Comment by Nexxxeh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nexxxeh | Hacker News Reader

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As my paranoia ramps up year on year, I now use Opera with µBlock. For me, it has the polish of Chrome with some nice extras, but without the increasingly creepy Googality. It works fine, although I've not tried µMatrix. (I have my defaults changed to DuckDuckGo. Usually connecting via a VPN.)

I've whitelisted a few sites I like to support (a couple of webcomics, HaD etc).

I have a lot of filters: "62,501 network filters ＋ 40,728 cosmetic filters".

Opera's task manager says the extension is taking up a mere 32MB. Probably not accurate, but a lot better AdBlock (my previous favourite).

Off-topic but I wish people would stop using Mu for project names. Where is the Mu key on the keyboard? I have to copy and paste or alt-code it. Call the project microBlock or something! They use "u" instead of "µ" on Github, so why not just use something else entirely?

µTorrent was the one that really irritated me because I couldn't type "utorr" to search for it on my start menu.

I'd say something to gorhill (albeit far more politely), but it seems childish and ungrateful. He's clearly poured so much time and effort into making such useful software. "Great software but the name is fucking annoying, mate!"

I myself most often write "uBlock" and pronounce "you-block", as in "users decide".

I originally used the mu character in place of the u to emphasize smaller resource footprint relative to similar solutions out there.

I've never been good with picking name etc., unfortunately now we are stuck with it.

Don't sweat it. It's actually quite a good name. It works both as "you block" and "micro block" depending on reading the first character as "u" or "mu".

If this is motivated by your paranoia, why are you switching to a closed-source browser?

Use a compose key system, native on Unix (Linux, Mac, etc) and available on Windows. It's very intuitive and will open up your character vocabulary considerably. I use the caps-lock key for compose.

http://fsymbols.com/keyboard/linux/compose/

DDG lies about not tracking you. Startpage appears not to.

http://www.howtotype.net/symbol/Micro/

Sadly, the US-International keyboard on Windows does not implement a shortcut for the "micro" character (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306560).

There's always character map which has this and like all others you can ever think of. A bit cumbersome, but at least one doesn't have to remember character codes and can search for characters by name.

"Let me google that" pulls out character map pretty poor UX if you ask me. Almost as bad for search ability as calling your product "go" or "cloud" or "driver" or any other one-word generic, hard to find even with contextual terms around it.

pretty poor UX if you ask me

yup. Has been around since NT or maybe even longer..

the poor UX is not the Character Map

It is having to open it every time you want to type the name of µSomething

The poor UX is the keyboard layout throwing away altgr.

In addition, I pretty sure many European keywords can type µ by alt-gr+m, at least in Windows on my Danish keyword. Only know that because once I had a keyword were they actually had printed it on the key, just like they always do with € on E.

> Where is the Mu key on the keyboard?

At least for me, option-m is the µ key.

There is a μ on the German QWERTZ keyboards.

On Apple keyboards Alt+m prints µ.

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