#technology rants

[one-shitpost-a-day]

i'd rather an app's ui transitions be choppy and ugly than showy and unnecessarily lengthy. tumblr. youtube. i do not want you to autoscroll when my finger touches the screen for a nanosecond

[iamsqwrl]

Tangent Thursday: Bixby, The Dumbest AI to Ever Exist

If you’ve ever tried using Bixby, you know true frustration. Samsung’s “smart assistant” is about as useful as a potato with a WiFi signal.

Let’s talk about Bixby, Samsung’s so-called “AI assistant.” And by “assistant,” I mean technological failure so profound that it actively makes my life worse. I don’t know what kind of corporate fever dream led Samsung to believe they needed their own AI, but here we are, stuck with the dumbest digital assistant known to man. Bixby isn’t just bad—it’s so bad that even Alexa looks competent. Even…

View On WordPress

[rocket-sith]

Goddammit my fucking phone has ghost touch, and that's not nearly as cool as it sounds. It means you try and tap the menu icon in the uper lefthand corner of a website but your phone thinks you're tapping the "Yes, please sell all of my personal information to the Jawas and the Ferengi" button at the bottom. Or you're trying to scroll through your social media feed and you end up accidentally angry reacting pictures of somebody's kitten and casting random votes in a poll you didn't even see.

If I accidentally did this to you and you're beginning to think I'm probably a lunatic - well, yes, I probably am. But not for that reason.

Also, ghost touch makes playing Pokemon Go a veritable nightmare. But Niantic is already doing a good enough job of that themselves, so it's kind of a moot point.

[initiala]

I was going to go to bed. I was. Then the computer I'm fixing let me know some scans were done. So I noodled on over and went through the next motions. Which happen to be updates. To EVERYTHING. For the love of all that is holy. WHEN YOUR COMPUTER SAYS IT IS TIME TO UPDATE, CLICK THE GODDAMN UPDATE NOW BUTTON. WHEN YOUR SHIT BREAKS, 99% OF THE TIME IT IS BECAUSE YOU DON'T UPDATE. And honestly your tech people, who you will call to fix this, will do all of these updates anyway and it's going to take hours because there are about five years of missed updates here and I am not even exaggerating for comedic effect because the last time one of these programs was updated was 1351 days ago and that is OBNOXIOUS. (This is a very old laptop)

[perpetualspincycle]

So I’ve just now found out that my operating system (Windows 8.1) does not in fact have DVD playback capability ( this is probably something everyone knew, but I found this out when my TV broke this morning and my shiny new external DVD drive refused to play said DVD). Apparently my options are to A) spend £100 on Windows Media Centre or B) download every free DVD player app in the Windows store to find out that NONE OF THEM ACTUALLY WORK.

...and I wandered off mid-rant to find something that would work, and came up with the VLC player. Seems to work so far.

Doesn’t quite alleviate my anger, but hey, at least it’s problem solved for the time being.

[compleatang]

What Ubuntu Needs to Learn from Android: How to Live in the Cloud

Google will never get ChromeOS to really shine until my laptop can do what my Tablet and Phone do: share with another app. Why when my phone can so easily transfer stuff around (it is by far the best syncing algorithm for my contacts; I can sketch documents and upload them to Evernote, to my work Project Management System, to Tumblr, basically wherever my cloud or community are) - and on my laptop and desktop I have to "save as." I flipping hate save as. It is a complete waste of my time.