Category: programs & os

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Obsidian Kanban Plugin Missing Scrollbars In Default And Minimal Themes – Fixed With An Old CSS Snippet

Above: Too dense in some areas, too sparse in many others. My current 2nd brain, third hemisphere, whatever you wanna call it.

Update: 8:58 p.m. – from the "Grand Opening, Grand Closing" Department – the reported issue is already marked closed and completed (and duplicate – remember to check those "Closed" issues in github, folks!) by kepano (https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-minimal/issues/861). Just awaiting the next update before this post becomes useless to everyone.

Most of my existence (timestamp) involves Obsidian, a dozen community plugins, and kepano's Minimal Theme. One plugin I'm trying to use more in research planning/tracking/bite-size-piecing to get things done is the Kanban plugin (despite it not having seen much dev action lately. ? – see https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban).

Things are generally just fine between updates, but something odd happened at some point post-v1.8. Specifically, in the default and Minimal themes, the scrollbars in my extended Kanban boards went invisible. This as of Obsidian v1.9.12. See below:

System specs as follows:

Obsidian v1.9.12
Minimal Theme v8.0.4
OSX Sequoia 15.6.1 (with "Show Scrollbars" set to "Always")
Kanban 2.0.51

Goofing in the .css files, such as in https://forum.obsidian.md/t/solved-hover-display-all-scrollbars/10137/4, for either the themes or the plugin lead nowhere specific (except getting the scrollbars back during hover).

What did work was simply re-calling the "entire section controlling scrollbars from the app.css," as described below (from https://forum.obsidian.md/t/right-scrollbar-of-the-note-too-small-after-clicking/81603/4):

"Also, this is the entire section controlling scrollbars from the app.css. The CSS above only includes the sections needed to get that result. If you are looking to adjust further, you may need to add another section or two to your snippet to overwrite the defaults."

This is reproduced below. Simply copy, save as a file in [your vault]/.obsidian/snippets folder (I named mine "Scrollbars.css"), re-open Obsidian, go to Settings -> Appearance -> CSS snippets (at bottom) –> move the slider for "Scrollbars" to active.

body:not(.native-scrollbars) ::-webkit-scrollbar {
  background-color: var(--scrollbar-bg);
  width: 12px;
  height: 12px;
  -webkit-border-radius: var(--radius-l);
  background-color: transparent;
}
body:not(.native-scrollbars) ::-webkit-scrollbar-track {
  background-color: transparent;
}
body:not(.native-scrollbars) ::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {
  background-color: var(--scrollbar-thumb-bg);
  -webkit-border-radius: var(--radius-l);
  background-clip: padding-box;
  border: 2px solid transparent;
  border-width: 3px 3px 3px 2px;
  min-height: 45px;
}
body:not(.native-scrollbars) ::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb:active {
  -webkit-border-radius: var(--radius-l);
}
body:not(.native-scrollbars) ::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb:hover,
body:not(.native-scrollbars) ::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb:active {
  background-color: var(--scrollbar-active-thumb-bg);
}
body:not(.native-scrollbars) ::-webkit-scrollbar-corner {
  background: transparent;
}
@supports not selector(::-webkit-scrollbar) {
  body:not(.native-scrollbars) {
    scrollbar-width: thin;
    scrollbar-color: var(--scrollbar-thumb-bg) var(--scrollbar-bg);
  }
}

And, with luck, your scrollbars are back in your Kanban and wherever they might have also been missing.

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Empty Thunderbird Mail Filter Content Box Leads To Any Emails Containing Hyphens In The Username Being Deleted

Above: Barely-related eye candy but the best pic from searching for a header. From www.publicdomainpictures.net

Posted here just in case you've experienced similar and are searching for a reason why. And now a defect on Bugzilla! And now I wonder how long I've been deleting such emails.

As part of the prep work for posting Design Of A Molecular Field Effect Transistor (mFET) – Links And Commentary to ArXiv (still to do), I set up an account and received emails back from e-prints@arxiv.org concerning that setup. Then I went to apply my evening Mail Filters to clean up all my inboxes.

And that's when it all started.

The registration e-prints@arxiv.org email went poof. Not moved to Trash, not moved to some other folder, just gone from Thunderbird (as of OS X v. 128) – and still sitting on my iPhone, so I know it was still on the server somewhere.

After clearing out the relevant inbox and re-downloading all of the mail on the server, the e-prints@arxiv.org email was back in Thunderbird – and the search within the Mail Filters for the reason was afoot.

The offending situation is shown below for a demo filter. After a lengthy search, I found one filter that contained an empty content block. Deletion of this empty block left the e-prints@arxiv.org email alone in the inbox.

Yes, a mis-setup on my part, but I suspect not an uncommon mistake. Reported to Thunderbird developers…

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1956392

… who then linked it to an old bug that I missed on search of their list.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391717

Still the best email client out there, esp. when your MBP dies and you've no alternative to Apple Mail on your Ubuntu box (dragging your entire mail folder onto another OS, opening Thunderbird, and being back in business is a massive relief). Know it's on their radar and your/my dumb mistake will someday not lead to a similar outcome.

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MySQL Database Collation/Character Encoding Change With phpMyAdmin To Recover Special Characters/Languages In Very Old/Recently Migrated WordPress Instances

The Death of Socrates - painting by Jacques Louis David (MET, 31.45)

Above: if only he'd waited, Σωκράτης (that's "Socrates" to the rest of us) could have seen his name rendered correctly on my site. From "Death of Socrates," by Jacques-Louis David, 1787.

The lack of rendering of "π" and replacement with "?" in the title of the recent blog post "Examination Of Metal-pi Interactions In The Coordination Chemistry Of Heavy Alkaline Earth Metal Tetraarylborates" irked me, as I never remember having had an issue with "special" characters before. Noting here a quick fix that might be due to the fact that I'm sitting on a very old WordPress database (started in 2005) or that I switched hosting companies after 23 years (web.com –> greengeeks.com) and find that not all defaults are the same.

And I'm Greek on both sides, so this was personal.

Logging into phpMyAdmin for this site, I was greeted with (the key part of this being the latin1_general_ci)

And, from all reports, the latin1 character set does not support special characters. The character set of choice seems to be utf8mb4, for which a completely usable collation is utf8mb4_unicode_ci. So, to begin, change that.

Next step in this process was the replacement of all instances of latin1 to utf8mb4 in my database, which I performed as per the recommendations found at brianli.com/how-to-fix-wordpress-character-encoding/ but with the SQL query box.

And yes, for f's sake, back up your database first or download a copy and then do this.

That's:

update TABLE_NAME set FIELD_NAME = replace(FIELD_NAME, 'DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1', 'DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE=utf8mb4_unicode_ci');

And, with that set of changes, π.