Thanks to UPS My Choice, I know my mom just bought something for me as a last minute gift, since I’m too sick to make it. I don’t know exactly what she bought, but I know who she bought it from. I don’t suppose many children have signed up for it, so it’s probably not ruining anyone’s christmas surprises, more an amusing annotation on the changes that technology brings.
Archive for the ‘tech stuff’ Category
The secret is out
Friday, December 23rd, 2011MAME for iPad
Thursday, December 22nd, 2011Get it while it lasts, iMAME is a free port of the generic arcade emulator. I suspect it only got approved because there’s a big rush of apps being submitted before the Apple approvers go on Christmas break.
I Hate the new Gmail look
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011I am not a fan of the ‘new’ look for Gmail.
And it would seem I’m not alone in that distaste.
But Google did user testing, and they all said they liked the changes. Thing is, if you read their explanation of the testing, you’ll notice that “Stay the same” wasn’t ever on the table for fellow googlers, so it seems kind of dishonest to claim feedback was positive there. And any outside usability group you put together was inevitably going to be filled only with people who like to try new things. People who don’t like change aren’t going to sign up, so no matter how diverse by age, gender, etc your group was, it wasn’t a representative sample of the actual user base, and gives you no data about how the change would be received at large.
It would seem that some of the feedback is getting through, slowly.
But some of the worst offenses aren’t ever going to go away, no matter how many people complain, because they would interfere with the big Facebook-ification that is their ultimate goal. I get it, you want people to use Google+. Thing is, I’m not going to post everything twice, and everyone is already on Facebook, so that’s where that stuff goes. I have gigs of pictures and metadata on flickr, and that’s where that stuff goes.
Trying to mimic Facebook is a bad idea. Fads come and go. Instead of trying to reproduce the look of someone else’s website, Google should have been trying to build a tool that integrates all the social platforms seamlessly. I would kill for something that let me post my pictures to Flickr, and my words to my own blog, and lets me control how that gets shared with fine grained control, then automatically takes care of the minutia of which service which person is on. That would be good. Not evil.
Impressive
Friday, December 16th, 2011Usually, on-board clocks for PCs are not known for their long-term ability to stay correct. So I was surprised and impressed when I plugged in my old P4, that’s been sitting in a closet for over a year, if not two, to find him only 3 minutes off from reality.
In another year or so, it should be done applying all the Windows updates that have been put out since he last went to sleep.
Skydrive seems pointless
Wednesday, December 14th, 2011I don’t get why Microsoft bothered to pay people to develop their iOS app, given that it doesn’t seem to provide a compelling experience to anyone who has used one of the competing cloud services. You can’t send documents to the app of your choice, and their built-in viewer is horrible. Shameful and sad horrible. Like if you developed it and you are reading this review now, as much as you are considering suicide, there are good jobs out there where you aren’t asked to humiliate yourself, so please consider taking one of them instead of your own life. But seriously, you should be ashamed to have your name on this product, even if just in the source code files.
Free Yellow Submarine in iBook
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011There’s a multimedia remix of the Yellow Submarine movie, as an ebook, in the iTunes store currently, and it’s free even. Looks pretty cool so far, but I always loved that movie.
Comcast upgrade suckage
Friday, December 9th, 2011So last week, I get an automated phone call from Comcast letting me know that although they upgraded my billing for the new higher tier or cable speed they call “Blast”, a good six months ago, it would seem my modem was never capable of delivering the promised speeds, and I need to replace it with a more modern one.
Fine, whatever. I’ve been meaning to buy my own modem eventually, and stop paying the rental fee like a sucker, thinking I might switch back to DSL. Amazon delivered me a nice new DOCIS 3.0 modem that’s on comcast’s list of approved modems for Blast service. Now I fire up chat with the comcast support rep to give him the MAC address for the new modem, only to have this idiot waste 10 minutes playing some weird passive-aggressive game before he finally tells me I have to bring the modem into one of their service centers, physically, before they will update their system. I can understand offering that choice to the few people who can’t figure out the instructions “turn device over, read label that says MAC address”, but not having a self-service option seems downright stupid.
Maybe I will switch to DSL after all.
UPDATE: I got a message from Comcast to let me know the chat representative was incorrect, and that they can do the change over the phone. Lesson learned, the chat staff are useless.
Win7 Neato Niftyo
Friday, December 9th, 2011Call me unobservant. Just this morning I noticed that with the little mini-views of program-windows in the win7 toolbar, iTunes and Rhapsody both have little mini controls for previous/next/pause, so you can interact without having to give full focus. Skype has controls for changing your away status. I wonder what other programs support the feature.
A Kickstarter Christmas
Friday, December 9th, 2011After months of silence from most of the projects I backed, suddenly several of them are shipping out rewards, in time for Christmas. I got my cool Pogo bunny USB stick and T-shirt just the other day, the T-shirt, CD and poster from Haley Harris and Ben Nippes, and woke this morning to a shipping notice from the pack light peeps.
We could soon break 50% on the percentage of projects actually seen through to completion =)
Real Fail
Thursday, December 8th, 2011You’d think the people who work at Real Networks would treat the only division that actually has a future, Rhapsody, with a little respect. They are the only part of the company that has any sort of potential for revenue and profit these days. And yet they managed to release an update that completely breaks the Rhapsody client. That means they literally didn’t do a single smoke test on the product before release. Talk about a massive display of incompetence. If I worked in QA at Real networks, I’d be polishing my resume, because I would know I deserve to be fired. I mean for crimmeny’s sake, you just days ago announced your big acquisition and transition for all the Napster people, and you break your own product during that critical getting-to-know-the-new-guys phase. You might as well have poured all the money you spent on the Best Buy customers down the drain for all the goodwill you’ve wasted.
