In Windows, often I’ll open something from the web, edit it, hit save, and then close it.
And then I have no clue where it is, because it saves it to a “Temp” directory.
Worst of all, because you open it from the web and not disk, it doesn’t how up in “Recent Documents.”
There are several ways this problem can be fixed. But no one has. It’s been a problem for years, too. And I can’t stand it!
Two thoughts…
(1) As someone who’s done a lot of work with SQL and web interfaces, today’s XKCD is hilarious.
(2) We’re currently trying to send out a fax. There are two of us, both tech-savvy, trying to figure it out. And we just have n0 clue. The screen says “WAITING TO DIAL 02%.” Kind of like, “PC LOAD LETTER” — what the @#$# does that mean? (I get the “Waiting to dial,” but 2% waiting?
Rusty and I usually don’t see eye-to-eye on style. But when he sent me a link to this shirt, I knew he was onto something.
Granted, it’s not out yet. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to be ordering one. Not only is it “geek chic,” but it’s functional, too: I often wonder if there’s a good WiFi signal in various locations.
As an aside, tell me that this doesn’t fill a need in your life. And seriously, I’m buying this. Which makes me wonder… Bluetooth is 2.4 GHz, too… Will it false-alarm my shirt?
The poor Zune has so much going against it. For one thing, they decided to make it brown; the most delicate way I’ve seen this put was something to the effect of, “The Zune team decided that brown was the hot new color. No other marketing team has reached this conclusion.”
I don’t like DRM, not even on my iPod, but the thing the iPod has going for it is that it’ll play that DRMed music. A lot of people complained that the Zune didn’t play half the formats of music they had.
And then there was the “orgasm screen,” a really bizarre screen during the installer that’s probably Not Safe for Work. Also probably NSFW is their logo upside-down, although that can be considered more bad luck than poor planning.
But I still gave them credit for trying. They have a terrible market share, but they tried.
Well! They just released the “Zune 2.0,” and, well, see for yourself. They did ditch the brown, although they also introduced “diarrhea green.” But I think this is even worse: the old one made me think, “Good for Microsoft, designing their own MP3 player.” Now I think, “Wow, it’s a bad clone of the iPod.” The looks are just too similar. They added some features, such as more video codecs, which is great. WiFi syncing to a computer? Awesome idea.
There is one thing that I think they got right, though. They failed the design, they failed the color choices (again), they failed having safe-for-work backgrounds in the installer screen, but they have a DRM-free music store now. I didn’t think Apple could lose its edge, but now Microsoft and Amazon are both offering DRM-free songs. And you know what? I don’t think I’m going to get my songs through iTunes anymore. Now that Linux is my primary OS, all the songs I bought from iTunes don’t play due to DRM. Apple’s got to do something, or it’s going to start losing, at least on music sales.
I have a lot of excess capacity on this server. The ‘basic’ hosting industry is shot to hell: $3 for 100 GB of disk space and unlimited bandwidth might be considered expensive. (It goes without saying that they won’t actually let you use that much.)
But here are a few markets that aren’t touched on enough:
I don’t have the energy or time right now to aggressively pursue these. But I think all 3 would work pretty well.
I think I’ve mentioned that I’m running experimental software for my desktop environment. So every now and then it crashes. And the first time I log back in after my desktop environment crashes, I get this bizarre error: “Nautilus can’t be used now due to an unexpected error.”
I know that Nautilus is GNOME’s file manager, but I bet not everyone does. So imagine that your computer randomly locks up and, when you come back, the only thing you get is this message that a program you’ve never heard of can’t start for unknown reasons.
Of course, knowing what Nautilus is doesn’t help. Why is it starting a file manager? Well, apparently, because it draws the icons on my desktop.
But there’s a little “Show more details” box. (Kudos on this, BTW: it’s a good way to accommodate both the technical and the non-technical people.) Here’s what it says, verbatim
Nautilus can’t be used now, due to an unexpected error from Bonobo while attempting to locate the factory.Killing bonobo-activation-server and restarting Nautilus may help fix the problem.
And what does that mean? What factory is Nautilus looking for (is that even a technical term?)? What does Bonobo have to do with it? Why is there no space between “factory” and “Killing,” making it look like it’s looking or a file called factory.Killing?
I like the idea of having a simple error with the option to see the technical explanation. That’s a really good idea, and a great usability enhancement. But some notes:
Maybe it’s a step in the right direction, up from “Error -134239520439: An error has occurred in UNKNOWN” type stuff. But if the error message ‘knows’ how to fix the problem, why doesn’t it do it? And why can’t error messages ever give a good explanation of what happened? What’s wrong with, “Nautilus has failed to start. Without Nautilus, your desktop will not have any icons. Click on ‘Show more details’ to see what happened and how to fix it,” with not just an OK (or “Dismiss”) button, but an “Autofix” button?
So I’m now forwarding all my e-mail to GMail. (Mostly because OWA is the worst mail client ever.) As you’re probably aware, there are sponsored ads. (Actually, I’m not sure why Adblock Plus isn’t catching them, but I digress.)
Today one of the other members in the Democrats here e-mailed me. His e-mail didn’t even discuss anything political, but I guess it picked up on the word “Democrats” in his signature. The ads were mostly about Ron Paul.
But the best… I just e-mailed one of my professors saying that I’ll miss her class tomorrow. The ads on the side are now for TheFakeDoctorsNote.com: “Print A Doctors Excuse Instantly.” How convenient!
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) is worth its weight in gold. (Err, I guess that’s not a grand compliment given the weight of a CD. Let’s instead say that, had I paid $200 for it, I don’t think I’d regret it.)
Least year I accidentally hosed the bootloader on my laptop. All my data was, in theory, intact, but all I got when turning my computer on was “OS not found,” which is very scary on a live system with important data on it. I tried all sorts of complex stuff, before I remembered that I had the UBCD. I booted it up, selected “Partition Tools,” and found a program that automagically restored my bootloader.
Monday night, one of my professors explained that he was just given a used laptop, and that it was all well and good except that he didn’t know the password. (And it was a WinXP machine where you need one.) I volunteered to help because he’s a really nice guy and, well, it can never hurt to be on a professor’s good side.
It took me about two minutes, and most of that was waiting for things to load. It includes a utility that let me just blank the password in the registry. It was kind of unceremonious, but I rebooted, ejected the CD, and then got the windows login screen. I just hit enter, logging in with no password, and it worked!
Of course then I spent an hour uninstalling old junk and downloading updates. As I sat there, he asked if I’d come help out a friend at his office–who would pay me–who was having similar problems. I agreed, and he called them, telling them that the FBI might be looking for me, but as long as I wasn’t caught beforehand, we’d be coming by another day to help him.
It’s got all of those utilities that come in handy when you’re absolutely desperate. I think I could make serious money on the side helping people with problems like this. And best of all, it just works. Oh, and it’s free.
I’ve been running Linux pretty exclusively lately. I copied Windows over to a partition on the new disk, but it doesn’t boot. (Apparently Windows doesn’t like booting if it’s not near the front of the disk?) So when I want to run Windows, I’ve just swapping hard drives. Tonight I had a hankering to play some Counter-Strike, so I put in the Windows drive.
Some observations:
Web forms should be designed to minimize data loss. Let me explain two scenarios in the past 24 hours:
I can’t do much about Craigslist, but it’s a “Fool me once…” thing with OWA. I think this was the third time I’ve lost an e-mail I spent a long time working on due to the inactivity bug. So I think I’m just going to start forwarding my school mail to GMail.