Why London Grid For Learning blocks GitHub, and why they shouldn't

Hi all! Today, I decided to check out an XFCE theme which is based on OneShot World Machine, only to be greeted by this error message here:

This message (known as LGFL SchoolProtect) is what you see when you try to access a blocked website, either by LGFL or with a local list.

This block wasn't issued recently, but rather a few months ago when LGFL blocked GitHub for being a gaming platform, which it isn't within itself. At the time of its block, GitHub pages with games were very popular, so it's no surprise

that LGFL took action on it.

Why this is a bad idea

There are of course, several disadvantages to this block, but I'll name one: they blocked the wrong domain. To put it simply, these pages are hosted on an entirely different domain (github.io), which is GitHub's user page hosting domain. This specific domain however (for the most part) isn't blocked, and to further prove this, I pulled up my GitHub readme which is set up to run on GitHub pages:

This is just more proof that even big companies screw up sometimes, but this is probably one of the biggest screw ups I've seen from a company focused on education - they literally can't tell the difference between .com and .io, and they should have done further research before going further.

Anyways, that's it! Ralzi out!

One month with a cheap Motorola

Hello again! About a month ago, I decided to make the switch to a cheap Motorola E20 after my Oppo Find X5 Pro battery kept dying way too quickly, even with no usage. I was originally intending to use it for a week. That week then turned into a month, so I think it's about time I wrote up about it, and shared my experience with you!

Switching over

Switching over from my Oppo Find X5 Pro was actually easier than I would have anticipated, minus transferring all of my stuff from one OHealth install to another, that was a pain. After switching over though, I had basically everything working as it did on my Oppo.

Overall experience

If I had to describe this experience, I'd say that "you win battery life, but lose everything else as a result". It was slow, that's for sure, but in some way, it has to be slow for battery and cost-sake. Speaking of battery, cost, and even performance, this phone comes with Android 11 Go, which DankPods describes as "the half version of a free operating system", and I believe him on that - Android Go releases skim down on stuff that is apparently not needed, but even then, the phone is still slow and does crash often.

Switching back

After this month, I ended up switching back to my Oppo Find X5 Pro because

A) I kept losing my card and having to order a new one

B) The phone was slow overall

C) The camera kinda sucked

Although I do think it is a good phone and value for money, I just don't think I'm ready to make the switch back to a budget phone after that experience.

So to sum up

The Motorola E20 is a budget phone made for those that just wanna phone that can... well... phone, I suppose. It's not bad considering it's £50 on Amazon, but I wouldn't be able to reccomend it to anyone that wants a decently powerful phone at a decent price. Speaking of power, here are the specifications of it.

And that's basically it! Ralzi out!

The problem with dark mode extensions

Hello again! Recently, I installed Peta Sittek's "Dark Mode Everywhere" extension, but couldn't help but notice that all it does is invert everything, not just the backgroud. Allow me to explain what I mean by this:

When you turn this extension on, it runs some code on the site to invert most of the elements, but that first sentence is exactly where the issue lies. Instead of inverting just the background and SVG elements that need to be inverted, it inverts basically everything. Here's an example using Google Classroom:

See how the notebook towards the right and the fact that in the corner is whte instead of black? This seems to be a big flaw with using extensions like this as they all get colors wrong. This is (of course) fixable via 2 solutions

• The developers of the site add native dark mode support

• The developers of these extensions change how their extension works

This is of course with no hate to Peta Sittek; I have been using his extension since 2020 and they are really good, I just wanted to point these problems out.

Anyways, that's all! Ralzi out!