I recently was conned into a reduced-price deal for Hulu, bundled with Disney+, cuz I wanted to see King of the Hill and Only Murders in the Building. Little did I know that Disney+’s byzantine pricing structure (see attached) meant that the bundle I have has frequent ads.
Grrrrrrr…
If you look at the fine print of the SIX different Disney+ bundles you’ll note that even the “no ads” options still say: “Ads will be served in select live and linear content.”
Grrrrrr….
Do most people even know what “linear content” means?
ATTN content creators: Here’s today’s illustration that when you use free services you are at their mercy of their bean counters.
If you are a musician, video gamer, or other performer who has live-streamed on Facebook to present your work and assumed that Meta would archive it forever, you are now officially screwed.
Meta’s official information about this drastic change contains no explanation of WHY they are doing this, as far as I can tell. But one must only assume that a bean-counting executive decided there’d be no more free ride. The only surprising thing about this change is that Meta seems to have NOT provided a way to preserve older live-streams through some enormous cost to the content creators.
Perhaps archive . org can pick up the slack?
E.g., I assume that the hundreds of live shows that Meredith Axelrod and Craig Ventresco live-streamed and stored on Facebook will be summarily deleted on May 22st. If this is the case, it will make inaccessible a treasure trove of live musical performance and a valuable record of musicians’ response to the pandemic.
If you’re going to run small airplanes and require that everyone check their roller bags at the gate, then you should waive all baggage fees and encourage passengers to check their bags in advance.
American Airlines “valet” tag.
Yesterday, I spent half an hour in a chaotic jetway scrum for my bag. I and four other passengers were told, “That’s it! That’s all the ‘valet-checked’ bags.” But we all had red valet claim checks and our bags weren’t there. “Oh,” said the baggage guy, “Let me check.” Then he came back and told us there were more bags “in the back”.
In the back??
Finally, the last five bags were found “in the back” and given to us in the (warm) jetway.
I blame the airlines for this situation. For years they’ve discouraged checking bags by charging fees for them. And now they’re reaping what they sowed as passengers are coerced into bringing their own bags onto planes and struggling to find space in overhead bins. And with small planes the airlines wind up inconveniently checking bags for free anyway.
My Instagram newsfeed has recently become gunked up with “because you watched…” crap. That is, I am being shown videos that I have not selected, but which are inserted into my newsfeed and labeled “Because you watched”. For example, “Because you watched a reel from automateconstruction” we are going to show you a video from forgottenfossils. Thing is, I have never watched a reel from automateconstruction.
I can only assume that this is Instagram’s new way of shoving suggested material down my throat.
Today I counted 100 posts in my newsfeed and found the following instances:
20 actual human posts
19 posts from persons/things I chose to follow
29 “because you watch…” posts
26 Sponsored posts
6 Suggested posts
The statisticians will tell you that this is a Gunk Quotient (GQ, a statistical term) of 61% and that the “because you watched” (BYW) posts are currently my newsfeed’s statistical “mode”–the most common posts. And most of those BYW posts are bogus references to videos that I did NOT watch, as above.
The odd thing is that this is only in the mobile app’s newsfeed. When I view Instagram in a browser, the GQ is much lower.
I’ve searched in vain to find a way to turn off BYW posts. Does anyone know how to shut them down? Or must I delete the Instagram app from my phone, as I have already done for Facebook?
Why can’t Google get biometric login (aka, fingerprint and face recognition) right on its Pixel phones?
I am a Android fanboy who generally loves Google’s Pixel phones and has not owned an iPhone since, like, version 1.0. But I have been repeatedly disappointed by Google’s implementation of fingerprint and face recognition for login purposes.
Case in point: the Pixel 6 Pro that I obtained two weeks ago has the most unreliable fingerprint reader I have ever encountered. And I am not alone in this opinion–as a Google search quickly reveals:
My main beef with the fingerprint reader is its unreliability. I’d say it responds after a single press about 40% of the time. More aggravating is that about 10% of the time it does not work at all. And I am forced to enter my PIN. Oh, the inconvenience of it all!
Perhaps this would not be as annoying if the previous Pixel–the Pixel 5–did not have a perfect fingerprint reader. It was in just the right place (the middle of the phone’s back) so that my finger naturally felt it when I pulled the phone out of my pocket. And the only times that it could not read my finger correctly was when it was wet or the print was otherwise obscured.
Additionally, the fingerprint reader was a huge improvement over the biometric reader of the previous Pixel release, which relied solely on face recognition. The Pixel 4’s face recognition seldom worked as advertised for me and then (hello, COVID!) when I started covering my face it became utterly useless. In fact, I bought the Pixel 5 mostly to escape face recognition.
Man, I loved the Pixel 5 fingerprint reader. When Google announced that it was moving the reader from the phone’s back to the screen on the front, I vowed not to buy the Pixel 6. I was persuaded to get one, however, by the improvements in the camera, which are pretty doggone amazing.
Thus, I don’t regret my purchase of the Pixel 6, but it’s time for Google to admit that its flagship phone’s biometrics are crap.
The University of Alabama announced that they are replacing physical ID cards with a crappy app that runs on your cellphone or a crappy iWatch.
A crappy app will soon replace physical ID cards at the University of Alabama.
All roughly 8,000 incoming students, faculty and staff will be able to download a mobile ACT Card for iPhone or Android cellular device. Those with physical ACT Cards will still be able to use them, but if the card is lost it will be replaced only with a mobile card…
What could possibly go wrong?
Erm… How does one get into one’s dorm/office or buy food when one’s phone has run out of power? I’m sure the app relies on either NFC or Bluetooth–further sapping one’s phone’s battery.
This is obviously being done to save the University the few shekels it spent on issuing physical cards. What crap!
Consumer warning: I bought a Wireless Lit Solar Powerbank from LitMobile. It never worked properly. Even after more than 15 hours of solar-charging, the battery never got above 50%.
I emailed them to exchange it for another unit (or possibly request a refund). They referred me to RMA@LitMobile.us, which I then emailed. Never heard back from them. That was two weeks ago.
We have decided to move the Crappy Software blog once again.
For the past five years, we have been irregularly posting rants about crappy software on a self-hosted WordPress site at crappysoftware.tvcrit.com, to which we had moved after Blogger became intolerably crappy. Don’t get us wrong, we still like WordPress, but–good gawd!–it’s become such a target for hackers that plugging security holes has become a full-time occupation.
So, we’ve decided to make our new home on WordPress.com–where hopefully the security vulnerabilities are immediately fixed. Our new URL is clunky: crappysoftware.home.blog. And we’re too cheap to pay for an ad-free version of the blog. That’s why you’ll see some click-bait-y ads popping up every once in a while.
We started the Crappy Software Blog on August 24, 2005. In the intervening years, software has definitely not gotten any less crappy. And so we soldier on…
I suppose it’s good to know there are some constants in the universe. Like, when AT&T says a technician will be there between 8:00 a.m. and noon, you can count on them NOT being there in that time window.
Also, AT&T’s online chat bug is “busy.” Thanks for nothing.
A new addition to my “In Order to Serve You Better, We’re Now Going to Fuck Your Over” folder! flickr is eliminating its one-terabyte-free option “in order to serve me better”. Free accounts continue, but are limited to 1,000 photos.
The most galling part of flickr’s announcement is how it says, in bold print, “Let’s be candid“, but then is anything but candid when it hides the fact that photos above the 1,000 limit will be deleted. This information is hidden in an asterisked footnote in tiny print.
And it doesn’t just say, “photos will be deleted.” Rather, it says, your “content [will be] actively deleted.” Content? Why not just say “photos and videos”? I mean, wouldn’t that be the “candid” way to put it?
Oh, and it says that three months is “ample time” for users to make other arrangements.
flickr, you used to provide an amazing service. Ending that service in this manner is crap.
Crappy Software 