The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've never had any Bluetooth headphones/earbuds cut out other then when the battery is flat. I think it's your Shokz that's the problem.

Even using Bluetooth with my TVs, I've never had a cut out or audio sync issue.

I think I was unclear earlier. Basically, when I'm listening at times the sound will glitch for a moment. It doesn't cut off for more than a moment, but it takes me out of what I'm listening to.

[ownedbycats]

How convenient that the survey errored out at the very end, after they'd gotten all my answers. Hope they enjoyed getting out of paying me.

[BetterRed]

Warning for Windows 10 Dark Mode users -- upcoming update has gone the full monty on shiny black… awful.

OTOH - Word's ongoing functional and performance improvements sometimes amaze me, as some will know I'm a fan of Toxaris' EpubTools addin for Word. The add-in hasn't been updated in six years - not only does it still work, it works better… the Dialogue Checker fairly flies, until recently it used to stutter and stagger to the finish line.

BR

[j.p.s]

USB 3 cables that cause intermittant USB 2 connections between a USB 3 host and a USB 3 device.

[ownedbycats]

Amazon, you're funny sometimes.



Sure, if I wanted to backup the toilet.

[BetterRed]

I use a mobile broadband service from Telstra AU's largest telco.

A week ir two ago some sites I visit frequently started to be painfully slow (e.g. https://calibre-ebook.com/ and https://www.smh.com.au/) whilst others were okay (e.g https://www.mobileread.com/forums/ and https://www.telegraph.co.uk/).

Examples: most recent download of calibre from calibre.ebook would have taken over an hour, same thing from github about 1 minute. Same article with same pictures from SMH - minutes, from UK-DT - seconds. Microsoft was another slow site.

Telstra's speed test was 1Mb/s down and 30Mb/s up

To no avail I spent an hour or more faffing around with the Telstra chat people (I think they were real ones), they were no help. I eventually found a solution at Tom's Hardware -- disable IPV6 on the Ethernet.

That fixed the slow sites and the speed test, it's now 220Mb/s down and 30Mb/s

My question is why were only some sites slow and not all site, and why would disabling IPV6 on the Ethernet side fix it.

BR

[Renate]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Telstra's speed test was 1Mb/s down and 30Mb/s up

I see those kind of numbers in the US on Verizon a lot in some areas.
Usually? it's just bad congestion with everybody downloading.
When that's the case, I do my serious downloading (1.5 GB updates) at 4 AM.

[cromag]

Devices like ereaders and MP3 players that use MicroSD cards for memory expansion when full size SD cards could have been easily accommodated. The micro cards are harder to manage, harder to tag, harder to insert and eject, easier to lose, etc., etc.

Anyway, that's my current peeve.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by cromag

Devices like ereaders and MP3 players that use MicroSD cards for memory expansion when full size SD cards could have been easily accommodated. The micro cards are harder to manage, harder to tag, harder to insert and eject, easier to lose, etc., etc.

Anyway, that's my current peeve.

I strongly agree. I have a Nook Color and a problem with it is not only does it use a MicroSD card, but it is in a location where it is extremely difficult to remove and insert the card. When I need to remove the card I end up having to unlatch it and then shake the device so that the card eventually falls out.

[OorieChai]

Originally Posted by cromag

Devices like ereaders and MP3 players that use MicroSD cards for memory expansion when full size SD cards could have been easily accommodated. The micro cards are harder to manage, harder to tag, harder to insert and eject, easier to lose, etc., etc.

My fave night-time audiobook/music player is a Retekess V115, which, in principle, is a big enough device for a full SD. It's opted out for a microSD, though.
On the down side, if I don't control the microSD when on its way out (it's a "push-till-click" sort of system)... well, I've had to hunt for the "grasshopper" due to a momentary lapse of concentration. Twice. Hard task. Totally agree.
On the up side, because the small cards can be used in a phone, they are relatively easy to find in shops, even in their now-less-common 32GB form. And, theoretically, I could use my phone to download stuff onto my player!

But the card is still jumpy as anything, yeah

Originally Posted by Comfy.n

yet they announce that as a feature, like this "Its new frameless four-sided NanoEdge display boasts an ultraslim 5.7mm bezel" *so thin that it can almost cut you like a knife!*

♫ Give me!
Oh, give me thick bezels! ♪
I can't levitate the phone, I need some safe area to hold it by! Buttons, ideally, but if you insist on touchscreens, make provisions for not triggering the touch sensors.




Today's technological terror: Cloudflare saying it's verifying whether "the connection is secure".

Captcha is not testing security! SSL status might be testing security, a bit. SSL means that the connection is tamper-proof to some extent. Though it's still no guarantee a site is safe, both for me and from me - the site can hack me and I can DDOS the site via an SSL-encrypted connection, no problemo!

No wonder people don't understand online safety, security, etc, etc, if one of the commonest sites is confusing them so...

"Testing if you're human", though has its own set of annoyances:

• the indignity of being tested for humanity by automated hoop-jumping;
• the waste of time inherent in wrestling down the captcha;
• the trouble I get when their JavaScript can't cope with my slow (ha! in dial-up times this speed would've been "beyond imagining"!) Internet;
• sometimes the waste of time that could be saved by automation on my part...

is at least more accurate.

[Sirtel]

Chrome finally forced the infamous update with huge white spacing in menus and bookmarks on me - it can no longer be disabled by any tricks. Well, I'm not going to swallow it, it makes Chrome unusable for me. I immediately switched to Thorium, because I wanted to take all my customizations and extensions with me. Firefox doesn't have all the features I use and I have no time to acquaint myself with a wholly new browser at the moment. Thorium is a fork of Chrome and almost exactly the same, minus the new horrible UI. I'm very satisfied.

On my phone I use Opera, but the phone isn't my main browsing device and I didn't particularly like Opera on my PC the one time I tried it there. Which admittedly was a decade ago.

Anyway, Thorium it is for now.

[ownedbycats]

https://vivaldi.com is also a good option.

[Sirtel]

Yes, I'm just a bit busy at the moment and wanted something as familiar as possible. Thorium is almost an exact copy of Chrome.

I may play around with Vivaldi when I have more time.

[issybird]

The dreaded moment has come. Tonight, my laptop has forced me to outlook mail from gmail. No longer can I toggle back.

Yeah, I'll get used to it and no doubt get over it. But for right now, I'm not a happy camper.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by issybird

The dreaded moment has come. Tonight, my laptop has forced me to outlook mail from gmail. No longer can I toggle back.

Yeah, I'll get used to it and no doubt get over it. But for right now, I'm not a happy camper.

Do you mean an email client? How can your laptop force you to use Outlook instead of Gmail?