USB Hoarding Vindication

I’ve been replacing some DisplayLink devices with Raspberry Pi screens, and now the time had come for the thing that both receives Z-Stick commands and sends Telldus commands to wall outlets.

The problem is that there’s just two USB ports, and they’re at the bottom of the screen, and I don’t want anything to stick out below. (But behind is fine, because of how it’s going to hang.)

And the Telldus thing has a Mini-USB connector. Yes! Mini! Not Micro! Mini! Nothing uses Mini these days, so angled connectors don’t exist. (Cables with angled plugs exist, but less cabling is less cabling.)

So I went and had a look at one of my boxes of connectors from the last three decades… nope…

And the other? What do my eyes spy!

Yes! It’s an angled A to A, and then an A to Mini!

Er…. That looks pretty wobbly, eh?

But then I found this U one.

And that’s OK! Looks less wobbly! The Z-Stick is smaller and can stick out that way; that’s fine.

Not as impressive as this classic, I guess.

Perfection!

See? Thingies are completely hidden by the screen, and I can now glue the screen into the shelf where it’s supposed to go.

The moral is: Never throw away connectors.

Firefox and PgDn/PgUp Keys

For years (well, as long as Mozilla and/or Firefox has existed), I’ve been annoyed that whenever an input field has the focus, the Page Up/Page Down keys don’t work. This is mostly an issue with web sites that helpfully autofocus on a text field: You’re searching for something, get a new page, and hit PgDn to scroll, and nothing happens.

So to reduce the laptop lossage from annoyed people throwing their computers out of their windows in disgust, I’ve now (only three decades too late, with innumerable computer casualties; sorry) written a trivial Greasemonkey script and put it on Microsoft Github.

To use, install Greasemonkey, then click on the “Extensions” symbol in the upper right:

Choose the “Greasemonkey” entry, then “New user script”, and then paste in the .js file from the pgdn-fixer repo.

Easy peasy. *rolls eyes*

(It’s really weird that you need something like Greasemonkey to be allowed to run your own Javascript in your own browser, but that’s apparently the case…)

It seems to work for me on about a dozen sites I’ve tried, but I’m sure there’s other sites that need some tweaking. Pull requests welcome.