I’m a big fan of the Cookie app for MacOS, which does an excellent job of scrubbing unwanted privacy-tracking cookies and other cruft from your web-browsing experience. But there’s one little problem: it can’t delete your history if you have iCloud bookmark sharing enabled, and Safari’s automatic “Remove history items” preference won’t do it either.

Meanwhile, the only Apple-supported method for clearing history nukes everything, including useful cookies like the ones that keep your bank from sending you text messages every time you try to login from a “new” browser.

The following AppleScript appears to be the only way to delete just your history from iCloud:

tell application "Safari"
    activate
    close windows
    make new document
    tell application "System Events"
        tell process "safari"
            keystroke "y" using command down
            delay 1.0
            keystroke "a" using command down
            key code 51 # delete
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

After running it, you need to leave Safari open for a minute or two without using it, or else it will repopulate with the iCloud history from your iPhone or iPad (“ask me how I know”).

Update

Seems this has the side-effect of causing Mobile Safari to freeze if it’s suspended on an iOS device, requiring you to force-quit it. At least, I’d never had Safari lock up on iOS so often. It’s almost like iCloud isn’t very good at this whole “sync” thing…

Update 2

Bumped the delay to a full second. If you have a lot of history to nuke, it can take that long to load it all. The Mobile Safari freezes continue to be an issue after running this script, but it seems it will eventually recover on its own if you leave it running, and doing so will keep it from freezing again.

…until the next time you clean out your history, anyway. “Dear Apple, up your sync game”

Shipgirls. You can’t swing a loli catgirl without hitting a dozen of them. Fortunately they’re easy to classify, as the Pixiv tag まったく、 駆逐艦は最高だぜ!! (“truly, destroyers are the best!!”) makes clear. This also crosses over quite a bit with 下着艦娘 (“shipgirls in underwear”), so most of them are in the NSFW section.

As a genre, I think it’s past its peak, but I just can’t see the new isekai wave generating as much quality cheesecake. Some of the early ones have done okay with the standard fantasy tropes, but now they’re into slimes, giant spiders, and [vending machines] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0763LLK22).

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Once upon a time, there was an actual “things you’ve marked ‘not interested’” list that could be added to, and even edited (unless, like me, yours had more than 20,000 items on it).

Now, however, your recommendation system has no memory at all. How else can I explain being offered the exact same items that I select “I’m not interested in this item” for every damn day? No, I do not want a Funko figure of Nearly-Headless Nick, and I won’t change my mind when you ask me again tomorrow. No, I do not want to read book 6 of an isekai series about a slime. No, I don’t want a Funko figure of Inigo Montoya, because I already bought the damn thing last week!

Seriously, of the 50 items in the “New Releases” you just offered me, I’ve already rejected 42 of them, some of them half a dozen times. If the buttons don’t do anything any more, just remove them and stop pretending you’re paying attention to my preferences. And understand that you’re selling less stuff to me because you’re not showing me products I might actually want.

By now some of my regulars shouldn’t need introductions, but I’ll fill in the names anyway when I get a chance.

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Clickbait spammy ad network Taboola keeps showing this to me (the Mill Valley bit is poor geolocation), and every time I see it, I think the rule they’re referring to is: kidnapped teens must be securely handcuffed while vehicle is in motion.

I thought everyone knew that, but maybe they don’t teach it in Drivers Ed any more?

I’ve spent 18 years trying to figure out what sort of picture to hang above the mantel. Then I stumbled across this on Sunday, and it arrived today.

Seems kind of fitting to put a volcano on top of a fireplace.

I’ve never played/watched/read any Fate/whatever games/anime/manga, but Grand Order’s Mash/Mashu/Matthew Kyrielight/Kyrielite in a blue gingham dress with sweater and glasses pushes all of my buttons. The ensemble even has its own tag on Pixiv: 先輩を殺す私服 (senpai wo korosu shifuku), “clothes which kill senpai” (aka the player). A few people have tried to expand the theme to other characters, but it hasn’t taken off.

Amusingly, I typed the above at work, then went over to the break room to nuke my dinner, and three attractive asian women walked in wearing flirty little sundresses with sweaters, and they all had glasses, too.

In related news, I’ve got Pixivpy working well enough that I can extract metadata for an image based on the ID in its filename, store them in a SQLite DB along with my work-in-progress tag translations, generate HTML to post the selected images, and update my Pixiv bookmarks with whatever I just blogged. That last bit helps improve their recommendation system, another way of weeding out the chaff.

Update

Senpai-killing body pillow (NSFW, of course)

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The tagging experience on Pixiv is… interesting. Images can only have a limited number of tags, so you’d think people would tend to consolidate, but no, there are thousands of tags, many of them slight variations that impair search results, and a lot that are just graffiti.

One useful descriptive term that turned up today was パイスラ (“paisura”), which at first glance looks like it might be related to paizuri (tit job), but in fact is an abbreviation for パイスラッシュ (“pai-slash”), and refers to the volume-enhancing effect of cross-body straps on clothed breasts. This also appears on Pixiv as π/.

Example images are left as an exercise for the reader.

(yes, someone in Tokyo owns paislash.com, and someone in Yokohama owns paisura.com)