Starship Asterisk*

rstevenson wrote:I have my Firefox browser set to open links in a new tab, always. Yet all links in Asterisk posts open in the Asterisk tab. There must be a setting in the phpBB software that is overriding my Firefox preferences. Any idea if there's something I can do to switch that off? I don't see any possibility in my Asterisk prefs.

How do you tell Firefox to open links in a new tab? I know how to tell it to open a new window in a new tab. And I can force any link to open in a new tab by clicking with the middle button or by right-clicking and selecting new tab. But I've never seen a setting that would force all links to open in new tabs. (There are addons to do this, presumably because Firefox doesn't have that native capability.)

That's a new one for me. I thought there might be a target="whatever" in the anchor tag, but there isn't. There shouldn't be anything inherent about Asterisk that causes them to open in the same tab. It's just another website.

You're right Chris, the pref is for new windows in a new tab. But the majority of sites I visit, including ones I've programmed myself (with no special link tags or settings) automatically open links in a new tab. Some others don't, so Asterisk isn't alone in this, but not that many. And some sites do that deliberately, in a misguided effort to keep people, if not in their site, at least as close as the Back button.

Oh well, I can continue to drag links up to the tab bar. (Having used Macs and a mouse since 1985, I never got into the habit of remembering keyboard shortcuts beyond the basic few.)

And Geck, the setting might actually be on the server, though I've no idea why such would be done.

Rob

Well, that's why it doesn't work then, because Asterisk doesn't open links into new windows. That used to happen back before tabs by putting, say, target="_new" into the anchor tag. Most people abandoned that a long time ago. I don't do it when I design websites because I don't assume the user wants a new window or tab or anything. So yeah, it has nothing to do with the server. It's definitely not a bug.

rstevenson wrote:You're right Chris, the pref is for new windows in a new tab. But the majority of sites I visit, including ones I've programmed myself (with no special link tags or settings) automatically open links in a new tab.

That shouldn't happen. Web standards, and HTML syntax have links opening in the same window. All browsers should work this way. You can force a link to open differently- in a new window, tab, or popup by using the appropriate target= syntax (which is deprecated) or Javascript. But an ordinary a href= link should never automatically open anywhere other than in the window it was invoked from.

That said, you are apparently not alone in wishing links would open in different windows or tabs, because there are Firefox addons that enable this behavior. You might try one of those.

I'm using version 1.2.5.0 of the APOD wallpaper application on Windows 7. This has been working fine until a couple of days ago, when it stopped updating -- last image was 12/20. When I try to update "manually," I get a message saying to review the application event log file for an explanation. I can't locate that file. Is anyone else having this current problem? Any suggestions? Should I download a new wallpaper application for APOD images?

ekaim wrote:I'm using version 1.2.5.0 of the APOD wallpaper application on Windows 7. This has been working fine until a couple of days ago, when it stopped updating -- last image was 12/20. When I try to update "manually," I get a message saying to review the application event log file for an explanation. I can't locate that file. Is anyone else having this current problem? Any suggestions? Should I download a new wallpaper application for APOD images?

Blame NASA. APOD is coming through https (secure socket) only now and it has broken a lot of things.

geckzilla wrote:

ekaim wrote:I'm using version 1.2.5.0 of the APOD wallpaper application on Windows 7. This has been working fine until a couple of days ago, when it stopped updating -- last image was 12/20. When I try to update "manually," I get a message saying to review the application event log file for an explanation. I can't locate that file. Is anyone else having this current problem? Any suggestions? Should I download a new wallpaper application for APOD images?

Blame NASA. APOD is coming through https (secure socket) only now and it has broken a lot of things.

"Blame" might not be the best word. Forcing sites to only work through HTTPS is generally a very good thing (Asterisk should make this change). Since the app is provided by a third party, I'd say the responsibility is on them to maintain it. There's no reason that APOD can't reasonably change its internal structure or its communications protocols.

Thanks for your replies; at least now I know the nature of the problem. As I recall, I downloaded the wallpaper application from CNET. I suppose I could wait a while and then download it again, hoping they've caught up with NASA's new means of making their images accessible. Have you heard similar cries for help from many other users of this program?

ekaim wrote:Thanks for your replies; at least now I know the nature of the problem. As I recall, I downloaded the wallpaper application from CNET. I suppose I could wait a while and then download it again, hoping they've caught up with NASA's new means of making their images accessible. Have you heard similar cries for help from many other users of this program?

No other users yet, no. They tend to post in here even though we really have nothing to do with those third party apps. Plenty of crying for my own scripts not working anymore along with a few mirror operators, though. There's something about https that requires some tweaking somewhere that I don't seem to be able to do on my own.

There are so many usually vocal users of this wallpaper that I still don''t understand why you wouldn't have heard others complain (even though I understand this doesn't fall in your bailiwick proper). Do you know of another forum where this issue might have been raised?

Why me?

ekaim wrote:There are so many usually vocal users of this wallpaper that I still don''t understand why you wouldn't have heard others complain (even though I understand this doesn't fall in your bailiwick proper). Do you know of another forum where this issue might have been raised?

Not that I know of. There have been a number of apps over the years and they rarely offer much in terms of support. Some of them are fan creations and others are entrepreneurial efforts.

OK, thanks. I'll search for other users who have this problem.

I finally realized that my APOD wallpaper program stopped auto-refreshing after 12/20 because the 12/21 APOD was in fact a bloody video, which has been discussed here many times and is a known no-no (sorry for the inadvertent alliteration) for most users, browsers, etc. Again, I realize this application is not really in the official purview of this forum, but I wonder if anyone can tell me how to get "unstuck" from the 12/20 image -- i.e., past the video of 12/21? Any help or suggestions will be much appreciated. I'm going through auto-refresh withdrawal!

ekaim wrote:I finally realized that my APOD wallpaper program stopped auto-refreshing after 12/20 because the 12/21 APOD was in fact a bloody video, which has been discussed here many times and is a known no-no (sorry for the inadvertent alliteration) for most users, browsers, etc. Again, I realize this application is not really in the official purview of this forum, but I wonder if anyone can tell me how to get "unstuck" from the 12/20 image -- i.e., past the video of 12/21? Any help or suggestions will be much appreciated. I'm going through auto-refresh withdrawal!

It is probably a combination of both issues.

This is, I'm guessing, related to the change to https, maybe. Anyway, the APOD pages here at the Asterisk have looked like this -- here in my Firefox (latest version) on my iMac running MacOS Sierra (latest version) -- for the last several days. That is, I'm seeing the URL of the image thumbnail, rather than the image thumbnail itself. Not sure when it started, but less than a week ago.

Rob

Yes. The forum software can't retrieve certain meta data about the image such as its dimensions and is being very finicky and not wanting to display it. It will be stuck like this until early next year when people are done with holidays.

Stuck for the holidays? Thanks for your replies; at least I know I'm not alone.

I have posted a beta version of my APOD Wallpaper software at https://sites.google.com/site/apodwallpaper/downloads that works with the recent changes made to the APOD website. The APOD Website started requiring https with TLS 1.2 around Dec 20th.

Please report any problems to astropod.wallpaper@gmail.com

cheers
Ken

I am not getting APOD images on Firefox 50.1 running on Win 10. They show up on Chrome, IE 11, MS Edge, but not Firefox. Ideas?

edit: Someone reported on facebook that they aren't showing on Safari.

bystander wrote:I am not getting APOD images on Firefox 50.1 running on Win 10. They show up on Chrome, IE 11, MS Edge, but not Firefox. Ideas?

edit: Someone reported on facebook that they aren't showing on Safari.

No problem for me with that combo. Maybe you have a plugin interfering?

Hm, wish I knew, bystander. I just tried with my own Firefox 50.1 also on Win 10 and APOD images are showing up for me.

Blue Mountain (or one of the 3rd-party sites) has finally offered a version of the APOD wallpaper application that fixes the bug that froze the wallpaper on 12/21/16, when NASA put up a new APOD that was a video -- so many users couldn't get past the previous day's APOD. The new version is 1.3.0.x. You should be able to locate it by Googling APOD wallpaper +1.3~. That might work for you, not sure.

Thanks, ekaim, but my problem is with the APOD web page.

The plugins I have are java, acrobat, and McAfee. I also have the Adblock Plus extension. Nothing new. I can actually view the images if I plug their urls directly into the browser.

edit: Youtube videos work fine.

bystander wrote:Thanks, ekaim, but my problem is with the APOD web page.

The plugins I have are java, acrobat, and McAfee. I also have the Adblock Plus extension. Nothing new. I can actually view the images if I plug their urls directly into the browser.

edit: Youtube videos work fine.

When you go to the main APOD page for a day, you see the page contents but not the image? Or you're not seeing the image thumbnails in the Asterisk forum?