students.

The initial ‘modernism at home’ buzz does not then sit well with the styling of the numbers or of the “Find open access journals & articles” strapline on the front page. Either the fonts are all sleekly retro-modernist or they’re not. Don’t mix the two.

The main Search box button is a very unfortunate shade of yellow, made even more jarring in combination with the blue flash on the dropdown menu…

Having made a search, the search button becomes a soft orange which better matches the new logo. But this still has the jarring blue flash on the dropdown menu.

Text-selection colour leaves the selected text clear (my Web browser has a UserScript that keeps the text-selection colour the same across all sites, but I turned it off to test).

Search results are looking good, but on a widescreen desktop I have to scroll down to get them.

What I get…

What I want (and have to scroll down to every time)…

Overall, pretty good. But the front page still needs some tweaking.

SumatraPDF adds extensive annotation tools

Extensive new support for editing PDF annotations, in the latest version (June 2021) of the popular freeware SumatraPDF PDF reader.

Also here on the JURN blog, my short guides to how to set up Sumatra for book and magazine reading (cover-page + double-page spreads, no gutters), and enable keyword search for .ePub files opened in SumatraPDF.

Setting up QuietRSS

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.