"An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted." - Arthur Miller

Saturday, March 17, 2018

Avengers: Infinity War Trailer #2

Looking forward to this movie that hits theaters on April 27.

Toys R Us Shutting Down

A true end of an era as 70 year old Toys R Us is shutting down world wide, selling off its assets over the next coming months. Some form of it may survive as negotiations are ongoing for some stores but the business multiple generations of kids grew up with will cease to exist, likely by the beginning of the summer. The cause is varied but primarily it can be placed at the feet of Bain Capital that makes profits by destroying companies after saddlings them with far more debt then they can handle or ever dig themselves out from. TRU went from $50 of million in debt in early 2005, sold to be Bain which drove that number to around $5.5 billion in that same year. The economics fails me but the net result is the company had not means of expanding, updating its stores, exploring new business models or anything else. Finally after 12 years, saddled with even more debt despite over 15 years of over of solid multi-billion years of sales, the company simply couldn't survive under the load. Its a sad day. The only year takeaway is if you know your company is owned by Bain Capital, look for an exist strategy as that company is exists to destroy.

Thursday, March 08, 2018

Firefox: "Do This Automatically for Files Like This" Is Greyed Out

Recently Firefox changed how the browser works at a fundamental level in what they called Firefox Quantum or Firefox v57 and up. Despite the update one of the long term problems (to me anyway) is the issue of the open dialog box where "Do this automatically for files like this from now on." is greyed out. As a result you do not get to tell Firefox how to handles these file types (or extension and what Mozilla calls a MimeType) from now on so do not have to keep verifying if it should download automatically or open a certain program. There is a technical reason for why its greyed out but it really doesn't matter because its a server side setting that you as the user has no control over and so you can't force that option to not be greyed out. The problem is the powers that be at Mozilla have long decided that the user should not be able to manually add extensions types via the gui interface.

Fortunately there is a fix that I found by combined multiple poor answers from various forums. Why people skip all the steps when explaining how to fix something always confuses me since they are trying to be helpful but provide answers that assumes their audience mostly knows the answer and just needs a nudge in a particular direction. In the pre-quantum days, the fix involved editing the mimeTypes.rdf file. Now it involves editing a different file called handlers.json. Now these instructions are going to assume you know the basics of your computer as some parts will change based on which version of Windows you have. If not sure how to do something like open Windows Explorer or Run, google it for your operating system.