JDownloader protects you from yourself!

This is just a very short gripe about the open-source utility JDownloader.

It’s a great tool for downloading all kinds of data from the Internet. Does much of the “leg work” involved with tedious download tasks. Very versatile, many plugin capabilities, endless customization. Almost.

I was disheartened to learn how the modification of the default “User-Agent” string is not available to users. This setting is one that users easily change in browsers, and many other utilities out there. While I understand the reasoning behind preventing users from easily modifying it, there are other ways to mitigate the PEBKAC errors. For instance:

1. If modified then a popup warning could appear at each launch with some stern verbiage about “If it’s not working, you probably broke it… if you’re having trouble, you should restore the default. would you like me to restore the default? Y/N”.
-or-
2. Modifications could be session-only, thus auto-remediating at each launch.

I guess, rather than rant on my blog about this I should propose it on the official forum. But as it happens, it’s down at the moment, so here I am.

Also, I’d have to try to act surprised if I saw responses to my proposal such as these:

“if you want to override this yourself, easiest solution is run a proxy and change via the proxy.” — raztoki (JD Developer)

“but if ppl just start changing UA themselves, guess who they gonna ask for help or complain when plugin breaks/fails.” — jiaz (JD Developer)

The bottom line is, there are plenty of advanced users that don’t want to edit source code and compile, or run a proxy server, to achieve this trivial change.

If any JD developer do happen to read this post, THANKS for your contribution to what has become an incredibly amazing and sophisticated tool. I know that people don’t take the time to thank the devs for their hard work enough. How many man hours have been saved as a result we’ll never know! I hope my comments above can be taken constructively, in order to help an already amazing tool become that much more useful.

Thanks for reading!

UniFi Network Server self-hosting; first signs of demise

I just noticed today, while reading the specifications on the UXG-Lite (seemingly touted as a successor to the USG)

First, they’ve remove the programmable second port that could be assigned to WAN2, for failover. This was in the previous compact USG device, but now we’re left with the only option of buying a device at least 6 times the size to accomplish the same task.

That aside, the reason for my post is because of a few asterisks I noticed in the specifications.

The primary heading reads:

Managed with a CloudKey, Official UniFi Hosting, or UniFi Network Server

Official UniFi Hosting, From $29.00 /month (Subscription)

Scroll down, and in the “Gateway Features” section, there’s a subsection named “Advanced networking” that reads:

License-free SD-WAN*
WireGuard, L2TP and OpenVPN server
OpenVPN client
OpenVPN and IPsec site-to-site VPN
One-click Teleport* and Identity Enterprise VPN**
Policy-based WAN and VPN routing
DHCP relay
Customizable DHCP server
IPv6 ISP support

*When paired with a Cloud Key or Official UniFi Hosting.

**When paired with a Cloud Key.

This seems to suggest that they are integrating special features into the “Official UniFi Hosting” and they’re not running the same product that they provide for download to the public. So, they’re not offering just the hosting, but in essence a different product altogether.

What this points to seems to be the next steps in quietly muscling out the self-hosted option and forcing the Ubiquiti-controlled products only. For those that want to continue to self-manage, it looks like more and more features will likely be removed in an effort to push you to buy in to their system.

This, coupled with the new “UI Care” product, has me worrying that the quality is soon to be going downhill. I hope I’m wrong, as I’ve enjoyed using and installing their products over the years.

Evernote search limitations

For any of you who use Evernote on a regular basis, you already know it quickly becomes a very handy resource to store thoughts, phone call notes, work-related notes, and pretty much anything you need to have at-hand. I also use the camera scan tool to scan receipts and documents, because it can fix the perspective of the scan to flatten it (i.e. when taking a photo and preventing the flash glare). It then scans any PDFs or scanned notes and allows the text to be searched. What’s more, from the days that I used Livescribe (the regular ink pen that writes on special paper and digitizes notes) I can search within any of my handwritten notes as well!

All this is great! You can search all of your notes with some various syntax terms which makes searching work pretty well.

I was frustrated recently when I was required to purchase the higher tier of subscription, despite the fact that I’d always been a subscriber to the “Pro” tier. They renamed “Pro” to “Personal”, then added a new “Professional” tier that was required in order to do Boolean searches. I needed this for one simple purpose: I needed to find notes I’d made in a specific month. There was no way to just search for “month:January year:2019” You must get this higher tier plan, then you can search “created:20190101 NOT created:20190201”.

I was slightly more frustrated when I found that Evernote arbitrarily removes the note edit history for notes older than two years. It’s not actually removed, but the times are all zeroed to 12:00AM, so finding the time between edits is no longer possible for those notes. This is only a problem if you needed this information for calculating work times or similar. (Which I happened to have done). Support provided no help when I contacted them about this. (Here’s a few examples). Be sure to scroll past the images and read the biggest problem I’ve encountered!

I was very frustrated when I found that Evernote’s search doesn’t work right for basic search whenever a URL or text appearing to be a URL is involved. Note that the text need not be “hyperlinked” to exhibit the symptom. I’ve emailed support on several occasions with very detailed examples of the problem. I think it best that I just include my most recent message to support below, so you can see my explanation of the problem. Before I paste that message, though, I want to mention that I repeated the exact same tests within the macOS built-in Apple Notes application and the problems exhibited within Evernote do not exist. If I didn’t have nearly 25,000 notes and a plethora of tags, an edit history on the notes, and create date, I’d migrate over to Apple Notes in a heartbeat.

September 18, 2023

I’ve been a longtime Evernote user, and sort of struggled with this here and there but I figured that I just needed to change my search syntax or something. Today, after digging even deeper into the problem (out of necessity), I’m finding that something completely bizarre appears to be true.

If I have a note that has a Web URL within the note, for example, http://www.magnets-r-us.com, and I search Evernote using simply the word “magnet” — this note is excluded from the results.

Taking it a step further, I try a few other searches to see what will give me my note in the results:

magnet* does not
*magnet* does not
magnets does not
magnets-r-us does not
magnets-r-us.com does not
www.magnets-r-us.com DOES

Now, since I’m composing this message in Evernote, I tested against this as well. Searching for the word ‘magnet’ does show this message in the results, and also highlights the word ‘magnet’ in the ‘magnets-r-us’ link above. But if I change the search to ‘magnets-r-us.com’ then I get nothing.

I also added some text into the same note: reallybizarreproblems.arentpleasant.net but was careful not to allow it to be converted into a hyperlink. This text exhibits the same behavior, in that my search results are:

pleasant = no result
arentpleasant = no result
arentpleasant.net = no result
really = no result
reallybizarre = no result
reallybizarreproblems = no result
reallybizarreproblems.arentpleasant.net = result

A VERY important note on this is that, if my note includes the standalone text (i.e. pleasant, arentpleasant, etc) from above, in addition to the Web address/hyperlink, then it WILL appear in search results and will ALSO have the problem phrase highlighted as well. So, for example, if I create a note that contains the text:

Beginning of note. Visit confusingproblems.org for more details. It has indeed been confusing.

… Then a search for the word “confusing” will find this note, and the results window will show BOTH the web address and the standalone word “confusing” to be highlighted. Remove the standalone word “confusing” and the note will no longer match without searching for the entire web address.

This problem is easily replicated across platforms and devices.

Please advise as it’s beginning to near the level of unusability for me due to the number of important notes that are missed when I search for them. The only way to locate the note, without knowing the entire URL (or whatever other special text it may be — password, etc) is to manually peruse all of my notes individually. Or I can export everything and use built-in macOS search functions to locate these simple phrases via Spotlight search.

Please advise if this is a known issue, if there is a fix in the works, or what more you need from me. I’ve given you enough information to replicate the problem.

voxpro / suntechpc – eBay seller of SIM cards, etc.

This is just a very brief post to hopefully save some others some grief when looking at options for cellular data. Now going under the username suntechpc this seller was offering “Bring your own SIM” as well as “Purchase our SIM” options for T-Mobile data SIM cards. There were some listings claiming $25.00 after tax, per month, and others with a higher price tag. This is overall a pretty good deal, but there are a few things to be aware of with this seller:

Billing

The pricing shown is only available if you submit your checking account information within their QuickBooks payment portal
Paying via a credit card will add additional processing fees
They will initially try to charge your card more than once in a 30 day period.
If there is any problem with your card, within 5 days they will terminate the service
Service may not be able to be reinstated, as in my case, where they are claiming they are “at capacity”
If service can be reactivated, there is a $10.00 fee (plus any fees associated with using a debit/credit card)
Technical

SIM card can only be used in a mobile phone device
If used in an unmodified hotspot device, it will quickly deplete the limited amount of hotspot data allowed

The price is pretty good, for sure. But it’s important to be aware of the above so you don’t waste time or money!

When I initially realized there was an issue with the payment card (it was a verification that the bank wanted) I emailed the seller right away to let them know, and to ask them to reattempt the charge. I think, had the issue come up while I was within the timeframe to leave feedback on eBay, that things may have been different. Who knows.