Optimizing Your Environment

I know this might be a bit overreaching, but before the proper meat of this segment I just want to make sure you’re not using something like Safari or Internet Explorer (the latter is not even a thing anymore, thankfully, but I assume it can still be found on some winflops computers). Safari won’t do, sorry. I am taking you…

Browser Shopping

Long story short: all browsers and trash, use whatever you want as long as it’s a real browser (i.e. not something like Safari or Opera), just make sure all possible cookies/permissions are blocked.

In the perfect world I would’ve used Firefox, but unfortunately in the real world Firefox is the slowest moving object in the known universe (almost unparalleled on mobile though, because it supports extentions). I personally use Chromium (of the Ungoogled variety) on desktop and Firefox of mobile. However, sync can be an essential feature when you are creating Anki cards from 50+ tabs on your phone or tablet (to quickly bring them to the desktop browser and make your life a little easier), so I would probably recommend using either Chromium with Google API or Chrome on desktop + Chrome on mobile, or just Firefox on both desktop and mobile. I somehow sync isn’t something you need and you don’t like mobile Firefox, another mobile browser to concider is called Kiwi (also supports extentions and is even slightly faster that FIrefox because it’s a Chromium reskin).

Despite Chromium itself, as well as Ungoogled Chromium, technically being options to consider, I cannot just straight recommend them to you. Those are projects, and not 100% real browsers. You can get a stable Chromium with Google API keys (which will enable the Google sync function) and support of open source codecs here (as well as potentially slightly enhanced build of UC), but it still won’t play noflix, spoopify, amazon streaming services, etc without some tinkering, at which point you might as well just use Chrome. Maybe somebody can explain why Chromium+Google API is better than Chrome (other than it doesn’t update automatically), but that somebody is not my stupid ass. If you don’t need sync or netflops (waste of money, really), just get Ungoogled Chromium, of course. This is how to install extensions for it.

In addition to uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger, the third absolute essential extension for me is something like Dark Mode. Some browsers (like Vivaldi) have a “force dark mode” button tho, but definitely not Chromium (or Chrome, of course, since Chrome is just Chromium with Google’s spyware).

Another function Vivaldi comes with and no other browser does natively — the ability to Open New Tabs Next to Current one (instead of opening them in random places).

Not sure about all of the Chromium reskins, but Chrome and Chromium absolutely need this: YouTube Control Fix. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work flawlessly: every now and again I get the bug it is supposed to be “fixing” anyway. Without the fix, however, I get the bug every time I click on a browser window with redtube (from another window) and try to rewind. Can confirm Vivaldi having this bug as well.

Every browser’s new tab page sucks: I use Infinity New Tab.

If you are using Chromium on Linux, you may need this: Linux Scroll Speed Fix.

Obviously don’t use Google search unless you somehow absolutely cannot help it. DuckDuckGo is currently the best alternative.

Uncancerring YourTube

First of all, you unsubscribe from everything English, except for maybe musicians (the real ones, not the music-related redtubers) or any other artist whose content is not based on them talking you ear off. Then go to settings and change your location to Japan. If you’ve already been studying Japanese for longer than 2 months, change the language to Japanese as well. There is never a good excuse to not know words like 登録 or 高評価, and switching redtube to Japanese is borderline the only way to learn those anyway: so I don’t think it can ever be too early for the switch — it’s highly doubtful anything in your immersion can prepare you to Japanese website UI-related terminology.

Now. Redtube needs Jesus. There is way too much cancer (that’s really not good for you) and distractions for productive application of your limited time on this website. Use Unhook. It removes distractions from the website. Not unlike something you can do yourself by manually blocking elements with uBlock Origin. Only with Unhook it takes 10 seconds instead of half a day and is easily reconfigurable on the fly (which parts you want to block, etc). You can then use uBlock Origin to block the rest of the garbage on the screen. My redtube “home” page is just the subscriptions page, and this is the entirety of a video page (there is nothing below it):

If you don’t think this is liberating and refreshing, and the non-uncancerred redtube is much better — consider not using this website for immersion: you’re not going to do a lot of productive things on it.

One thing to note. Redtube never stops devolving, so certain extensions may interfere with each other or just randomly stop working correctly. For example, Unhook’s Home Redirecting is broken atm if you also use the next extension I will be talking about (PocketTube), so you need to disable that option (if you end up using PocketTube, I mean). The nature of the current bug is that Unhook keeps redirecting you to your sub page when you try open videos. Pretty much every time. That’s a bit too much uncancerring, I think.

• But how am I going to discover new channels? 😦
  • By using the search function. And also from collabs with the channels you are already subbed to. I don’t trust myself to use the uncleaned redtube in productive ways. Do you trust yourself? You shouldn’t.
• But what if I really really really care about these totally not cancerous English channels I’m following?
  • Just look them up manually when you absolutely have to. You’ll be surprised by how few channels you’ll be doing that for. Those are the ones you could maybe perhaps actually care about: the rest were just leeches on your brain. I ask you to consider not putting them back on.

Use PocketTube: Youtube Subscription Manager if you want to be able to organize your subscriptions (sort them into folders, arrange the order of channels on the left UI panel, etc). Extremely useful. Redtube itself provides literally no tools for things like that (I assume they don’t have enough money for it). At the moment is completely broken, but could be fixed by the time you read this.

Also use BlockTube to block everything unholy from search results (not just videos — you can block entire channels with it). You can also prematurely block channels and videos based on keywords (also comments, but by now you’re not supposed to have comments at all).

Are you trying to read something when paused on Redtube or Twatch but the player’s UI is in the way? On Twatch use uBlock Origin’s block element right on the paused video: that will remove the dark overlay preventing you from seeing things. For the rest of the interface: when in theater mode, the interface is tied to the edges of the window rather than the edges of the video itself, so if you just resize the window to be narrower than the video, the UI will be above and below it instead of right on top of it. To hide interface on Redtube: hyde.

You can remove many other stupid things with uBlock Origin: remember how websites love to have some kind of splash screen blocking you from viewing/interacting with the page until you give them your phone number or just generally consent to your personal information being sold to the highest bidder? Yep, most of those screens are easily removable. No need to click on any OK, I AGREE or SURE, GO AHEAD AND PROFIT OFF MY PERSONAL DATA.

After you are done with all that, consider cleaning the rest of the SNS websites you’re using (I mean manually, with uBlock Origin) and switching languages/regions to Japanese/Japan. Not everything is cleanable of course, and also websites can occasionally break during uncancerring. Or even after uncancerring, of course, if/when the UI gets updated. When it happens — go to uBlock’s setting, *My filters, and disable things one by one (by adding, say, // to the front of the string) until you find exactly which filter breaks the website (you may end up having to allow that element, unfortunately). Also don’t forget that your rules/settings/whatevers for pretty much all of those extensions can be exported and imported (even Infinity New Tab). So you don’t have to manually re-do everything when you switch browsers.

On a side note… I honestly don’t even know if it’s possible to uncancer twatter feed from random garbage. Twitter is very sneaky in how in hijacks the feed: usually it shows you a crap ton of cancer first, but if you refresh the page it all goes away and for a while you only get normal tweets from your follows. In addition to unfollowing all the random useless people you don’t even know and manually blocking a bunch of elements with uBlock Origin, there used to be this method: adding these to your muted words:

suggest_who_to_follow
suggest_recap
suggest_recycled_tweet
suggest_recycled_tweet_inline
suggest_activity_tweet
suggest_pyle_tweet
suggest_ranked_timeline_tweet
@ RT

However, these don’t really work anymore (or at least definitely most of them don’t). You can also try adding twitter.com##.flex-module to the uBlock’s filters. I’ve done all of these methods and I’m still getting shit like replies from strangers that my follows receive. If you know how to remove all that from the feed, please let me know.

Windows and Japanese

As long as you are using it, of course. You see, despite being unusable and terrible, winflops does have one huge positive quality: you in fact, totally for reals, don’t have to use it. I recommend at least trying Linux by, say, downloading VMware Workstation and installing Mint or Ubuntu because of the following situation with Windows.

If you do decide to use winflops for studying Japanese, you might notice that the system renders Chinese/Japanese characters like complete ass. I don’t think I would’ve gotten anywhere with Japanese if I wasn’t on Mac or Linux. Like, if you’ve ever seen how Japanese text looks say, in video games — apparently that is something completely out of Microsoft’s league. That is not how Japanese text will look in your system. Winflops fonts are… bizarre. It’s not even the fonts themselves as much as how jenky they are rendered: it is sad and painful. On win7 Japanese font was even worse: it was absolutely unreadable. It was ugly, one-pixel-thin aliased nightmare. Well, it is slightly thicker now on win10 (lol does anyone use 11?) but for some reason it is still aliased af, as well as weirdly boxy and still very ugly. If you want things to feel a bit better, you can try installing MacType. It made things a bit more tolerable for me, but that’s not saying a lot since I don’t use winflops all that often anyway.

When I am finally leaving macOS, I’m definitely going Linux for productivity: there is no way I am fully switching to winflops. Unless Apple wants to sponsor me of course — as a musician I’ll shill for Apple ecosystem 7 days a week: good luck getting anything audio-related done on Linux (you won’t notice any problems unless you are an audio person, so don’t worry about). The only thing transitioning to winflops from mac will be music production (and that’ll be win7 btw) — for literally everything else Linux is 1000 times better. If you are not on Linux or Mac already, you should reconsider your priorities: all you need winflops for are those video playthings for children you can’t live without, right? Well, no one’s taking that away. I am also not saying you should throw away your PC and invest into an underpowered overpriced Mac. Installing Linux alongside winflops and just trying it out will cost you absolutely nothing. Unlike with winflops, by the way, most Linux distros can be tried out without installing. Also virtual machines are a thing that exists.

Linux distros constantly switch places in terms of who sucks the most this week, so I recommend doing a bit of research (not a lot tho, at the end of the day they are all the same). There is always one new hot distro on the market receiving everyone’s praise. For example, at the moment it’s Pop!_OS. I don’t recommend you go with the hot option. Pop!_OS is the perfect example why. The current latest version of the system comes with seven Japanese input methods all of which are broken and you have to install the correct one manually. For comparison, even win7 had at least one semi-working Japanese method… which for some reason kept switching to roumaji… but it least in theory it was usable, OK! Now, installing the proper Japanese input method was actually super easy, but I wouldn’t expect anyone to know how it’s done. Especially if you are switching to Linux without much experience with Japanese computing in general — you’d probably just get stuck confused with the seven broken input methods before giving up on Linux altogether. Also, half the system is still in English once you switch its language to Japanese, and what Japanese there is looks a bit sloppy in places. So to sum up, I don’t see how Pop!_OS is any better for you and I than, say, Ubuntu. If you want more winflops-like experience, go with Linux Mint (Cinnamon UI is a bit more win10-ish, MATE for a bit more win7-ish).

Android and Japanese

Let’s do a simple test. Take a look at this character:

This is a picture of how it should look for you:

Here’s a link you can try opening: https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BB%A4%20%23kanji

If on your phone it looks different — it shows you Chinese characters instead of Japanese. Probably because your phone is a non-international version of itself your bought from a Chinese vendor on ebay. To rectify this problem there are apps like Kanji Fix. I also recommend it if Japanese characters (including kana) on your phone look like they are in comic sans (disgusting). That shite does not only look ridiculous: it is actually pretty straining to read in my opinion. Kanji Fix allows to choose between the default comic sans android font and the one normal human beings should be using. Kanji Fix does require root access tho: my phone was already rooted so it wasn’t a problem for me. If you don’t know what rooting an Android phone is, your phone is probably not rooted. Think of it as activating developer mode: something that allows for things in your system to be actually modified rather than just played with. The procedure is different for each phone, so you’ll have to search for it yourself. On most modern Android phones there is like one button for it somewhere in the system preferences. There could be some strange requirements attached to it tho: for example my phone manufacturer (meizu) wanted my email and phone number if I wished to press said button. As if they don’t already know all of my emails and phone numbers. Ignore idiots giving you reasons why you shouldn’t root.

Turns out on Android 7.0+ you don’t need Kanji Fix (unless you want to fix the comic sans problem). You just need to add Japanese to your language list in Settings —> Languages & Input —> Languages.

If you get similar problem on Windows, go into your browser’s font settings and choose Meiryo as the default font for everything. On MacOS, chose Hiragino Sans.