540. Briefly: prevent Youtube and Google from signing you in -- firefox version

The scenario: I've got a blogger account (i.e. this one) which is linked to my google account, and I'd like to be able to use youtube and google search without being considered as being logged in. If I log out in e.g. the google search page I also get logged out from blogger.  Gmail isn't an issue since I use thunderbird/evolution, but it would cause similar issue to blogger vs search/youtube.

The past year I've become increasingly annoyed by the behaviour of google applications -- they feel more intrusive and I keep on being asked to sign in and stay signed in. Without going into specifics, it's beginning to feel like Google is trying to turn the entire web into their version of Facebook. And I don't lie it.

Anyway, luckily there's a pretty simple way to stay signed out of Google search and youtube, even without using privacy mode -- by restricting the use of cookies.

Here's what you can do in Firefox:

1. Install the Cookies Manager+ add-on in firefox, and restart firefox
2. In firefox, go to Tools, Cookies Manager+
3. Click on Tools/Exceptions
4. Add google.com and youtube.com

Done. Now you can remain signed in to all other google sites, while staying signed out of Youtube and Google Search. Note that it doesn't make you  anonymous, but it just takes care of some of the minor nuisances associated with always being tracked by google.

539. Laptop not suspending on closing lid in Debian Jessie/Gnome 3.8.4 -- need to use systemd

Edit: I suspect that there are solutions out there that don't require systemd. It just happened that this was the path of least resistance, at least for my laptop which has a fairly simple set up. Not sure my work cluster would be so straight-forward...

Original post:
Closing the laptop lid doesn't have any effect. dmesg returns

[95643.717984] systemd-logind[2731]: Lid closed.
[95643.718173] systemd-logind[2731]: Suspending...
[95648.722146] systemd-logind[2731]: Delay lock is active but inhibitor timeout is reached.
[95648.735369] systemd-logind[2731]: Failed to send delayed message: Launch helper exited with unknown return code 1

(also, why are we suddenly requiring systemd? I thought debian was going to be free from that...that...abomination...but I suppose this will be fixed before jessie goes stable in a couple of years)

Anyway, the issue seems to be that systemd hasn't got PID 1:

Working suspend/resume requires systemd to be PID 1 [1].
Boot with init=/bin/systemd for that.

And in my case I had

init=/sbin/bootchartd

in my GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT which I changed to

init=/bin/bootchartd 

. Note that my full line is

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet drm_kms_helper.poll=N init=/bin/systemd initcall_debug printk.time=y resume=UUID=8adf424c-c375-4035-8d5d-181489b4461b resume_offset=7182336"

where the resume commands are related to this post about hibernation using a swap file, and the drm_kms_helper.poll is related to this issue.

Anyway, rebooting gives

ps aux|grep systemd
root         1  0.1  0.1  46104  4668 ?        Ss   07:31   0:00 /bin/systemd
root       202  0.0  0.4 144868 18416 ?        Ss   07:31   0:00 /lib/systemd/systemd-journald
root       221  0.0  0.0  38500  2292 ?        Ss   07:31   0:00 /lib/systemd/systemd-udevd
root       877  0.0  0.0  37024  1760 ?        Ss   07:31   0:00 /lib/systemd/systemd-logind
message+   887  0.1  0.0  29148  2520 ?        Ss   07:31   0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --system --address=systemd: --nofork --nopidfile --systemd-activation

Closing (and opening) the lid gives

dmesg|grep PM
[..]
[  444.637761] PM: Syncing filesystems ... done.
[  444.668607] PM: Preparing system for mem sleep
[  444.784170] PM: Entering mem sleep
[  445.232203] PM: suspend of devices complete after 447.606 msecs
[  445.232862] PM: late suspend of devices complete after 0.650 msecs
[  445.277535] PM: noirq suspend of devices complete after 44.667 msecs
[  445.360219] PM: Saving platform NVS memory
[..]
[  445.509662] PM: noirq resume of devices complete after 100.525 msecs
[  445.510133] PM: early resume of devices complete after 0.295 msecs
[  447.065176] PM: resume of devices complete after 1555.037 msecs
[  447.151847] PM: Finishing wakeup.

i.e. it works.

So I'm now using systemd, I suppose. However, I have yet to explore whether I can still use my precious /etc/network/interfaces file. At least my network interfaces haven't been renamed using the systemd nomeclature which annoyed me so much back when I used Arch, and my /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules are still respected.

538. Briefly: Sort folders before files in nautilus 3.8

I'm running debian jessie (current testing) on my laptop and after having held off upgrading for a while since I had to take it to a conference and didn't want to risk ending up with a broken system, I finally took the leap. I notice that there are a lot of references to systemd in dmesg, but haven't had a look at what it actually means -- are we past init and fully switched to systemd now? Or how do I go about modifying my network configuration if I can't use /etc/network/interfaces?

Anyway, one annoying little thing is that in Nautilus the folder content by default is arranged in alphabetical order, regardless of whether it's a file or a directory. The old behaviour was to arrange folders in alphabetical order, then files.

Here's how to get it back to 'normal' behaviour:

 

The new behaviour

Click on the 'Files' menu on the top desktop bar, select preferences:

Check 'Sort folders before files' to get back the normal behaviour

Check sort folders before files to make Nautilus behave well again