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?
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.
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.
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…
When I moved into my first home in 1987, I partially did so to have my own clothes washer and dryer and escape the monotony and tyranny of the laundromat. I bought what would now be considered a “low efficiency,” top-loading washer that worked flawlessly for me for 14 years.
Then, my wife and I bought our first washer together–a “high efficiency” (what a load of crap), front-loading machine, by Frigidaire (the Affinity model). Since then it’s been one problem after another. (See my previous post about it.)
The washer soon developed a mildew stain on the rubber gasket on the front-loading door–despite our care with drying it out after each load and running its cleaning cycles. Turns out, this is a known issue that has affected hundreds of thousands of front-loading HE machines. There was even a class-action lawsuit about it.
To repair it is a major, expensive proposition. If you hire a pro to do it, it costs more than a new washer.
So, we bit the bullet and bought a new washer, donating the old one to a friend. We stuck with HE (big mistake), but got a top loader. Specifically, we spent about $600 at Lowe’s on a Maytag 5.3-cu ft high-efficiency top-load washer (model # MVWB835DW0). It had thousands of positive reviews and an average of 4.5 stars.
The Maytag MVWB835DW in our laundry room.
What a mistake.
From the start, my wife had trouble with lint gathering on her clothes if she hung them up to dry and did not run them through the dryer.
Then, after about a year, it began having a rotten-eggs smell after washing a load. No number of cleaning cycles would get rid of it. Online message boards are filled with complaints about this.
Final straw: This week, 14 months into our ownership of it, the machine began getting stuck in the rinse mode. Won’t go from there to spin without pausing the machine, raising the lid, and re-starting it.
And we’ve never felt that it effectively cleaned our clothes either.
All in all, a piece of crap, and an expensive piece of crap, too.
First, a recent attempt to update you failed. Now, EVERY time I boot my computer I get this error message about APSDaemon failing. A quick Googling reveals that MANY folks are afflicted with this error.
Image missing due to crappy behavior by Blogger, which deleted dozens of my images.
Do I bother trying to troubleshoot this, or do I just uninstall iTunes on this computer–on which I seldom use iTunes anyway because my iPad and iPod are synced to another computer and iTunes does not like us to share accounts among computers.
If computer software could be a dickhead, iTunes would be a dickhead.
Not only do you encourage users to install a useless toolbar and a video game (Angry Birds), but you make your installation screen look as if there’s no way to avoid that crap!
As you can see in the screen shot below, the “Custom Installation (Advanced)” choice, which is the only way to get out of the crappy toolbar, appears to be greyed out!
Today, whenever I try to do anything on Blogger, I get this error message:
We’re sorry, but we were unable to complete your request. When reporting this error to Blogger Support or on the Blogger Help Group, please: Describe what you were doing when you got this error. Provide the following error code. bX-kn464r
Weird thing is, whatever I was trying to do (start a new post, publish a post) WORKS, despite the error message.
At the end of my crappy, mandatory, 90-minute, obviously lawyer-induced, the University-covering-its-ass training course in (1) reporting child abuse (how many younger-than-18 students do I encounter?) and (2) handling hazardous materials (which I never do), there was a box for comments. So I wrote:
“Very poorly designed training course. Should NOT rely on browser pop-ups and should NOT be written in Java (a computer language with numerous security holes).”
(The training platform was so poorly implemented that the College tech support had to configure special computers in a lab for faculty and staff to use. Most folks could not get it to run on their own computers.)
Today I got a response from Skillsoft customer support that said, “Thank you for sending in feedback. We appreciate it when subscribers take the time to tell us how they are finding the service. Our courses are designed to work on as many configurations as possible.”
Crappy Software 