Author: Jeremy Butler

Apple: Same Old iTunes-Update Crap

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I thought Apple had stopped pulling this crap when they inveigle you into updating iTunes (an, inevitably, piling on more DRM crap), but no. When I went to update iTunes/QuickTime two days ago, Apple Software Update defaulted to installing Apple software that I do not want: Safari and MobileMe Control Panel (see illustration).

Yes, if I had blithely clicked the install button without checking what crap Apple had bundled with iTunes, I would have had my computer infected with Safari and MobileMe.

‘Course, iTunes is crap to begin with, but I’ll save that rank for another time.

(Image missing due to crappy behavior by Blogger, which deleted dozens of my images when Crappy Software was hosted there.)

I Have No Status! Crap!

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Y’know how Facebook’s key feature is your ability to update your status? Well sir, I just lost that ability–when using the Chrome browser.
Normally, a “What’s on your mind?” status update box appears at the top of the news feed. Like this:
(Image missing due to crappy behavior by Blogger, which deleted dozens of my images when Crappy Software was hosted there.)
But, starting yesterday, the top of my news feed looks like this:
(Image missing due to crappy behavior by Blogger, which deleted dozens of my images when Crappy Software was hosted there.)
See? And it’s the same on my FB profile page, too.
I have no status! Crap!
Doesn’t Facebook want to know what’s on my mind anymore?
Oh wait! I might have solved the mystery!
I just noticed a little “Status” button that I don’t remember seeing before. Has FB tweaked its user interface without telling me? No, that would NEVER happen.

Crappy Telemarketers: Text Messaging That I Pay For

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There’s something particularly galling about getting a telemarketer’s scam via text message. I don’t have a text-message package with my phone so I have to PAY for each of these messages from these crapheads.

This week, I’ve received two such messages. The latest, according to caller ID, came from 7605769989. I don’t know if this is accurate or if they somehow spoof the number.
The text reads:

Homeowners! Would you like to make your house energy efficient and cut your electric bill? Just text back the word “SAVE” to learn more, or STOP to cancel.

Well, I ain’t gonna text anything to a scammer. Any suggestions on how to really get them to stop?
Crapheads!

DRM and CoDec Crap

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The Librarian of Congress has given media-studies professors like me an exemption to the DMCA so that we may break the copy protection on DVDs in order to create video clips for pedagogical purposes.

Consequently, we’ve put together some tutorials on how to create video clips as well as screen shots over on TVCrit.com:
One thing we have yet to figure out, however, is how best to capture high-definition video clips. Or, that is to say, we’ve figured out pieces of the process, but not the entire thing. Blocking our success is DRM and CoDec (i.e., video compression / decompression) crap. We can get the clip off a Blu-ray disc (BD), but we can’t convert it into a usable format.
I figure to use this post to chronicle what I’ve done so far and the failures I’ve encountered.
First, the success: Using the following process, I’ve been able to suck a video clip off a Blu-ray disc–using a Windows 7 computer.
  1. I use AnyDVD to remove DRM encrustations so that I can access the video on the BD. This runs in the background and works on any BD or DVD.
  2. After inserting a BD into the drive, I examine it in Windows Explorer, drilling down through its folders: BDMV –> STREAM. In the STREAM folder I find numerous .m2ts files (video files using the following codec: H264 – MPEG-4 AVC).
  3. By sorting the .m2ts I can find the video files — as they’re all several gigabytes big. They’re big files because the resolution is big: 1920 x 1080 pixels (in a 16×9 video).
  4. I right-click a likely file and choose to open it with VLC Media player. Ever since something like version 1.0, VLC will play BD’s!
  5. In VLC, I enable the Advanced Controls in the View menu. This adds a red-dot “Record” button near the controls for playing video.
  6. I start the view playing and then, when I reach the section I want to extract, I click the Record button. When it’s finished playing, I click it again to stop recording.
  7. This dumps a fat .ts file in the _________ folder (I forget where). E.g., a 3 minute clip was over 700 MB.
But here’s the rub. I can’t find anything to convert that .ts file into something more usable.
  • MPEG Streamclip, which I rely on for so much on the Mac, cannot handle the file on Windows. Don’t know if it’s a Windows issue yet. (Haven’t tried it on a Mac.) Gives me a blank image, although it will play the audio.
  • Handbrake is also useless. Just fails when I try to convert the file. No explanation provided.
  • VLC itself promises to do transcoding, but the resulting file has very crummy audio. There might be some setting I’ve got wrong, but I’ve tried two or three and gotten nowhere.
  • HDTV to MPEG2 barfs on the file, saying “Could not find a Channel!”
And that’s where I stand as of 13 September 2010. Defeated!
Update:
Another failure. Tried RipBot264 and got the following error from AviSynth (which RipBot runs):
DirectShowSource: couldn’t open file C:UsersJeremyVideosDamages20070814qq00_00_00qq.ts:
Unspecified error (E:tempRipBot264tempjob1getinfo.avs, line 2)
There are several guides out there. This Gizmodo one seemed more helpful than most.
Update, 9/14/2010:
Moderate success!
I followed the Gizmodo guide and managed to create in-sync, miniature versions of the clip I wanted. I had to use AnyDVD HD , RipBot264, .NET Framework 2.0, the avisynth, ffdshow, and Quicktime Pro, and the process took hours, but it does work.
Gizmodo goes into all the bloody details, but, essentially, I ripped an episode from the BD using RipBot264 (which took hours), then I opened it in Quicktime Pro (it’s gotta be the Pro version) and exported small clips. Here’s the files I dealt with:
  • Ripped hour-long episode at 1920 x 1080 pixels: 2.5 gigabytes.
  • Exported for Web (by Quicktime) files:
    • Desktop version: 852 x 480 pixels, 21.9 megabytes
    • iPhone version: 480 x 270 pixels, 14.3 megabytes
    • iPhone cell version: 176 x 99 pixels, 1.3 megabytes
The difference this time around in my use of RipBot264 is that I used it to pull video directly from the BD. Before I was trying to get it to transcode a .ts file that I had captured with VLC media player.

AT&T — No Longer a Monopoly, But Still Crap

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At this moment, I’m 31 minutes into a call to AT&T’s support line. Why? Because when AT&T Uverse was installed last month they managed to knock out all of my upstairs phone jacks.

Now, don’t you reckon that they’d want to immediately come over and fix what they broke? Oh, noooooo. They won’t do anything unless I have the $7.50-per-month in-house wiring warranty. That’s right. They broke it, but they won’t fix it unless I pay them either an exorbitant service-call fee or start their warranty.
So, I waited about 20 mins to talk to a repair person about this. She said she couldn’t do anything about the fee and referred me to a “customer service” person. Then the customer service person gave me the crap about starting the warranty service. Or, she said, I could dispute any charges later if I wanted to.
I said to her, “Let me be clear about this. AT&T is going to charge me to come to my house to fix the phone lines that they broke.” Yes, she said, that’s correct. Or I can dispute charges later.
I told her I would accept the warranty, but I asked her to tell her supervisor that I was not happy with how AT&T was handling this.
Then, at the end of the conversation she told me that AT&T might call to check on her and asked if I were “very satisfied” with her (and “not the company’s”) handling of my situation. I told her I thought she had done all she could do. She pressed: “But are you very satisfied with how I handled your situation?” Essentially, she wouldn’t end the call until I said I was.
But of course she couldn’t then schedule a service call for me. Oh no, that would be too easy. She transferred me back to the repair service — where I’ve now been on hold an additional 10 minutes.
41 minutes into this repair call and still no resolution…

Finally resolved after 45 minutes on the line.
Update, 24 July 2010:

AT&T had the gall to send me an email confirming their extortion fee for in-house wiring that contains this hunk of crap:
Your satisfaction is our #1 priority.
Thanks again for choosing AT&T – setting the standard for a new era of integrated communications and entertainment services.
Oh, yeah, they set a “standard” alright. A very low standard.

When Is HD Crap? When It’s Had the Hell Compressed Out Of It

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A few weeks ago, Comcast jerked my chain one too many times and I resolved to dump them. Their latest offense is forcing all customers to use a set-top box for every TV in their house. You’re no longer allowed to plug your “cable-ready” TV into a wall socket. AND if you have more than two television sets, they will be charging $2 per set per month for the “privilege” of using these set-top boxes.

Crapcastic, indeed.

Incidentally, the Tuscaloosa News had the gall to run a Comcast PR release as if it were a news story–headlining it “Comcast upgrading Tuscaloosa service”:

http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20100608/NEWS/100609669

No customers/customer support groups were contacted. So much for balanced reporting.

AT&T had run fiber optic cable into my ‘hood last year and I was curious to see if it was rilly fast. So, I signed up for it.

Let me tell you, it is smokin’ fast. I am lovin’ the ‘net access.

However, I am not lovin’ U-verse — the TV service that came bundled with it. I paid a premium to get HD service and to have it run in two rooms — off of one HD DVR, which is pretty sweet in itself. The one fly in the ointment?

AT&T has compressed the hell out of its HD signal. And it’s quite noticeable. I first saw digital artifacts in The Deadliest Catch‘s action scenes. Then I began to see them even in The Daily Show, which doesn’t have a whole lot of action. Were my eyes deceiving me? Could AT&T’s HD really be this bad?

I started Googling around about it and found forum posts on AT&T’s community forums about the poor picture quality. In one thread titled, “Why does U-Verse Suck So Bad??”, I found an explanation by SomeJoe7777, midway down on this page:

Every customer does indeed get the same (crappy, overcompressed) feed. The issue is that there are many factors on the customer’s end that make the compression artifacts either more or less visible than they are to other customers. The customers with large, really good TVs will notice the compression artifacts a lot more than customers with smaller, not-quite-so-good sets. Connection methods make a difference – HDMI can emphasize the artifacts, component can soften them. Bad digital processing can make the artifacts worse, good digital processing can hide them. LCD TVs can emphasize the artifacts, projection TVs can soften them. There’s dozens more factors.

But as far as the compression, the fact is that AT&T is attempting to deliver 1080i feeds in 6 Mbps of H.264 bandwidth. This is about half of what’s required for an artifact-free picture. It’s one-quarter of what is used on a typical Blu-Ray.

Sigh.

I had hoped to winnow my online bills down from Comcast (Internet) and DirecTV (TV) to just U-verse, but now it looks like I’ll need to keep DirecTV and just use U-verse for Internet.

Oh, and another crappy aspect of U-verse: It doesn’t carry American Movie Classics in my market (although it does in others). That means no Mad Men this summer. Just another reason to keep tapped into DirecTV.

Android Incredible May Be More Crappy Than Incredible

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Acquired a new Android Incredible phone this week as I wanted to escape the icy, DRMed grip of Apple’s iPhone/iTunes. Unfortunately, it appears the honeymoon may be very short.

Today, the phone spontaneously rebooted three times–each time returning the error message “SD card removed.” But I had not been messing with the SD card. I’d just pressed the icon for mail. The third time it rebooted, it appeared to be locked up. It seemed to be stuck at the “loading” stage. I started Googling around for solutions and before I could find out how to do a hard reset, it came back to life.

Sad to say, there are already posts on the Android forums about this issue. One in particular caught my eye. goatspanka (!) reports:

I live on the border between Mississippi and Alabama and I get random reboots when at home, but when I am at work, I don’t get issues at all. I have the 8gb card from my storm in it, so I don’t think that’s a problem.

I do live in a “fringe” coverage area so my phone is constantly looking for service. The tower switching problem sounds valid, but I have heard of reboot while using wifi only, so it may be a software problem. It seems all we can do is wait.

To which another Alabamian, kur1j, responded:

Damn didn’t want to see this…

I am in Alabama and have had the phone reboot 3 times today. I am in area where I don’t get great coverage.

I didn’t notice it before the OTA update. 1 day after the update and its done it 3 times. And this was posted today.

Guess I’ll just have to keep an eye on this. If the Droid Incredible becomes the Droid Crappy, I might trade it in for a regular Droid. I was intrigued by its sliding keyboard anyway…

Update 5/9/10: Verizon doesn’t exactly make it easy for you to find the user guide for the Droid Incredible. I finally tracked it down here after much Googling:

http://cache.vzw.com/multimedia/mim/htc_incredible/incredible.pdf

But that URL doesn’t look very permanent. You can get there by following links from

http://support.vzw.com/

Update 6/10/10: A month later… and I’m happy to say that the rebooting issue resolved itself within a week or so. Since then I’ve only experienced the “incredible” side of the Droid Incredible.

That is to say, I’m lovin’ it!

The iPhone did play a bit of catch-up this week with version 4, which contains some of the features of the DI — like multitasking. But still I have no buyer’s remorse. It feels good to be free of Apple and AT&T Wireless.

This blog has moved

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This blog is now located at http:// crappysw. blogspot. com/.
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Update 12/16/2014:

In December 2014, Blogger pulled a crap move and somehow managed to delete dozens of my images. Consequently, The Crappy Software Blog is no longer active there. I’m hosting the blog on WordPress on my own site now.

Blogger was getting dated anyway. Seems like it went downhill after Google bought it.

Trying NOT to Think of Firefox as Crap

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I am desperately trying to continue lovin’ Firefox, to not think of it as crappy software, but lately it just keeps a-crashin’ and a-crashin’ — like, about once a day on both Mac OS X and Windows 7. Plus, it keeps lagging and having trouble displaying pages quickly. Slashdot is particularly bad, but Gmail ain’t good either. On Mac, that freakin’ annoyin’ spinning beach ball has become the norm. I hate that damn thing.

And yesterday, something crappy and new happened: Tried to access Gmail through Firefox. It would not connect. Gave me the error msg: “The page isn’t redirecting properly.” Tried Gmail with Internet Explorer and got right through. Since I use Google for all manner of things — from email to Picasa’s online Web albums — not being able to connect to it is a major issue.

I’m a longtime supporter of Firefox, dating from its very first release. And I’ve recommended it to numerous friends over the years. But this recent crappiness is driving me back to OS-native browsers — Safari for Mac and Internet Explorer for Windows.

For the record, I’m using Firefox 3.5.3 on Mac 10.5.8 and Windows 7 release candidate. And I’ve tried disabling all extensions/add-ons/etc and clearing cookies and the cache. I’ve also Googled around a bit to see if I’m alone in my suffering. Not hardly. In fact, I found blog posts quite similar to my own!

“I Want To Love Firefox 3.5, But It Keeps Crashing On Me“

And this one, from David Rothman, sounds like it should have been written for the Crappy Software blog:

Oh, how I hate it when good software goes bad!

The Comic Crappiness of Microsoft Word

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I was merrily typing along in WordPerfect this afternoon when I began to question my oft-repeated oath that you’d have to pry this fine word processor from my cold dead hands. I’d recently run into some formatting issues when I converted WordPerfect files to Word in order to submit a manuscript and when working with grad students I often need to be able to read their material in Word and use its track changes to make comments.

So, I’ve felt the pressure to switch for some time. I just got a new computer this summer and put Windows 7 (a release candidate) on it and, since I have no major deadlines (at least, not this week) just now, I thought it might be fitting to try a new word processor.

I fired up Word 2007 and began taking notes on C. S. Tashiro’s Pretty Pictures, an interesting book on the history film that may provide some insights into Mad Men, on which I’m currently working. Almost immediately, almost comically, Word’s crappiness became apparent.

First, it crashed when I tried to make a simple configuration change (so that it’d use curly quotation marks). Did that twice.

I figured Word was getting pretty confused by then so I closed it and rebooted the machine. It still wouldn’t do curly quotations marks, but I gave up trying to configure it. Then I attempted to open the file that I’d been working on. It refused! “Word experienced an error trying to open the file…”

WordOpenError-761640
I tried, as suggested, to use the Text Recovery converter. No dice. My notes were inaccessible.

WordPerfect to the rescue! I asked WP to open this Word 2007 document and bada bing! Success!

How beautiful is that? WordPerfect is so generous that it even opened a competitor’s file. Can software be equanimous? If so, then I think WordPerfect qualifies.

What did my experience with the comic crappiness of Microsoft Word teach me? It taught me that my oath was not in vain! Just try to dislodge WordPerfect from my hard drive now!