Don't look!

I can't believe that looking at the video actually RUINED the story for me. Talk about a disappointment!

There are beards, and beards.

For instance This Guy, who, unbelievably, is running for office.....

you have to look. this is the photo on his campaign poster.

Has It been a year already?

I guess that it's time for my once annual trip to hotmail land. Somehow the damned thing never dies, and somehow I invariably end up using it for something once a year. Usually to test another e-mail account.

Anyhow, I had a relative complain bitterly to me last weekend that all of a sudden they couldn't figure how to send an email since it became outlook.com. They're the kind of average non-geek user that uses hotmail, and they were rightly pissed off.

(Not that Gmail is remotely intuitive until you've used it daily for a month)

Moot Point

To those of us in Canada where data charges are so insanely high that even garden variety HD video would bankrupt you. Hell, I think twice before streaming audio!

I Be Afraid.

Right now the Facebook app is the one thing on my Android phone that is always half-baked. It has "Network errors" when nothing else does, it uploads photos that never arrive at Facebook, or which are posted four times. It hangs for endless periods.

In short, it sucks.

On top of that, Facebook is a company that I really don't trust, and I've long since stripped any "real" information out of it, and refuse to let it connect with any other site or app.

...the Facebook app has the ability to read settings for the HTC Launcher, the stock Android launcher, and the Touchwiz launcher – this, Android Police believes, is a smoking gun that indicates the app may become available as a standalone app in the Google Play Store as well.

Aha. I'm betting that the next "upgrade" to the Facebook app will try to tie it so tightly into the Android OS that it will be nearly impossible to sandbox. That's the moment when it will disappear from my phone.

Oh My God....

I'm not only reading an article about an alternate file system that I'll likely never bother to use, I'm also reading and enjoying the comment thread that follows.

I really better take to dog out in the sunshine for a walk.....

Word? LibreOffice? LaTeX? Pfft

WordPerfect 5.1 STILL rules them all.

As long as you have your big fat copy of Acerson close at hand....

Eh? Wifi?

Burned it to a DVD, stuffed it in and rebooted.

This is the first distro in a very long time that didn't automagically find my wireless card and allow me to set up my network in a couple of seconds.

I'm surprised. I spent ten minutes poking around looking for the right place to fix the settings, but never succeeded.

Eject DVD and back into Mint.

That said, the KDE environment looked very cool and useful, and I MIGHT try it as an alternative to my current Mint install.

Just a guess

But this new and improved pay by bonk technology will turn out to be a) a pain in the arse for consumers and b) no impediment whatsover to crooks.

As for mating PayPal with Facebook? Yeah, right, I'm so gonna buy into that!

Rotten to the Core!

Hah! props for the tab containing PIL!

It's all about trust

Funny thing is, I'd actually trust Google enough to use that login for other things. Well, SOME things.

Facebook? Not on your life, both for the obvious privacy reasons, and because I assume that connecting anything to Facebook means a barrage of FB timeline spam* that I don't need or want.

No, Facebook is maintained as a tiny little island cut of from anything else in my life.

* Actually, the spam on Facebook is a great source of entertainment. Or more specifically, the comments that follow. Last week WalMart spammed us with news of their Green Student Challenge thingy, and the negative comments ran into the THOUSANDS. Broken up periodically by some poor social media moderator trying to convince people to behave nicely. McDonalds spam yesterday suffered the same fate.

Really, How Many Would Care?

Like dog plus 80% of world, I'm already downloading e-mail to my phone without BIS. In terms of data or power usage it's a minuscule thing. Push e-mail would be nice, but it's hardly a deal breaker.

I'm looking at the new Blackberrys to replace my Google phone not because I want or need BIS, but because I find the Nexus just isn't cut out for creating and handling information. By which I mean, writing an e-mail more than three sentences long.

I've been looking for BB reviews to get a better idea how well it will work for me, but have thus far been frustrated by the fragmentary and biased nature of everything I've found. Between the anti-RIM bitching, and the BB fanboi commentards, there is bloody little useful information to be had.

At least now I know how it will play with Gmail, which I use pretty much exclusively. I think I read that the BB will work OK with Google calendar. But beyond that, not much to go on.

For instance - real world battery life - not "if you turn off 4G." Battery with GPS, WIFI, and full phone function running.

For instance - how does the mapping and GPS compare to Google, or can I use Google's product on the phone?

For instance - how is the BB to use in cold or wet conditions - this is Canada after all, and the Nexus can be pretty irritating in snow and ice.

For instance - how does the camera rate? Does it, unlike my JB powered Nexus, allow me turn off the shutter click?

And, dare I say it, Twitter, Facebook, Google+....

Honestly, I thought that some of the reviewers who've had these phones for several week could have come up with a decently comprehensive review.

(Of course now I'll pointed to a half dozen such reviews. Oh well. (PS - a YouTube video of flashy features doesn't cut it either))

Multiplan and C64

Although I liked PaperClip on the C64, it was MultiPlan that made me sit up and go "OH. WOW."

A word processor was still like a typewriter with improvements, but automagically calculating numbers was just amazing, and I could see how far reaching that could be.

And yeah, WP 5.1 still rules.

The view from Canada

We're doing Netflix (US, via an add-on service to fool them into thinking we live there). The programming might be a season or two old, and the movie choices less than comprehensive, but we're paying about $12 a month, versus $40 minimum for cable.

For us it's a hands down easy choice. We're not TV junkies, and don't care if we're watching "this weeks'" episode of some show, so we could never justify the difference.

Admittedly Netflix lacks sports, and news, but I don't care about the former, and listen to BBC World Service in the car via smartphone for the latter. And surely Netflix' interface is horribly bad, and inconsistent to boot - some days it shows me "recently watched", some days it doesn't. No idea why. And I would LOVE to be able to tag things that I find and would like to watch later.

My frustration is the sheer amount of programming out there on the web that I can't (easily) get onto my TV. I'll happily pay for a single box that will get me the usual Netflix etc stuff, but also let me view streaming TV from websites the way that I can on my computer. And don't get me started about the madness of all of these regional series with differing choices.

Finally: An American remake of House of Cards? - that's just sad.....

Bang for Buck

We're one of those new Netflix households, via a new Sony DVD player. Plus a sub to Blockless.com, which makes NetFlix think we're in the US and not Canada, quadrupling our choices.

Upside: $12-13 a month, versus the $50-100 we would pay for a cable subscription.

Downside: a really mediocre interface, esp. on the TV; great holes in the selection, and no obvious way to guess what will or will not be available.

The geographic thing is critical. How come, for instance, US Netflix has more Dr Who episodes than UK Netflix? Weird.

All in all though, we've been lapping up a whole bunch of TV series that are new to us, if not to the greater TV universe.

Free Trade!

C'mon, if it was a factory job everyone would be cheering about the increase in "productivity." I'm waiting until we can outsource the politicians.

Don't need 'em

Around here we have one PC running XP - very happily. That will likely need to be replaced in the next year to handle some software that's on the horizon that I'm sure won't cut it on this box. (Sibelius).

My box has been on Linux for a few years, on a five year old Dell box, with Vista running in a VM when I do our bookkeeping. I'll probably replace this box too in the next year, for more storage space, RAM, and speed. But that's a "want to" upgrade, not a "need to."

Probably my first computer upgrade though will be my smartphone, which is where I do a LOT of e-mail, browsing, and other on-line stuff. And I can see adding a tablet for a lot of idle around the house stuff.

My laptop was given a way to one of the kids when I realized that I was only opening it up once or twice a month.

Seriously? You're COMPLAINING about the difficulty of opening PDFs?

PDF is sufficiently ubiquitous that I don't even think about them. On my hard drive. On a web page, in a browser. As an e-mail attachment. On my phone. In a standalone app... I don't even give it thought. it just works. It's been at least five years since PDF presented any challenge at any time.

Now, if you want to talk flash web stuff in any browser on my Android phone.....

Ah, but What of Blackberry

I'm not an Apple fan (three years with a Powerbook cured me of that fetish), and consequently wound up with an Android phone. Although I generally am happy with my now ageing Nexus S, and with JellyBean, I have to say that I'm very interested in seeing what RIM comes up with this month.

At the end of the day my phone is used more as a computing device than a telephone, and the ease with which I can create documents and communicate them is what matters. I don't have a real need for Instagram or Facebook, but I do often need to write e-mails that span several paragraphs - something that's just too much hassle with a screen keyboard.

Between trying to compose in wet or cold environments, and battling the insanity of auto-correct, I usually leave anything important until I'm back in front of a desktop machine.

Yes, I want real clickety click buttons to type with.

Beyond that, although I use Gmail and Google stuff for most tasks, I do keep running into barriers. Even something as simple as resending an e-mail that somehow never was received - something that can't be done with Gmail. I just don't find that Google is really set up for for someone that uses mobile computing for business, and suspect that RIM will do this much, much better.

For those who jump up to exclaim "But RIM is going down the drain!" let's remember that not too many years ago Nokia RULED the cel market, and couldn't be touched, then Apple, which surely Google could never match, and now Google. It's silly to think that any of these companies can't fall from grace, and equally silly to think that any one of them (OK, Microsoft) couldn't reinvent themselves and regain the dominant position.

Old ≠ Stupid

Today I found a very old newsgroup post, and discovered that I was messing with Linux as an adult way back in 1999. * Which is a roundabout way of saying that it's idiotic to equate 60+ with any inability to use technology.

Let's just leave age out of it - you would never accuse someone of being too old to understand how to use a blender, or an elevator, you would just assume they were pretty pathetic.

* Caldera, if you care, and never did get the X-server working right

Look! Over There! A pedophile!

It's time stop worrying about pedophiles* in the bushes, and start asking yourself this:

While the media and government have you all whipped into a frenzy worrying about this specific crime, what things are going on that you're not watching?

Really, if the people who are screwing you left, right, and centre in a thousand ways need something to distract you folks, this is the low hanging fruit.

*North American spelling, as the "ae/ea" combinations make our heads hurt.

Depressing

... that my first reactions was "Hey - that sound WAY better than any airplane meal I've had in the last decade!

Addendum #1: Then again, those were mostly Air Canada flights.

Addendum #2: Interestingly, in Kentucky no-one eats KFC - they eat Lee's Famous, which is much better.

Addendum #3: next time you're in or near a KFC, try to find the word "fried" anywhere in the store.

Apps? It's data that's killing me

Started using an app on my Android phone to listen to BBC in the car, and quickly ran into a data ceiling. The evil greedheads at Telus Mobility (in Canada) are demanding $25 a month for 2 gigs of additional data. That's a 50% jump on my current cel bill.

That kind of rip-off is so offensive that I can't bring myself to consider paying it, so no more BBC app.

Waste of Electrons

I've only been around for a partial eclipse (Northern Ontario, forget what year), but even that was pretty mind blowing.

What's even more incredible though is that anyone would bother watching an eclipse on the Internet.

Honestly folks, how dismal can things get?

Love / Hate

I rely on Gmail, and like it, but still tend to be beaffled by some of their designc hoices. Like no option to "Resend" a Sent message. Am Ia lone in finding this handy at least once a month??

Much like Android, I find Gmail to be 95% excellent. The other 5% though drives me to distraction.

I'm Lined up to Install it!

At the very first opportunity! When I buy a new retail PC! That has it already installed! In a year or two.

Seriously, that's how Vista and 7 got into the house. Can't see going out of my way to upgrade.

Craigslist / Freecycle

OK, I'm coming in very late, but what's with "throw it away?"

Anything remotely of use that I don't need gets posted to either our local Freecycle e-mail list, or the Craigslist "Free" section. I've yet to find anything that won't disappear within an hour.