• Directory
  • FAQ: about JURN
  • Group tests
  • Guide to academic search
  • JURN’s donationware
  • openEco: nature titles indexed

News from JURN

~ search tool for open access content

News from JURN

Monthly Archives: October 2021

How to capture a screenshot of a side-scrolling Trello board

30 Saturday Oct 2021

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks

≈ Leave a comment

Trello is known for its long side-scrolling window, and this window can get very long when planning a substantial project. How to take and archive a quick horizontal screenshot of such a Trello window?

The only screenshot software that hints it can do this is SnagIt. But here’s how to do it for the Opera browser without any additional software. It’s very similar for other Chrome-based Web browsers.

1. Visit Trello, allow your board to load. Position the scrolling frame at your starting point.

2. Menu | Developer | Developer Tools. This brings up the scary Developer console.

3. Ignore all the scary bits and on the console just click here…

This gives you a ‘mobile device view’ of your page, in this case the active side-scrolling frame which is the ‘meat’ of a Trello board. The view appears above the Developer console.

4. Up top you now have your mobile device preview and above this are two inputs for Dimensions, in pixels.

Change the left-hand setting to 9999. This is as high as it can go, but should be long enough for most larger Trello boards. Give it a moment to load up the entire frame, after you’ve increased the Dimensions. You should then see a mini overview of your board, as if on some crazy 6ft-long mobile device(!). It won’t be blurred, as here, but you get the idea…

5. Over in the top-right of the screen, notice the mundane three-dot icon. Click it and from its menu choose “Capture full-sized screenshot”.

6.Then click anywhere non-active in the preview. Any ‘grey bit’ should do…

A screenshot will be created and saved. It may not be a perfect capture in terms of near and far edges, but should be good enough for ‘snapshot’ archival purposes.

7. Unclick the ‘mobile device view’, and then back out of the Developer Tools panel. After a moment your browser should return to its normal view.

You’re done. You should now have a huge ‘side-scrolled’ capture of your Trello board, as a .PNG in your usual downloads folder.

The same process should work for other long horizontal frames on websites.

Browser problem fixed: it was LetsEncrypt’s expired root SSL certificates

03 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

≈ 2 Comments

The browser problem I described yesterday is fixed.

As a test sample, consistently utterly un-reachable sites in Opera were…

www.majorgeeks.com
www.etools.ch/
www.davidrevoy.com/blog

All loaded perfectly fine and instantly in the Pale Moon Firefox-based browser.

One clear possible cause I found was LetsEncrypt changing its root site certificates, which are used by way too many (20%?) of the world’s smaller website servers…

DST Root CA X3 will expire on September 30, 2021. That means those older devices that don’t trust ISRG Root X1 will start getting certificate warnings when visiting sites that use Let’s Encrypt certificates.

The timing was right. The systems affected were right. The reason for the Chrome vs. Firefox strangeness was right…

Browsers (Chrome, Safari, Edge, Opera) generally trust the same root certificates as the operating system they are running on. Firefox is the exception: it has its own root store.

Thanks to ‘GGG’, who got it right. He had exactly the same problem as me, Chrome (Brave) not working, Firefox working fine. He traced the broken sites to their use of LetsEncrypt root SSL certificates. This led me to the server techie Gunter Born in Germany warning of the same problems a little in advance and describing them in detail. Apparently the certificates are free and thus are widely used by smaller sites. It’s the world’s largest certificate authority. Seriously. The world’s largest certificate authority suddenly revokes its 300-million+ key server certificates and effectively breaks 20% of the Web and… the media don’t tell anyone in advance? So far as I can see only a few gadget sites and some Indian sites gave a few hours warning.

Anyway, assuming rogue SSL certificates rather than iffy DNS servers was the actual problem, as now seemed very likely… how to fix it?

The solution: You need to manually add fresher certificates. Do as the Tech Journal explains in the new page for the DST Root CA X3 Certificate Expiration Problems and Fix. There Stephen Wagner has kindly dug up the links to the new fresh certificates.

The guy who saved the world.

You will need a Firefox or Pale Moon browser to get them, as LetsEncrypt’s problem is blocking LetsEncrypt from itself (durh…). Some Windows users will need to choose the .DER rather than the .PEM version of the certificates. Best to get them all and see which version your Windows recognises and adds an icon to.

Once downloaded you need to double-click them and for each one a Windows Certificate import Wizard will launch. Install it to the correct folder….

Don’t just accept the Windows defaults (could install anywhere…), but guide each certificate to its correct folder. isrgrootx1.der and isrg-root-x2.der go in the “Trusted Root…” and lets-encrypt-r3.der goes in the “Intermediate…”. Intermediate seems just as important as the others, so don’t skip it. There appears to be no need to delete the old defunct certificates, although browser access seemed to speed up a bit when I hard-deleted the Sept 2021 certs from “Trusted Root…” and “Intermediate…”.

Now when you close and re-launch your Chrome-based browser, and after a pause of perhaps 12-20 seconds for each previously blocked site, the problem should be fixed. It was for me. I assume the one-time pause is for the browser to re-cache the page.

I did not need to re-boot Windows for this fix to ‘take’. The Windows-savvy will be able to type MMC at the Windows Start menu and then load a Snap-in to see new certificates and their dates…

This is also the way you delete the old ones, which cannot be done via Settings | Security | Proxy in Chrome/Opera…


Update: According the Linux Addicts the problem briefly took out Amazon Web Services, Shopify and The Guardian. The Daily Swig adds Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and many others. The following day there was a massive worldwide Internet crash, including Facebook being down for about a day, though this was apparently an un-related problem?

Chrome-based browsers – “This site can’t be reached”

02 Saturday Oct 2021

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

≈ 1 Comment

A curious problem has developed persistently in recent days, for users of Chrome and Edge browser… but not for Firefox / Pale Moon. Evidently the problem is now shared by others as well as myself.

While browsing a site/page fails to respond to the Chrome browser, but springs instantly into action for Firefox or Pale Moon (based on Firefox). In the Chrome-based Opera you get…

This site can’t be reached. [URL] took too long to respond.

Doesn’t appear to affect the mega-sites like YouTube or WordPress. Sometimes there is a 20-30 second delay in reaching a mid-ranking site, and often nothing at all from smaller sites or certain known recalcitrant mid-ranking sites (e.g. Stack Overflow, GreasyFork). Slack also seems to be badly affected, though that doesn’t affect me…

The problem appears to be cross OS, as I’m on Windows and this other guy (linked above) is on Linux. I have the same symptoms as he has: Chrome often gives this error while Pale Moon (Firefox) is totally fine. The problem occurs even if you are using a DNS server other than that of your ISP. For instance in Opera, it’s possible to select from a number of DNS servers. They all exhibit the same problem. Other fixes tried include:

* Changing the Windows IVP4 DNS to another (9.9.9.9, 8.8.8.8, 1.1.1.1) makes no difference either.

* Running with all browser extensions and scripts off also makes no difference.

* Visiting the page in ‘Incognito mode’ makes no difference.

* Modem reset makes no difference.

* PC reboot makes no difference.

* I don’t have proxies configured.

My first guess was some iffy under-the-hood Chrome update, perhaps some new and imperfect query being made to the some local and rather sluggish and partial DNS cache. Linux-guy’s claimed solution thinks along these lines and he suggests flushing your local DNS, which on Windows is:

1. Start menu.
2. Run.
3. Run dialog box, type…
4. ipconfig /flushdns
5. Confirm. A DOS-box window should flash up for a microsecond, the DNS cache is flushed, and the Run box exits.

Works as described above, but this didn’t cure the problem for me.

Nor did clearing the internal Chrome DNS cache (who knew?) and restarting the browser…

chrome://net-internals/#dns

Then I downgraded the Opera browser, back to Opera 78.0.4093.147 (mid August 2021) with the help of the full offline installer. Still the same problem, and thus it can’t be due to some recently-updated Chrome component.

So… if its not in Windows and not in Chrome, and not due to extensions or other obvious problems… what on earth could it be? It must be some kind of interaction between any DNS server and a Chrome-based browser, even a slightly older one. A problem which Pale Moon/Firefox is not affected by, and which has only recently started in the last few days. It can vary between DNS servers, some loading one page and not the other and visa versa.

One odd thing is that if you click hard and long and quick enough to load such a jammed page, like 50 times, it will often eventually load. This is repeatable. It’s like there’s a ‘black hole’ somewhere along the route, for smaller and mid-ranking sites that need DNS lookup, and eventually the system will ‘get the message’ and use an alternative route. I wonder in DNS servers have been ‘split’ in three and now have different sub-databases for top, middle and lower-ranking sites? And that the low-ranking databases sometimes power down their disks when not being called? That might explain it. The disks could need time to power up. But surely they would be modern always-on SSD’s and not old mechanical hard-drives?

Why Firefox / Pale Moon is unaffected I have no idea. But it is. I’ve been unable to discover if it uses any special DNS routing. Only that Pale Moon has no support for ‘DNS over HTTPS’.

So the temporary solution is then:

1. Open the Pale Moon browser, which has no such problems, and keep it open.
2. Install Andy Portmen’s “Open in Pale Moon” extension in Opera or Chrome.
3. Pin “Open in Pale Moon” button to your bookmarks bar.
4. Launch any recalcitrant page in Pale Moon (Firefox). This browser is already open so it will load instantly, and the supposedly ‘un-findable’ page will also load instantly.

Sadly the above only works once Opera has actually received the “This site can’t be reached. [URL] took too long to respond.” message. If you pass the URL over to Pale Moon while the browser is still waiting (and waiting and waiting…) for a DNS server, you get nothing in Pale Moon. You can however go back and right-click on the original hyperlink and “Open in Pale Moon” that way.

You can also switch your RSS reader to open pages externally in Pale Moon / Firefox.


Update: This, at first glance, seems to explain the difference between the browsers…

1. “Chrome uses DNS prefetching to speed up website lookups”

2. DNS pre-fetch is off by default in Pale Moon… “DNS prefetching disabled by default to prevent router hangups”.

Checking the value on about:config / network.dns.disablePrefetch assures that it is indeed off in Pale Moon.

In Chrome/Opera this is now called “Preload pages for faster browsing and searching”, and again it is turned off for Opera. The uBlock Origin addon forces it off.

So, despite sounding plausible, the above can’t be the explanation for the problem.


Update: Browser problem fixed: it was LetsEncrypt’s expired root SSL certificates. Install the new ones. Firefox / Pale Moon uses its own SSL certificate store, which was why it was unaffected.

Subscribe: RSS News Feed.
I'm on Patreon!

JURN:

  • JURN : directory of ejournals
  • JURN : main search-engine
  • JURN : openEco directory
  • JURN : repository search

Related sites:

  • 4 Humanities
  • Academic Freedom Alliance
  • Accuracy in Academia
  • Alliance Defending Freedom
  • ALPSP
  • alt.academy
  • AMIR
  • Anterotesis
  • Arcadia project
  • Art Historicum (German)
  • AWOL
  • Beall's List (updated at 2018)
  • Beall’s List (old)
  • Beyond Search
  • Bibliographic wilderness
  • Booktwo
  • Campus Reform
  • Charleston Advisor
  • Coalition for Networked Information
  • Communia (public domain watchdog)
  • Cost of Knowledge
  • Council of Editors of Learned Journals
  • Dan Cohen
  • Digital Koans
  • Digital Shift
  • Dissernet (Russian anti-plagiarism)
  • DOAJ
  • Don't Block TOR
  • eFoundations
  • EIFL
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation
  • ELO
  • Embargo Watch
  • ePublishing Trust for Development
  • Facebook: Arab Open Access
  • Facebook: Italian Open Access
  • Facebook: Open Access India
  • Film Studies for Free
  • FIRE
  • Flaky Academic Conferences
  • Found History
  • Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
  • Free Speech Union (UK)
  • Google Algorithm
  • Heterodox Academy
  • Iconclass
  • IFLA Serials blog
  • ImpactStory
  • infoDocket
  • InTech Blog
  • Jinfo (formerly Free Pint)
  • Kindle blog
  • L'edition Electronique (French)
  • La Criee : periodiques (French)
  • Leader Statement Database on Free Speech
  • National Association of Scholars
  • National Coalition of Independent Scholars
  • Neil Beagrie
  • OA Lookup : Policies
  • OA Working Group
  • OASPA
  • Online Searcher
  • Open Access Bibliography
  • Open Access Week
  • Open and Shut?
  • Open Electronic Publishing
  • Open Folklore
  • Open Knowledge Maps
  • Open Library of Humanities
  • Periodiques en ligne (French)
  • Peter Murray Rust
  • PKP / OJS
  • Project Gutenberg
  • Publishing Archaeology
  • RBA Blog
  • Reclaim the Net
  • Research Information
  • Research Remix
  • Right to Research
  • River Valley TV
  • ROARS (Italian)
  • Scholarly Electronic Publishing
  • Scholarship Matters
  • Searchblox
  • Searcher
  • Serials Cataloger
  • Serials Review
  • Society of Young Publishers
  • Speech First
  • TaxoDiary (taxonomies news)
  • Taxpayer Access
  • Tentaclii
  • The Scholarly Kitchen
  • Thoughts from Carl Grant
  • Web Scale Discovery
  • Zotero blog

Some of the libraries linking to JURN

  • Boston College Libraries
  • Brooklyn Public Library, NY
  • Duke University
  • Kobe University, Japan
  • Rhode Island College
  • San Jose State University
  • UConn Stamford
  • University of California
  • University of Cambridge (Casimir Lewy Library)
  • University of Cambridge (main)
  • University of Canberra
  • University of Toronto
  • Washington University
  • West Virginia University

Spare BitCoins? Please send donations to JURN via: 17e2KGuyzjzEEE7BsoYTwMo3MtUod6DrjP

Archives

  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • June 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • News from JURN
    • Join 901 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • News from JURN
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...