Tag Archives: technology - Page 9

Doing It Way Wrong

Posted by on November 20, 2013 No comments

http://www.ibtimes.com/kleargearcom-woman-hit-3500-fine-bad-credit-score-after-writing-negative-review-online-retailer

This story caught my attention, so I had to do a little looking into it.  I’m no uber-sleuth, but I can put some things together. I can put together enough to make some conclusions.

My first thought when going to KG’s site was, oh, they’re ripping off ThinkGeek.  Then I saw the copyright date of 2001, and thought, maybe they were first.  Turns out they’re not, ThinkGeek’s copyright goes back to 1999.  But in the course of figuring that out, I found that KG’s internet domain was first registered in 2004.  I’m not sure you can copyright a domain name before it’s even registered.  Scam flag #1.

Looking at the next level: the address.  A reputable company will display its address prominently to provide credibility.  However, the address is a Michigan address and there is no corporate record in Michigan for their company – no DBA record either.  Looking further, the address is simply a mail drop, not a physical location.  Scam flag #2.

So where is this company?  The BBB website says that KG’s legal department had an address in San Antonio, TX.  No corporate records found in Texas for them either.  A quick search in LinkedIn shows three members, the CEO and the CMO of KG (Rob Key) and a freelance writer who contracted with KG.  The CEO and CMO are both in Michigan.  Hmmm.  Rob Key also might have an address in San Antonio, TX according to internet searches.

So let’s just assume that’s a dead end.  The biggest red flag is their help page, which basically spells out how you’re going to do business with them.  in short, it’s the most unfriendly terms possible.  There isn’t any way to check the status of your order.  I couldn’t even find a login to check your profile.  When you have so many other options out there, why would you even buy from this site?

I’ve seen this business approach before.  It was in my Finally Fast review.  Companies like this need to die a quick death because they are doing no one any service.  The unfortunate thing is that the owners live on and create a brand new entity just like the last one.

Out With The New And In With The Old

Posted by on November 7, 2013 No comments

I guess it wasn’t meant to be.  I am back using “the tank”  – my old keyboard.  I gave the new slimline KeyTronic keyboards a fighting chance.  but I’ve ruined three already – not a good sign at all.  The first one, something happened under one of the keys, so I pried off the key caps to fix it and wound up breaking the spring on one of the keys,resulting in the key being stuck down.  I RMA’d that keyboard and I think I had to pay shipping.  Its replacement, I spilled a very little bit of Coke on it, and the Delete key started sticking.  There was no way I was going to pry off the keycap to clean it!  So I lived with the sticking delete key for quite a while (and I use it a lot).  The keyboard I took to work has actually failed from use.  The left Control key sticks randomly.  With all the key commands I use every day: Ctrl-X/C/V – cut/copy/paste, Ctrl-E – Execute query, Ctrl-S – Save, Ctrl-A – Select All, Ctrl-Z – Undo, it just couldn’t handle the stress.

I’m taking the other tank to work and will start using it there again, too.  I have some new co-workers, so I suppose they’re going to be ridiculing me for my ancient technology.  Laugh if you want, but it is damn good technology.  They don’t make ‘em like they used to.  When I started typing this post on the old keyboard, I was surprised at how much better the action felt than the thin, low-profile style.  It’s much more forgiving.

I still have one of the slimline keyboards.  It’s still new in the box and I’m unsure what I even want to do with it.  I think it’s going to be donated to a junk sale.

Windows 8 Users, You Need To Do This.

Posted by on September 27, 2013 No comments

Windows 8 has been around for quite a while and there are still people that are pissed off, frustrated, and confused about it.  It’s all about the Start screen.  People don’t know what it’s about or how to use it.  My initial message to people was, “Get over it.  It’s the Start Menu, just in a different display format.”  Then when they still didn’t get it, it became, “Stop worrying about it, just start typing and search for the program you want.”  Now I have a new message: “Don’t be afraid.”

Here’s my Start screen at work.  It is not intimidating; it is not confusing; it is everything that I need to do my job and nothing more.  You can have this in three easy steps.

Start Screen

Now, when I say, don’t be afraid, I mean it.  What you need to do is right-click the hell out of your icons and remove them from your Start screen.  What you want is only the programs you use on a daily basis.  You might be saddened to see how little you use your computer when you seem to have so much software installed on it.  Once you have done that, you will immediately feel less overwhelmed.  DO NOT BE AFRAID.  All of your icons and shortcuts are still searchable, findable, and re-add-able in the All Apps screen.  Trust me, when you have your Start screen finished, you’re going to be freaked out when you see everything behind the scenes.  And that was the old Start menu.

Now for step two, creating groups.  You see that I have five groups of icons, we’ll cover the naming of those groups in step three.  For right now, merge everything into one group, then start dragging icons out of the main group, when you see a highlighted column appear, you will be creating a new group when you drop the icon.  Think in terms of categories.  Don’t worry if your groups are out of order, we can rearrange whole groups in step three.  Originally my first two groups were combined, but there didn’t feel like there was enough whitespace, so I broke some icons out.  it changed my four-column group into 2 two-column groups, and it gave me a new “category”.

Now for the final step three.  Once you have your new, limited icons set up, move to the lower right of the screen where you see the “-“ minus/zoom out icon.  The Start screen will zoom out and you can work on your layout at the group level.  Right-click each group and choose Name Group, then give it a meaningful category name.  While your group is selected, you can drag it into a different position.  Click a blank area of the screen to zoom back in.

Now, take a deep breath and look at what you’ve created.  It’s a launchpad for your work.  Never mind all that hype about live tiles.  Maybe someday it will be worthwhile to hit the start button to get caught up on bunches of little details, then jump back out.  This is more about arranging your desk.

The very first thing you do when you install a new application is take all those new stupid icons off the Start screen.  That is, unless you want to keep the application’s primary shortcut – if it’s something you are going to use very frequently.  If you won’t, get rid of it and find it later via search.

Triple Gunnars

Posted by on August 23, 2013 No comments

Ok, so now I have three pairs of Gunnar glasses.  I figure I have enough experience with them now to make a compare and contrast review if you are considering any of these models.

My first pair was the Groove model.  When I got it, I was somewhat disappointed by the rubber arms  – I was thinking they were metal from what I saw in the pictures.  The Groove has good-sized lenses and a decent wraparound design.  However, the Groove’s nosepads are not articulating.  If they don’t fit right, you need to bend them into a comfortable position.  I actually gave up on the Groove for an extended period because I could not get the nosepads to stop digging into my nose.  That is what led me to my second purchase.  But while waiting for shipment of my second pair, I was able to find a position that fit and felt excellent, and they became my standard work glasses.

The next set I purchased were the E11vens.  My primary reason for buying them was the hard plastic, fixed bridge.  I figured that would be better than the nosepads that were burrowing into my skin on the Groove.  When I got the E11vens, I was disappointed by the cheap black plastic.  Plastic doesn’t have to be cheap-sounding, but this is.  Very tinny and light sounding.  However, despite that,  the E11vens are lighter than the Groove and the bridge is comfortable.   Also, this model excels in an area that the others don’t.  It’s wraparound design is totally up on your face, like goggles.  Because of this, if you get dry eyes, these will keep the moisture in your eyes and you will praise them at the end of the day.  The other positive about the E11vens is they have the largest lenses of the models I own.  This means you can look all around without needing to move your head as much.  While I was using the Grooves at work and the E11vens at home, Woot had yet another Gunnar sale.  This time, they had a model I’d been watching and hoping for.

I purchased the Emissary model last week and just got them today.  The full name is Attache Emissary, to give you an idea of the image they are trying to convey.  And when I opened the box and pulled the glasses out, I was stunned.  They were beautiful.  Where I was disappointed with the materials used in the other two, I was highly impressed with the sturdy feel of the metal frames and their hinged arms.  The glasses felt feather-light, but they probably weigh about as much as the E11vens.  It’s probably just a perceptual trick because the Emissary frames are so thin and the E11vens are so bulky.   The lenses were tiny, unlike the other two.  The Emissary looked very similar to the Ray Ban prescription glasses I wear.  So from a stylistic perspective, there is no comparison.  If you want style, this is the one to have.  But that style comes at a price.  The lenses are very small, so you need to move your head more to keep the your vision through them.  Because they are small, they don’t have any of the wrap-around benefits like the E11vens, so your eyes may dry out quicker.

Looking at the Gunnar online store, The Groove isn’t available anymore, nor is the E11ven, and the color of Emissary I bought isn’t available.  That’s all fine.  Woot is a clearinghouse for older and discontinued stuff, and the glasses work just as well as the new models.  The model I have my eye on now is the Epoch, which is similar to the Emissary, but with thicker frame lines.  Go for four?  Why not?  I used to have a massive collection of sunglasses in my younger days.  I guess this is the adult computer geek version of that hobby.

Garbage Backup

Posted by on July 4, 2013 No comments

As I get older and my data grows along with me, I am slowly getting better at managing it all.  I’ve blogged before about losing data and it’s never pleasant when that happens.  But, I’m doing pretty good now, and I have one more step to go.  Right now I have weekly backups to an external drive.  The next step is to have a monthly backup stored offsite in a safety deposit box.  But anyway, that’s not the point of this post.

I have a 1TB external drive for my backups, which occur weekly.  They are differential backups, only backing up the changes.  That should allow me to get a lot more use out of the drive instead of doing full or incremental backups, and it also gives me change history.  But I want to get even more out of that drive.  Right now I’m down to about 30GB free.

One thing that Windows backup does is backup your user profile folder.  This includes your temp folders, yes, and your temporary internet files folder.  You probably see where I’m going already, so I’ll just explain what I ‘m doing to trim down the amount of useless data I’m backing up.

Windows has a Disk Cleanup utility and that utility has the capability to be automated, which is what I’m doing.  I run the utility just before the backup so that my hard drives are as clean as possible.  You can do this in a couple steps.

First, open a command prompt and enter cleanmgr.exe /sageset 1

This will open the disk cleanup utility and will prompt for what types of files you want to clean.  For me, I just chose everything, but you may want to be more selective.  Temp files and Temporary Internet Files are options.

image

When you click ok, the options are saved as profile #1 (that’s what the 1 is for; you can choose another number if you want different profiles).

When you want to run this cleanup profile, just open a command prompt and run cleanmgr.exe /sagerun 1

You can also put that in a shortcut or put it in the Task Scheduler.

image

Enjoy your smaller backups and your extra drive space!

Responsive and Slow

Posted by on June 13, 2013 No comments

A recent discussion with a co-worker resulted in the phrase “responsive, and slow.”  This came about from using Microsoft Office 2013.  Office 2013 is some kind of a pinnacle of where software development seems to be going, and it seems that’s just a bit too far.

For years now, asynchronous programming has been shoved down developers’ throats.  “It must be done this way! It’s how you achieve a responsive UI!”  Seems like desktop applications have always had background work being done.  The original idea was to do processing in the background, so you could cancel the work if you needed to and so you could display a progress bar.  This is fine. 

Then there’s the case of background loading tasks.  Lets say a dropdown list needs filled, so the dropdown list is disabled while the data is being loaded in the background.  Meanwhile, you have your mouse hovering over it waiting for it to finish and become enabled.  Now we’re starting to see the effects of async programming. 

Now, take everything and make it load async.  Your application opens and nothing is there, then things start magically appearing all over the place as they finish loading.  This is how Office 2013 feels, although that’s not literally what happens.  The best example is marking emails read in Outlook and there is a significant delay in updating the unread message count.

As long as I’m griping about Office 2013, I find the new Lync 2013 client to be ridiculous.  I keep my conversation windows on the left side of my monitor, which Lync is great about remembering.  The problem is, the new message notification shows up in the lower right of the screen, so I have to click there, then the chat window does a wicked-smooth slide all the way across my screen to where I keep them, then it does a fade in.  So, in addition to having to move my mouse the full width of my screen, I have to wait for the animations to finish.

But anyway, back to asynchronous coding.  It’s all supposed to be in the name of responsiveness, so the UI doesn’t get blocked by anything.  The problem is, maybe the UI isn’t ready for use yet!  Have you seen a UI with 20 “loading…” placeholders all over?  if you haven’t yet, you will soon.  T-Mobile’s account management section does it.   This is stupid.  How can computers be so fast and yet so slow?

Gunnars

Posted by on May 30, 2013 No comments

I’ve been a Woot buyer for a while, from back when Woot was cool.  But even now, you can still get some good deals.  Anyway, that aside, it was a few months ago that I saw one of my co-workers wearing these yellow glasses.  He said he got them on Woot.  I recognized them as Gunnars and was curious as to whether they were worth the money.  He said he noticed the difference.  I tried them on and because of the slight magnification of the lens, I took them right off and said “no way.”

Weeks go by and my co-worker is wearing his Gunnars every day.  Every once in a while I ask, “they’re working ok?” and he says they’re great.  The joke in our department is that they are future glasses and when wearing them you can “see future.”  On a more practical level, if the glasses didn’t work, he would’ve stopped using them.  So, the next time Gunnars showed up on Woot, I went for it.

I purchased the Groove model.  When I got them, I was slightly underwhelmed.  The arms were simple rubber and the nose pads were stationary and tiny.  But I got over that and wore them to work.  After an extended time, the nose pads started really hurting me.  I adjusted them over and over but couldn’t find a good position.  So I ended up wearing the glasses less and less and eventually they just ended up in a drawer.

Another Woot sale came along and I decided to purchase another pair, one with a different bridge.  I decided on the e11vens, since they had a solid plastic bridge.  When I got the glasses, again, I was slightly underwhelmed.  The whole frame was a glossy black plastic and felt a little on the cheap side.  But the glasses look like something Tony Stark would wear, so there’s that, anyway.  At the time I ordered the e11vens, I played around with my Groove’s one more time and found a very comfortable nose pad position.  With that modification, I started wearing the Groove’s consistently.  Now I had a pair for work and one for home.

The real question is, do they work?  Yes, they do.  You’ll see a lot of reviews saying that Gunnar’s are overhyped, overpriced, and pointless.  After using them, I have to disagree.  I’ll admit, when I first researched Gunnars, I was totally put off by the hyper-aggressive, buzzword-laden marketing they used.  Since that time, the company seems to have toned the hyperbole down and the message is a lot more palatable.  I read some quotes from their founder and they made a lot of practical sense.  Basically, Gunnars are safety eyewear, and that’s not sexy.  It wouldn’t be very cool to be wearing “safety glasses” at work, and who would ever buy them with that label?  So I understand why they did what they needed to.  Now, with some real testimonials and word-of-mouth behind them, they can afford to be more realistic and practical with their message.

Now, some of the arguments against Gunnars say that that all they are is tinted glasses and all you need to do is go out and buy blu-blockers from the dollar store to get the same effect.  That’s fairly untrue.  Some of the features that Gunnars profess (and probably way over-hyped) are actually beneficial.  I’m not going to look up what their special marketing words are when discussing the features, because they don’t matter.

One feature -  I ‘m pretty sure they call this “microclimate” – is the wraparound style of the lenses.  It doesn’t need a buzzword to be effective.  I know this works because my eyes don’t dry out throughout the day.  You may think it’s a placebo effect, but physical proof that my eyes aren’t drying out is that I get “sleep” in my eyes at the end of the day, which means my eyes are tearing more than sufficiently.

Another feature is the slight magnification, the part that freaked me out when I first put the Gunnars on.  This magnification is optimized for up to about a 3 foot distance.  Don’t wear Gunnars for driving or even for walking around, they don’t work for far distances and you’ll get a headache. 

Gunnars hype the optically pure lens material and anti-glare coating.  Eh, I would hope glasses would be clear and anti-glare, especially at that price.  And the tinting, it’s not sunglass tint, it’s like shooting glasses.

So, can you use blu-blockers?  Sure, but you won’t get a wraparound fit, so your eyes will dry out.  The tinting will be darker and more pronounced, which I can’t see that doing any good.  You could use shooting glasses, but you won’t get the near-range magnification.  Cheap sunglasses probably aren’t as optically pure as specialized glasses, so maybe there would be a bit of distortion.  And, purely for vanity’s sake, in an office environment, wearing Gunnars may be considered edgy, but wearing actual sunglasses would be either tacky or plain weird.

The other real question is, are they worth it?  For $100, I wouldn’t think so.  Luckily, they are a Woot recurring item, so you shouldn’t have to pay that much.  At Woot prices, they are definitely worth the money.

An Honest Try

Posted by on May 22, 2013 No comments

I’ve played around with Linux in a few different forms on and off in my computing years.  Recently, I’ve been pretty impressed with the Ubuntu and Mint offerings, since they are really starting to look like polished pieces of software, with friendly installers and GUI management tools.  So, I happened across an older laptop and decided I would make it an Internet machine.

My biggest problem with Linux is that I am a Windows developer.  That means I spend a lot of my time in Visual Studio and SQL Server, neither of which are suitable for Linux.  I could probably get by with Wine emulation for most other applications, but developing is what I do, so I need Windows.  But I figured I could have a laptop that is just for Internet, and with Linux, it would be a speedy little device.

I keep an Ubuntu USB stick handy for disk diagnostics, so I booted that up on the laptop with no problems.  The laptop’s hard drive was dead and I was waiting for a new one.  I figured I’d try something fun and try installing Ubuntu to a 16GB naildrive stuck in the laptop.  Just so you know, it’s impossibly slow when running off a USB drive acting as a hard drive.  No SSD speed here.

Last night, I got my new hard drive, installed it, and downloaded the newest Mint version onto a USB drive.  I went to install and the system froze.  Tried again under compatibility mode and Mint essentially said the machine was not compatible.  So I tried with the newest Ubuntu.  Same thing.  I should have figured as much since Mint is built from Ubuntu.  So I went and installed the older version of Ubuntu I had on my diagnostic USB drive.

Mind you, I went into this install with a pretty positive attitude.  Maybe I was a little unrealistic in how lightweight and fast Linux is supposed to be, but lots of things started adding up.  Downloading the ISO images was so slow.  I thought Linux was huge in universities and they had lots of bandwidth.  I guess that’s not as true anymore?  I was surprised that newer versions were less compatible with older hardware.  I thought things always got better with time.  Then, the install itself took a surprisingly long time to finish – over an hour.  Again, maybe I’m being unrealistic, but I think that my expectations have been molded by the enthusiastic Linux community.

Finally, after install, I have a desktop and everything’s working pretty well.  I map a network drive and try out a few application.  Then the Update Manager pops up.  Yeah, I’m using an older version, so I have to update.  Woah, 471 updates!  That’s almost four times as many as Windows XP’s post-install updates (~120).  Alright, go ahead and update me.  Another hour passes and now I have to reboot.  Linux needs a reboot?  I restart and when I get back to my desktop, I’m prompted for my wireless network passphrase.  That’s odd, I thought Ubuntu would save that.  I re-enter the password again and Ubuntu prompts me again.  Oh.  The 471 updates broke my wireless network driver.  Where do I go from here?  Which update did it?  Not knowing the details of Linux, how would I even begin to troubleshoot this?  Can you even roll back updates in Linux?

So here’s where I picture myself at: I can reinstall fresh then either skip all updates or try to find (guess) which updates botched the wireless and exclude them.  Looking through 471 updates is not high on my list.  The other option is to install Windows XP, which I know will work.

The Future Is In The Past

Posted by on May 3, 2013 No comments

Today I was forwarded an article about a new computer input device utilizing gestures and the article was teasing with a headline like “gestures replace keyboard and mouse.”  Uh huh.

Go ahead and pile this technology on an ever increasing pile: Stylus, touch, multi-touch, swype, and Kinect.  All of which are supposed to be revolutionary and every one has not replaced the keyboard.  Or maybe that’s not true.

Long ago, computers were for highly-skilled people – researchers, academics, scientists.  Then they went mainstream.  Personal computers took over every household.  Then, people started demanding less “computer-looking” devices, so the style element of PC’s was addressed.  More recently, it seems the public has been clamoring for simpler interfaces, reducing the need for input devices.  Enter gesture and touch input.

Depending on which camp you are in, this advancement – or decline – of computers is only a subset of the reality.  Throughout all of it, the standard computer, with boxy tower case, keyboard, mouse and monitor (or monitors) is the mainstay of the creative computer users.  The alternative input devices are too imprecise and too inefficient to actually create anything of quality, whether it be art, code, or engineering.  The sacrifices made for aesthetic purposes limit the raw power needed to actually do work.  So because of this, the computing landscape has split into creators and consumers.

The media keeps hyping that tablets are the future.  This is actually probably true.  The majority of people are not going to need or want the power of a full computer setup.  Combined with the news that there are fewer students with computer programming skills than in previous years, this forms a scary trend.  In a few generations, it’s entirely possible that the use of an actual computer becomes exclusive, just as it was in the early days of computing.  If you have a full computer, you could be viewed as old-fashioned, or maybe you’d be viewed as a genius.

The media also keeps saying that the PC is dead.  This in absolutely not true.  If this were true, there would be no way to create future software and hardware.  However, if they were to say, the consumer personal computer is dead, they may be on to something.

To me it’s very sad to think that we almost had something.  It’s as if we were right on our way to having a super-intelligent global society and a huge shockwave hit and lowered the bar for everyone.

Change For The Good, Right Now

Posted by on April 10, 2013 No comments

In the “these things happen to other people” news, I’ve been a target of a hacker.  As hacks go, it was fairly significant – my EBay account.  The hacker bought a whole bunch of stuff, surprisingly not using my linked PayPal account.  EBay locked my account quickly, notified me, and took care of most all the issues with fees and listings.  Regardless, I felt obligated to apologize to a bunch of people who got caught up in the mess.  One person had actually shipped the product by the time I emailed them.

I’ve been online a long time and my password strength has grown with the ever-increasing threat.  I’ve felt I’ve had a decent password, but I suffer from what a lot of people probably do, and that is password entropy – using the same password on every site.  Well, that’s not entirely true since I do use a variant of my main password for those sites that don’t support the special characters I used.

Now it’s time to get real.  Just before I discovered my eBay account was hacked, I had dealt with some spammer sending me over 7000 emails of random text.  So I was giving consideration to changing my email address, and why not have a different email address for every site?  So my email address for Bank of America would be bankofamerica.com@mydomain.com and for Expedia it would be expedia.com@mydomain.com.  This would be relatively easy to remember and would identify if anyone sold my email address to another company or if my email was stolen or harvested.

But at the time, I felt a bit overwhelmed with the task of changing ALL my emails.  Now, since I have to change ALL my passwords, I might as well go through with it.  In addition, I’ve decided to use a password manager, KeePass.  It seems to be a pretty slick utility and I’m surprised I never gave it a chance before. I think my main reason for avoiding it was that I never wanted to be unable to access a website because I didn’t know my password.

But upon closer inspection of that fear, it is very similar to other fears that keep you from (positive) change.  The fringe cases override everything.  It seems everyone is afraid of the word “can’t,” because it is only interpreted in its absolute and permanent sense.  It’s not “I can’t do this,” it’s “I can’t do this right now.” And the “right now” part is what makes the modern time so awesome, hectic, and dangerous.

So, with KeePass, I can have a password file on my home computer and there’s a version for my phone that I can keep synched.  That should be well enough to let me do what I need when I need to.  And for the other cases, it’s going to have to be the other person disappointed when I say “I can’t” because I’m not going to let it control me.