Tag: hack

Taming Zoom

Matera the Mad

How to get into a Zoom meeting in a web browser if the fucking assholes won’t give you the option.

For years, I’ve just pasted my meeting link into a browser, and when the stupid join link doesn’t summon the desktop app (because it’s not installed!), the page would then present a tiny, hard to see but thankwhatever usable “join from your browser” link. Suddenly I found myself stranded, forced to use the app – or so it seemed.

I’m an old hand at URL dissection, so I tried ripping the bloody bits out and pasting them in where indicated.

First, copy the link and paste it into a text editor (Notepad, whatever) so you can see it easily and split it up.

The link discombobulates thus:

https://whatever-zoom-whatever/ [+] string-of-characters [+] ?pwd= [+] string-of-characters

The first “string-of-characters” is the meeting ID; the second is the passcode.

Log in to Zoom in a suitable web browser, go to the “WebApp” link in the upper right corner of the page, and enter the separate parts in the appropriate fields.

I loathe Zoom. Everything about it is deplorable, but the desktop app is the last word in shitty usability.

First of all, if you don’t have perfect eyesight, it’s a tiny-font torture chamber. You can change the font size for one feature that I never use, but the control labels, the chat, settings – NOTHING is readable.

Second, the window behavior! Uncontrollable narcissism! It doesn’t act like a normal window. If minimized, it becomes a little floater that can’t be gotten out of the way. If you use multiple desktop workspaces, and want to jump into another workspace to check on something else, the Zoom cr-app becomes a little floater and follows you around. Biggen it up again and you’re stuck with it in the wrong workspace unless you perform extraordinary shenanigans. It will NOT stay put in a designated workspace. That for crapsake is what workspaces are for – to to keep things separate, right?

So that’s why I prefer the browser interface. It Stays. Where. I. Put. It! The font size can be freely changed. It just, you know, works.

#FuckZoom

Empty Or Not?

From the Department of Insane Hacks

On Halloween, Windows played a dirty Trick on me, so I gave myself a great Treat: I blew Windwoes to hell and installed Debian. Life has been wonderful ever since — but that’s not what this story is about.

Because I like playing World of Tanks, I ended up installing Windows again, but only as a slave chained in a dark little dungeon that I could access when I damn well felt like it. One day, when I had booted into my little slave Windows to play, I wanted to do something Internettish. I opened the portable version of Firefox that was in a shared NTFS partition. Windows blue-screened out.

Something in that portable ffx was deadly. It may have come from an attempt to run it in Wine, or from an update done through ‘nix. At ay rate, it was thoroughly poisoned. I couldn’t run it, couldn’t delete the cache, couldn’t poke my nose into it at all without crashing Windoze. After three bluescreens, I stopped trying. It didn’t knock the virtual Windows over, so I tried to get rid of it from that.

Using Free Commander’s wipe function, I erased — oops, not quite all of it. The “Some files could not be deleted” dialog popped up. I looked. All that was left was a nested directory with NO FILES IN IT. OK, I step away from Windows and take a look with Nautilus. Yep, empty. But I still can’t delete it because it is “not empty.” Bash, what do you see? Nada. No files. It’s EMPTY. No command shows anything, deletes anything, does anything. It is empty, but it is “not empty.” I can even rename the top dir (from “Firefox” to “poison”), but I can’t delete anything!

I get mad. OK, you little SOB, you’re not empty — let’s see what happens if I put a real, visible file in you. Copy, paste. Ha.

Then I up-dir to the root of this odd family of not-emptines and…DELETE the whole shebang. No complaints. It’s gone.

I suspect a wee fukup in the Master File Table. Wottever, it’s just another one of those crazy hax where doing *something* shakes something loose and whothehell cares, it works.

The late perp:
/media/(UUID)/progs/poison/Data/profile/safebrowsing