Oh those pet peeves

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Mongrel
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Mongrel » Sun May 09, 2021 4:36 pm

nosimpleway wrote:
Mongrel wrote:Oh yeah, this too.

After this post I got a screenshot on my phone of Google Maps labeling slapping "Del Taco" onto a major arterial road in a way that looks pretty convincingly like that's the name of the actual street

but uploading just seems like so much effort ya know

It's rare that I take photos worth sharing. I don't browse on my phone anymore because even when I go out I don't want to wipe down my phone after coming home, so I just... don't take it out anymore, usually.

If I did, I used to figure that I never uploaded anything from my phone because the process for doing so is so hilariously roundabout and complicated due to my using an ancient OS and browser that literally can't be updated anymore and which isn't even RECOGNIZED by many websites now, let alone supported (the last native Blackberry OS & browser released, before they just went to an Android base).

But whenever I hear about other people trying to simply upload things from (or download things to) their much more modern (or at least functionally current) phones these days, geez, it sure as hell doesn't seem like the process is any more user-friendly for a lot of them.
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mharr
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby mharr » Sun May 09, 2021 5:55 pm

I found an Android file transfer app called AndSMB that will happily copy multiple files and folders to and from network drives, generally the usb one attached directly to our router. Much easier than trying to negotiate things with another OS.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby IGNORE ME » Mon May 10, 2021 5:08 pm

Google is disincentived from allowing photo sharing on their operating system to be straightforward in any way that doesn't involve giving Google explicit consent to archive them.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Mongrel » Mon May 10, 2021 6:30 pm

Brentai wrote:Google is disincentived from allowing photo sharing on their operating system to be straightforward in any way that doesn't involve giving Google explicit consent to archive them.

Apple's even worse, of course.

A friend of mine has a nightmarish - still ongoing! - multi-day saga of their simply trying to put an .mp3 they've owned since the 90's onto their iphone to use as a ringtone.
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Yoji » Tue May 11, 2021 1:54 pm

Mongrel wrote:A friend of mine has a nightmarish - still ongoing! - multi-day saga of their simply trying to put an .mp3 they've owned since the 90's onto their iphone to use as a ringtone.

I think I went through the same thing with my old iphone 4S. Like goddamn, I just want an MGS Codec ringtone. With my old Cosmos 2, I just had to enable USB storage*, drop the .mp3 into a "ringtones" folder, and I'm ready to be Solid-ish Snake. To do the same with the 4S, I had to read about rooting and stuff like a crazy person.

And regular old .mp3s, too! On one phone, just drag everything into a Windows folder. On the other, I have to be guided through some stupid proprietary app that is a little buggy sometimes because it deigned to work on a different operating system.

It's silly, but that's a big reason why I won't touch Apple devices unless I have to. Opaque software that tries to curate every little thing so you don't ever need to worry your pretty little head. Coincidentally, one of the reasons I hate the new cloud-based CAD program we're tying to move to at work.

*Shit, I forgot that's another thing iphones don't like, either. Not good when you're still in an age before cloud storage!
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Mongrel » Tue May 11, 2021 1:56 pm

At the end of the day, at least I can just plug my phone to my computer and take files off it or put them on like it were any other drive. It's wild to me that that's actually... not the norm????
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Tue May 11, 2021 3:08 pm

Mongrel wrote:At the end of the day, at least I can just plug my phone to my computer and take files off it or put them on like it were any other drive. It's wild to me that that's actually... not the norm????

Given that Android's got the majority of the market, that is the norm.

(Sort of. MTP is kind of terrible and doesn't work very well IME. But it's still better than whatever the fuck Apple's deal is.)

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby mharr » Thu May 13, 2021 9:02 am

At least everything has USB on-the-go adapters these days, right? (Tell me they do)

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Thu May 13, 2021 8:40 pm

Period pieces are hard.

I'm reading a comic that's set in 1970. I'm enjoying it, but occasionally there's an anachronism that just takes me right the fuck out of the story. Like when a character says "What is your major malfunction?", quoting a movie released in 1987.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby IGNORE ME » Fri May 14, 2021 2:41 pm

Supposedly that's a thing that people actually did say in the Vietnam War era, but we don't recognize it as anything but an R. Lee Ermey quote now.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Thu May 20, 2021 12:12 pm

#3 has the phrases "Keep her name out of your mouths" and "Come get some," both of which sound like post-1970 slang to my ear. But I haven't exactly done a deep dive on their origins and earliest recorded uses broken down by region, either.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 15, 2021 1:46 pm

Previously:

Thad wrote:Long term, I'm going to need to buy a new audio receiver that can pass 4K/HDR video through anyway (and/or supports eARC so I can output audio through one of my TV's HDMI ports).


Got that.

Couldn't get eARC to work. TV supports it; receiver supports it; tried two different HDMI 2.1 cables to make sure the cable wasn't the problem. Looked through the manual, the website, finally requested a support chat. Took 45 fucking minutes to get to "oh yeah, you have to enable it under the General Settings submenu before you can activate it under the Sound submenu, and the General Settings submenu doesn't call it eARC, it calls it Anynet+."

God damn, how many things have to go wrong, from the UI to the manual to the script the support techs read from, for it to take that much fucking time and trouble to find something that should really be one of the very first and very easiest things to look for? Like, checking that setting should definitely come before trying a different cable.

And look, TBF, I checked the manual afterward and it turns out this is explained in the troubleshooting section, sort of, except it's under "The volume of the external device cannot be adjusted", which isn't really the issue I was having.

So the manual's unclear, the troubleshooting script they give the support techs is poorly put together. But really, basic UI level -- instead of saying "This function is not available", the fucking screen should say "eARC requires Anynet+ in order to function. Would you like to enable it? [Enable]/[Do not enable]/[What the fuck is Anynet+?]"

Useless, inscrutable error messages on TVs were understandable in the days when they were just running embedded 8088 or PIC chips. But come the fuck on; this TV has more processing power than the computer I had in college (not to mention RAM and storage). There's no excuse for this Mickey Mouse shit.

Also somewhere along the line my Harmony remote got fucked up and now it won't switch to the TV input when I press the TV button. I think that might be because I enabled Anynet+ and now it's trying to send simultaneous signals to the TV and the receiver, and they're also sending those signals to each other? At any rate, some other fun thing I get to troubleshoot now.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby beatbandito » Fri Jul 02, 2021 12:03 pm

Every program and game should let you customize save locations. And the ones that not only don't, but use appdata for it, are now illegal.
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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Fri Jul 02, 2021 12:17 pm

You can get around it with symbolic links, but they're kinda wonky in Windows.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Fri Jul 02, 2021 12:25 pm

Thad wrote:and the General Settings submenu doesn't call it eARC, it calls it Anynet+.

Apparently every fucking vendor has a different name for this feature, but it's the thing that allows devices to communicate commands to each other through the HDMI cable.

Which sounds like a great idea, except it means that every time I turn my TV on, it turns on my PS4 and Blu-Ray player too.

I figured out how to disable it on my PS4, but still haven't figured it out on my Blu-Ray player.

This would be a great feature if I had a single media device connected to my TV. But I don't. I have a shitload of them. Bought a fucking 43U server cabinet to put them all in because I was sick of having to move furniture to run cable every time I bought a new one.

I wonder if there's a way to fix it in the receiver settings -- "block communication between TV and device unless explicitly switched to that device's input." Probably not, because the receiver even passes the signals when it's powered off. (Though it may be a sleep-mode thing where it's still listening for communication between other devices? I haven't tried unplugging it to see.)

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby nosimpleway » Fri Jul 02, 2021 2:14 pm

beatbandito wrote:Every program and game should let you customize save locations. And the ones that not only don't, but use appdata for it, are now illegal.


Read this and brain reflexively went "What's appdata"

I assume Brent Spiner will be along shortly to deliver the punchline

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Thu Jul 15, 2021 12:11 pm

Thad wrote:There are a lot of really terrible trends in web design, but I think gray text against a white background might just be the worst.

I really should just make a custom CSS file that's just body { color: black; } and set it as the default for every website. Occasionally I'd hit a light-on-dark site and have to disable it, but probably a fuck of a lot less frequently than I find myself opening up the debug panel just to change a site's text color.

Thad wrote:Decided to check and see if there's an extension to handle that; found Blacken, which seems to do the job.

Blacken sucks; does anybody know any extensions that do this and don't suck?

(To go into just a little more detail: Blacken is supposed to recognize light-on-dark text and adjust it accordingly, but it doesn't fucking work; if you go to a page with light text against a dark background, it blackens the text and renders it unusable. It's also hacky as fuck; it darkens tags by slapping

Code: Select all

style="color: rgb(x,y,z) !important;"
all over the page, which is some Baby's First jQuery shit and offends my sensibilities as a web developer even more than gray text does.)

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Mon Aug 23, 2021 2:12 pm

Sometimes, something crosses over from "pet peeve" to "professionally offensive".

On rarer occasions, it crosses over from there to "safety issue."

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Kids, don't do this.

If you're packing a box that uses tabs to open, don't put tape over the tabs.

Especially don't put opaque tape over them so that the recipient can't see the tabs or where to cut around them.

In packing and in general, do not surprise a person who is holding a sharp thing.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby Thad » Thu Aug 26, 2021 1:50 pm

"But why didn't they just fly into Mordor on the eagles?"

Do you go to a war movie about soldiers who have to sneak behind enemy lines on a secret mission and then ask why they didn't just scramble the fighter jets? No? Well then what exactly is it about the presence of wizards and elves that's making you stupid?

Also it's 2021. Shut up.

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Re: Oh those pet peeves

Postby KingRoyal » Thu Aug 26, 2021 3:29 pm

Did the people who ask that question somehow miss the dudes in black robes flying on fellbeasts in the second and third movie?
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