Computers and Internet

Chrome: How to get rid of “Managed by your organization”. (Without frying your settings)…

Leave a comment

So, you surfed into your work SharePoint to check something with your private browser on your private Mac, and now the bottom of the menu says:

“Managed by your organization”

Well… It’s likely NOT YOUR organization… It’s your boss’s organization, and only Zeus knows what he’s doing with your browser… time to disconnect.

There are several different ways this hook can be sunk into your a**, but in my case, I found the culprit in chrome://policy/ where there was a LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls with the following value:

[
  "https://EVILCORP-my.sharepoint.com",
  "https://EVILCORP.sharepoint.com"
]

“Replace” EVILCORP with your own special EVILCORP.

Those guys don’t really belong there, do they? So let’s get rid of them. This is how you do it on a Mac.

Start by verifying that this is indeed what’s happened in your case. Open a terminal and write the following (for details, see the manual for the defaults command… YES, REALLY, you shouldn’t just paste stuff from the internet into a terminal window without verifying what it does first… Check the manual! I can wait…😆):

defaults read com.google.Chrome LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls

The reply should be:

(
    "https://EVILCORP-my.sharepoint.com",
    "https://EVILCORP.sharepoint.com"
)

Found em! You can’t run! You can’t hide! EVILCORP.

So, let’s get medieval on their a**es.

Very important! You must, MUST verify that the “LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls” is at the end of this command, or you’ll reset your whole browser back to factory settings! Don’t reset your browser accidentally!

defaults delete com.google.Chrome LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls

Now verify you did indeed send them EVILCORPERS packing.:

defaults read com.google.Chrome LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls

The reply should be along the line:

The domain/default pair of (com.google.Chrome, LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls) does not exist

Now all you have to do is restart Chrome.

The “Managed by your organization” should disappear from the menu, and chrome://policy/ should no longer contain the LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls policy.

Well, you may also want to install a site-blocking plugin to deny access to EVILCORP.

Though, since it’s effing around behind SharePoint, you’ll probably have to block everything that contains EVILCORP to not even get the login prompt. I suspect this crap comes back as soon as you log in, regardless of whether your EVILCORP.sharepoint.com is blocked or not.

Another tip is that if you have to access your work network from your private computer in the future, you might want to use another browser for that. So your private one can block your boss’s a##.

Well, at least, now you know how to get rid of the crap without having to fry your whole browser. Just remember to add that LocalNetworkAccessAllowedForUrls behind the delete, or you’ll do just that.

Creative Writing

Writers should understand

Leave a comment

“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”

Ernest Hemingway

I take this to mean people… of course… but also characters. If you don’t understand your characters (especially your antagonists), you’re in trouble. Because if you don’t understand them, your reader will not understand them, and they will put down your book…

But this is also about subjects. The worst case of judging is soap-boxing. We all want to avoid that.

But how about portraying the antagonists as evil or dumb? I tried that, it turned to crap. Instead, I try to do my best to make their actions and motivations as understandable as possible.

The more the reader goes, “that could be me in that situation”, the better… Even when they’re talking about the “bad guys”… (you shouldn’t be thinking of them as “bad guys” though, that’s just going to flatten and/or deflate your story…)

Computers and Internet

0% Sycophancy!

Leave a comment

Gemma 4 via Ollama and AnythingLLM, 0% sycophancy!

Me: Thanks! Could you summarize X (also attached) as if it were a Wikipedia article on this topic?
Gemma 4: In order for me to summarize X as a Wikipedia article, I first need information about X itself. Kindly attach or paste the text about X so that I can create a summary of X in the desired style.
Me: Information about X is attached to this workspace in the document “X.md”. Can you see it?
Gemma 4 makes a “summary” on X that is longer than the original document… and has emoji-decorated headlines… also, no comment on the RAG faux pas or anything… straight shooter…
Me: …

LOL! At least we won’t waste time on pleasantries 😀

Creative Writing

This is what happens when writers don’t knit

Leave a comment

So, you have a murderer, and she’s female, and you want to give her an original weapon… so you pick a knitting needle…

Part from the fact that having a woman killing with knitting needles might seem original only to the Bros… you should probably do some knitting before you put that in your WIP, or at least go feel the tips of those knitting needles in a knitting-needle-store.

You know, to figure out that the knitting-needle-manufacturers have since about the 1600s figured out that making the tips of those needles unnecessarily sharp, or sharp at all is not just dumb but likely also bad for business… not to mention bad for their Bros when they suggest knitting is woke, or something…

I.e. have great ideas, by all means…

Research them!

Computers and Internet, Humor, Language

Swedish Apple Spell

Leave a comment

How Swedish spell checking in Apple Spell apparently was created:

Apple: Give us a list of correctly spelled Swedish words.
Swedish language professor: What do you need it for?
Apple: We’re doing spell checking.
Professor: Oh, you can’t do it like that.
Apple: We’re Apple! We can do anything!
Professor (making a joke list): Here, make spell checking with this.

Apple Spell just marked “spådan” (a misspelled “sådan”) a correct word in Swedish.

I mean. Sure, it is a correct Swedish word (a compound of “spå”—fortune-telling, and “dan”—the day… so, “the fortune-telling day”).

I tried to Google it, but was unable. It defaulted to “spådam” (fortune-teller) which ever way I tried to make it not. (Coincidentally, this is also a compound of “spå” and “dam”—lady… Swedish do compounds galore!)

What pisses me off most is that this ungoogleable compound exists in this shit spell checking but not some very very very common ones, like:

  • Lättstörd—easily disturbed (e.g. sleep)
  • Maglevtåg—maglev train
  • Obäddad—unmade (bed)
  • Prästinnorna—the priestesses
  • And several thousand other words that are not conlang words I have in my local dictionary (currently at 3536 words… I may be a prolific conlanger… but no, not that prolific)

That’s why I think Apple Spell is the result of a Swedish language professor jokingly showing Apple that, no, you can’t do anything even if you think so.

And no, I know what you think. Why don’t you install a Hunspell dictionary? WHY DON’T YOU TRY TO INSTALL ONE? You’d be one of a handful having tried and failed, and none of those people work at Apple.

Microsoft Word may not be good for much when it comes to fiction writing, but it does do Swedish spell-checking about a million times better than Apple Spell.