floof.org
I think I'm becoming utterly disillusioned on tech stuff lately. I'm hugely aware of the "you like stuff you grew up with" and "you have less patience for stuff as you age" biases, but even so...
Streaming is shit.
Searching is shit.
Researching is shit.
Shopping is shit.
Troubleshooting is shit.
My phone is shit. Autocorrect, touchscreen keyboards, Bluetooth, AI, Android Auto, Spotify, all shit.
It's not even capitalism or consumerism, I'm just tired of arguing and fighting with things I own.
That 168-hours-and-a-bit slowly cycles later and later into each passing week, and you fucking dread when it reaches late Friday afternoon, because it means Monday morning will be written off by logging in, rebooting, and patting multiple Microsoft applications on the head, and you're useless to your busy colleagues until you do.
This program with no icon or name is preventing you from restarting. You click Cancel. It restarts anyway.
Also, how likely are you to recommend Teams to a friend?
Your cheap home PC doesn't have the physical space for another hard drive inside, so you buy an external one and your wireless keybbbbbbbbboard starts acting up when you're backing up.
Seriously, USB 3 devices put out a bunch of 2.4GHz interference and it fucks up wireless gear. Put your dongles on cheap USB extension cables and blutack them to the underside of your desk, I promise you'll stop hating Bluetooth quite so much if you do this.
Bluetooth is still shit, but this one's USB's fault.
You buy a second-hand but still quite new wireless gamepad. It dies unexpectedly at the approximate age of 16 months. There's a listing for a replacement battery on Amazon and a disassembly guide on iFixit, so you take a punt on a new battery and swap it in.
The gamepad's still dead, so you email its manufacturer for A) a repair, or B) spare parts, or C) to offer them even more money to fix it, but they don't provide any of those for a device still sold new today.
Get fucked, Steelseries.
And here's the thing: None of this stuff makes me angry. Annoyed, sure, but I've been around computers since I was a toddler, and I have to solve shit problems like these for myself every day.
What makes me angry is: What about all the folks who aren't computer people? How the absolute fuck do they survive in a world where you can no longer function as an employee, a family member, any sort of citizen without encountering this stuff?
Those people are fucking heroes, and I'm angry for them.
This shit is why, when banks announced they were going to stop processing physical checks and a whole wave of elderly folks protested, I understood. It's one of the last fleeting vestiges of anything in their lives that still makes sense, and arguing about the cost of supporting obsolete systems is an absolute red herring.
It's not about the money. It's not about the tech. It's about kindness, and being fucking human to each other.
Do you work in IT? Do you support a system? Do you work on a helpdesk? Do you take calls, answer emails?
Congratulations. That's no longer your job title. From the moment you read this, you're a user advocate.
Process issue holding something up? Bug in the app? Is a particular system always down? Advocate for your users. Go to bat for them with the teams responsible for their struggles.
Folks will say "oh thank christ, it's you" when they hear your voice on the phone if you advocate for them.
tl;dr: In a world where companies will fleece you, scammers will steal your grandmother's savings, your chat program algorithmically charts your gender, and your car's manufacturer sells analytics about the way you drive without a second thought:
The only thing that matters is kindness, and we could all do with a lot more of it.
Also, I'm going to go have a drink or two now. Holy hell, that little rant has been building up for a while now.
Surprise! You're logged out of this website you were using ten minutes ago. Surprise! You're also logged out of LastPass, so first you have to pull down the notification shade, tap the LastPass icon, wait for some boxes to appear and move about, then you can log into LastPass. Then you can pull the shade back down, tap on LastPass again, tap the one matching site in your vault, and finally log back into that website.
Surprise! Would you like to save your login for this website to LastPass?
Dominos Australia's website having a totally normal one today. I appreciate the camelCase in the second screenshot here.
Not even going to address the derangement required to categorise "butter chicken" as a "traditional pizza" - you work with the system you've got, and they probably have decades of marketing research telling them "Traditional" is an incredibly valuable category name.
My wireless keyboard gives me so many varied and wonderful settings to handle what it does when I haven't touched it in a little while. I can make it dim the lights, or pulse them; I can set the brightness of them; I can tell it how long to wait after I stop typing to dim, and whether or not to turn the lights off entirely.
What I actually want it to do is use a $1 sensor to know if I'm sitting at my desk, and light up if I am, and be dark if I'm not. That's it. Where's that option, Logitech?
This description of a wireless gamepad on eBay is AI-generated, right? No human would describe it as weighing "only 1.5kg", that it is "compatible with games and controllers" and "has an unknown cable length" (I repeat: wireless gamepad), and that it "comes with an unknown manufacturer warranty".
This is worse than just leaving the description blank. I can't wait for the day I have to force a seller into processing a return and refund because the automatic lying machine misrepresented an item.
Oh, and here's Intel's white paper on the USB 3.0/2.4GHz interference thing: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/327216.pdf
It's from April 2012. The industry's known about this for 12 years, and it's been so well-communicated that you absolutely knew about it before reading my post on it today. More shit.
My phone sometimes hangs hard and reboots when I plug it into my car. It's too many taps to navigate to the single digit number of locations I have saved. I'll be mid-playlist, and Spotify will forget and switch to random songs based on the last one it played. People can't hear me on a whatsapp call even after granting it every permission it asks for. The album I had on last week won't play anymore because licensing.
And at the end of the drive it asks me if the fucking sound quality was okay.