Microsoft is currently the worldʼs largest company. Too bad it doesn't know what a semicolon is.
Those are two names displayed in Outlook. But they might as well be four.
What still works on an iPhone 3G in 2024? Not much. But more should.
Like many technology enthusiasts, I have several boxes of gadgets that I keep around “just in case” I find a use for them later. One of the items in my boxes is an iPhone 3G, which I recently pulled out of storage because I found a use for it. Yes, in 2024.
The iPhone 3G came out in June of 2008, and I bought one for my wife on launch day. This is not that phone. My launch day iPhone 3G was stolen by a street urchin in a McDonaldʼs in Rome. At the time of the theft, Appleʼs Find My iPhone app was in its infancy, so for the rest of the day we were able to use my iPhone to watch my wifeʼs iPhone make the trip from Rome down to Naples, and eventually cross the Mediterranean Sea to Tunisia where the tracking stopped working.
To us, the tragedy wasnʼt that weʼd lost a telephone. Phones can be replaced. But iCloud photo syncing didnʼt exist yet, so my wife lost all of the photos she took in Rome, Naples, Ischia, Procida, and elsewhere. Understandably, she still grouses about it to this day.
A short time after we returned to the United States, the thiefʼs accomplices sold the phone to a woman in Tunisia, and for some reason instead of setting up her own e-mail account, she tried simply using the one already on the phone — my wifeʼs. Maybe the buyer thought that phones just came with e-mail already on them. I exchanged a few unpleasant messages with her in my tourist-grade French, and for what turned out not to be the last time in my life, I was told that because Iʼm an American, I am fat and I am rich and itʼs O.K. to steal from me. I just wanted her to e-mail me my wifeʼs photos, but seeing that our moral compasses were pointing in different directions, I changed the password on the e-mail, iTunes, and App Store accounts. Remote-wiping the phone was not yet a feature.
It should be noted that this is the somewhat unusual iPhone 3G, not the iPhone 3G🅂 which was released a year later and sold much better.
I wasnʼt a fan of the iPhone 3G, even when it was new. To me, the original iPhone, and the iPhone 4 still feel the best in my hand. They have a reassuring heft to them, and even though I know in my mind that the newer phones are more durable, the older ones feel more solid. The 3G, with its rounded plastic shell feels like a 1970ʼs Remington ladies electric leg shaver.
This iPhone is one of several in my collection, and itʼs not any physical flaws that keep my old iPhones from continuing to perform their original functions. Itʼs all in the software.
This iPhone 3G could probably do much of what it was intended to do, except for one big problem: connectivity.
The iPhone 3G cannot connect to any of my wifi access points. At first I thought it was because the 3G cannot handle modern encryption methods. But then I remembered reading somewhere that an accurate clock is required by some encryption schemes, and my 3Gʼs clock is not accurate. Thatʼs because there is no 3G cellular service for it to connect to where I live. This place is all 4G and 5G now, and the metaphorical plugs have been pulled on the 3G signals.
The phone does have some limited connectivity via USB. It shows up in Finder on a modern Mac just fine, and itʼs possible to sync music and other data with it. But any photos taken with the 3G canʼt be downloaded into a current Mac with either the Photos or Image Capture program. When connected, the phone promisingly shows up in the sidebar. When clicked, a message pops up (again, promisingly) asking you to unlock the phone. But that message vaporizes just a couple of seconds after it appears, along with the iPhoneʼs sidebar icon. No amount of plugging and unplugging or booting and rebooting either device returns the phone icon to Photos.
Fortunately, the same plastic bucket of tricks that held the iPhone 3G also yields a Mac computer from the same era. That machine is happy to slurp down the 3Gʼs photographic secrets like my Uncle Jerry through a bucket of oysters at a Poconos clam bake. Except that the Mac uses the standard Image Capture program to supply its needs, and not my Aunt Eileen.
Sadly, the iPhone 3G cannot use a tethered connection to access the internet. So this is what weʼre left with:
This is a screenshot of the iPhone 3Gʼs home screen in all of its… wait for it… 320x480 pixel glory. The current top-of-the-line iPhone is the 15 Pro, which sports a screen that has 23 times more pixels.
Letʼs start with the Settings app.
Thereʼs not too much to note in here. Though the visuals have been tweaked, thereʼs not much difference between a modern version of Settings, and the 3Gʼs. The modern version has many many more options, but the 3G does something the modern one doesnʼt. When the 3G is updating, the cogs inside the Settings icon rotate. Itʼs the sort of nice little touch that youʼd expect from an iPhone of its era, and exactly the sort of nice little touch that is shunned in todayʼs world.
The fact that there is no software update option in Settings confused me briefly. Iʼd forgotten that over-the-air software updates werenʼt a thing yet, and that to use an iPhone in any meaningful way, you had to plug it into a computer to update your apps, music, contacts, and everything else.
The App Store is a no-go. Without an internet connection, thereʼs no way to access it. Even if there were some apps in the current App Store that would run an on iPhone 3G, thereʼs no way to download them onto a Mac and sync them via USB. App syncing on the Mac does not exist anymore now that syncing has been moved from iTunes to the Finder.
Ah, the iTunes Store. This was peak iPhone. Millions of people spent billions of hours and dollars scouring Steve Jobsʼ bottomless stew pot of audible morsels. But, like with the App Store app, without an internet connection, it doesnʼt do anything anymore.
Itʼs the same story for the YouTube app. Which make sense, since itʼs an internet streaming app. But dig that YouTube icon!
Itʼs an actual tube. In the 3Gʼs era, tube televisions were still very common. We had hundreds of them at work. I didnʼt dump my Trinitron and go flat screen until 2006ish. I suspect weʼre only a few years away from children wondering why the word “tube” is in “YouTube.”
Like the others, the Stocks app requires an internet connection. The default indices are revealing. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and NASDAQ are default for the United States. The Standard and Poors is de rigueur for tech companies. Then thereʼs Apple, for obvious reasons. Google, for less obvious reasons. Perhaps because Google was already on the iPhone in the form of the built-in YouTube app, Google Maps app, and Safariʼs search feature. (Alternate search engines? You mean like Altavista Hotbot, Dogpile, and Ask Jeeves? Bing was still a year away, my friend.) The last one is Yahoo!, the formerly mighty internet company that now seems to have the same relevancy, business plan, and smell as Gold Bond Powder. But back then, Yahoo! was where all the information came for the Stocks app. So on the default list it went.
By this time, youʼre not at all surprised to see that Messages doesnʼt work without connectivity. But note that it requires a very specific type of connectivity: A cellular connection. There was no sending of text messages over an internet link yet. It all went via SMS. This historical fact is a bit inconvenient for people who like to indulge in conspiracy theories surrounding the current Messages appʼs use of green bubbles for SMS messages and blue bubbles for internet-delivered Apple Messages messages. People like to imagine that Apple moved SMS text messages into a “green ghetto” in order to make them hard to read and thus promote its own messaging platform. But the truth is that SMS text messages were green from day one. It was part of the design language of the iPhone: Things that a regular cell phone did had a green icon. Thus the Messages and Phone icons are green. When Apple added its messaging technology to the Messages app, it had more features than SMS could handle, so it got a different color bubble (blue) so people would know if they were on the old-fashioned text messaging platform invented in 1982 (SMS), or the modern one invented in 2011 (Messages).
The name of the app Messages is also interesting, because it later changed to iMessage when internet messaging became possible, and then back to simply Messages in more recent years.
This phone is contactless. Not in a NFC way. In the fact that there are no contacts loaded into it. Since the Contacts app works with standard iCal formats, I could probably sync my contacts to it with the Finder and a USB cable.
Now thatʼs how you skeuomorph! For a while, people liked to complain on the internet about Appleʼs design language which translated real-world objects into screen representations of their functions. This is a feature that aids with discovery and usability, not a bug, but as is so often the case, the loudest voices carry the day in the tech world, and weʼre left with the boring flat slabs and bland shades of corporate blue that have overwhelmed our computing day. Today, more and more people are realizing that boring is bad, and skeuomorphism is coming back.
Because it looks like a real-world object, the very simple user interface of the Voice Memos app needs no explanation. No help bubbles popping-up. No onboarding mechanism. This app should inspire apps of the future.
The Phone app of yesteryear looks very much like the phone app of today. The only notable difference is that the old one has buttons that look like actual buttons, instead of disembodied numerals floating around in the inky void of deep space.
Mail only goes this far without an internet connection. But like the Stocks app, itʼs interesting to see the defaults. All of the choices are viable options today, except for Appleʼs service. Mobile Me went bye-bye just four years after this phone came out. For long-time Apple users, itʼs been an annoying adventure as our e-mail addresses were migrated and duplicated from iTools to .mac to Mobile Me to iCloud. To this day, when Iʼm asked to sign into some Apple services, it will seemingly choose randomly between my @mac.com, @me.com, @icloud.com, or my other non-Apple Apple Accounts e-mail addresses. This is not ideal when youʼre on an input-limited device like an AppleTV.
Safari was one of the killer apps for the iPhone. A real internet browser on a phone! I shared Steve Jobsʼ glee when he publicly demonstrated viewing the New York Times on a device that fit in the palm of either of our hands. It felt like the future had fully arrived.
Again, thereʼs no internet connection, so blah blah fishcakes.
Another killer app for the iPhone was the fact that you no longer needed to carry both a mobile phone and an iPod with you. One tool to rule them all! Sure, mobile phones had music players in them before the iPhone. My Sony Ericsson M600i (as used by James Bond) had one. And guess what — it sucked. It crashed more often than Mobile Microsoft Word on that thing. The only way I could get it to reliably play music from the time I left work at WGN-TV to getting back home in the Loop was to wait for a full moon, swing a dead cat over my head three times, and hold my breath on the entire Brown Line ride home. If I made it to Clark and Lake without the phone rebooting itself, Iʼd stop by the bodega on the corner and buy a lottery ticket, because it was my lucky day.
Because the iPhone 3G cannot be updated beyond iPhone OS 4.2.1, the iPod app still has CoverFlow. This was the beeʼs knees to music enthusiasts. It was like flipping through your record albums anywhere on Earth. Sadly, Apple got sued over CoverFlow. And even though it won on appeal, for some reason Cupertino decided to yank the feature once Mr. Jobs was safely dead and notions of delighting audiophiles were swept out the door.
Hereʼs something completely unexpected. Google Maps works. Thereʼs no reason it should, since thereʼs no internet connection and the phone has been completely wiped so thereʼs no map cache. I can only guess that the app comes pre-loaded with a base set of common maps so that it doesnʼt have to rely on the eraʼs slow cellular data connections so much. When I get some time, Iʼll have to explore the limits of this. I expect it will be interesting.
The calendar app works, once you manually set the date and time in the Settings app. As with most calendar apps on a phone, thereʼs really no way to go right. Phones make for terrible calendars. An iPad is suitable. But thereʼs just not enough digital real estate on a phone screen to avoid making sacrifices.
The Photos app works. This appears to be the last photograph I ever took with this phone. Itʼs of Louis, in our apartment in Aqua. There was only a narrow window of time when we lived at Aqua, and Louis was still alive, so the photo must be from early 2011. On my end table in the background, you can see my original launch day iPhone playing music through a Sony radio. Itʼs the same radio that I plan to mate with this iPhone 3G to play music, and the reason I dug this phone out of my bucket oʼ gadgets.
The camera works, but man is it slow. The focus is awful. The exposure is terrible. There are only two buttons: One to take a picture, and one to show you the picture you just took. The images are 1,600x1,200 pixels. Thatʼs not quite two megapixels. The current iPhones take photos 6,048x8,064 pixels. Thatʼs 48 megapixels, or 24 times bigger than an iPhone 3G.
Itʼs hard to say if Weather might work if I was able to give this thing an internet connection. APIs change so often, itʼs possible that the iPhone 3G might be left out in the cold. Still, you could always access the weather onli… oh, wait.
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Notes works fine. But even if you had an internet connection, donʼt expect it to work with any of the notes that you have on your current iPhone or iPad or Mac. Note syncing is strictly between the phone and the computer. Though, itʼs possible that if you were to sync your modern iPhoneʼs notes with the same computer that they might migrate. At one time the Notes app stored its contents as simple IMAP data. Thatʼs why you used to be able to sync notes between devices with any old e-mail account acting as an intermediary. I believe that is still true today.
The clock works, but the time isnʼt perfect because I had to set it manually. And the time zones are probably not right anymore, since those things seem to change all the time. There hasnʼt been a change to the Daylight Saving rules in the United States since this phoneʼs last operating system update, so it should be fine as an alarm clock.
One plus one remains two.
To sum up, the iPhone 3G is a good phone, when it isnʼt neutered. And without an internet connection, its utility is significantly stunted. Iʼm going to try to remember to bring it with me when I go out some day to see if itʼs possible to find a public wifi access point thatʼs less persnickety about its security. Maybe at a cafe, or a hotel. Or perhaps in a library, or a community center, or a Metro bus, or some other cash-strapped municipal outpost that likely doesnʼt have the money to upgrade access points all the time. Or maybe Iʼll bring it with me to the parts of Mexico or Honduras or Nevada where Iʼve been recently where 3G networks are all thatʼs available. Perhaps then Iʼll be able to re-write this article with much more positive results.
I think Starbucksʼ server needs more coffee.
In spite of what Amazon.com suggests, Iʼm not sure that these optical disc sleeves are compatible with my iPhone.
I got a new video game today. Itʼs the Sears Tele-Games version of Atariʼs Codebreaker. Like most Atari and Tele-Games cartridges, its box featured fantastically imaginative art that had virtually nothing to do with the game.
Released in 1978, this was one of the early Atari 2600 games. It was also very unpopular. Codebreaker can be hard. It is visually unappealing. And it requires a weird controller. Half a century later, these factors combine to make it one of the more difficult games to find for sale at a price under $10, my maximum budget for buying Atari games.
While video games today — and todayʼs entertainment in general — are all about thrills and special effects, games of the 1970ʼs were more about thinking. Dopamine release came from exercising oneʼs brain and figuring out a problem, rather than killing things.
Think about the sorts of things that people did for entertainment in the past: Solitaire, cribbage, crossword puzzles, home chemistry sets, playing music, even needlepoint were all mental stimulation involving math and science. You donʼt think playing music is mathematical? Think fractions, baby.
When computers started to be used for recreation, they were perfectly suited for adapting the entertainment of the day into an electronic form. Codebreaker even includes the game Nim, a traditional two-player mathematical game that has been around for over a century. With an Atari in front of the Magnavox you no longer needed the extra player, as you could pit your gray matter against a computer.
The first games for computers involved numeric deduction, and Atariʼs Codebreaker brought that from multi-ton mainframes right into peopleʼs family rooms. It felt like The Jetsons was ready to happen any minute now.
Today, I suspect the number of people in the world playing Codebreaker for entertainment is close to zero. But in spite of all the so-called advances in video games, which mostly seem to involve explosions and killing things, people still love thinking games.
There are still cities like Chicago and New Orleans where you can jump into a game of chess with a stranger on the sidewalk. Or Tampa and Seattle, where itʼs not unusual to see an energetic round of dominos in a coffee shop. Or even recently when I was at sea, I was pestered to be the fourth in a rubber of bridge.
Mental stimulation games donʼt get a lot of attention, but they are alive and well. If they werenʼt, the New York Times wouldnʼt have paid millions to buy Wordle. Itʼs not a very long trip from Codebreaker to Wordle.
And then there are days when you unlock your phone, and your phone locks up.
Except for the screenshot function, which for some reason still works.
Hereʼs something you donʼt see every day. Among the big technology overlords, Amazon isnʼt perfect, but EC2 outages aside, its flaws are rarely technical. This is one of those blue moon cases of a styling error on amazon.com.
This must be my lucky day. Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket, or something.
If your computer is not able to run the latest version of macOS, and a program you bought through the App Store has a new version, the App Store program will helpfully allow you to download the latest version of that program in question that will run on your version of macOS.
Except that it doesnʼt work.
In the video above, you can see that I would like to update Microsoft Outlook on my Early 2015 MacBook. When I click Update, the App Store offers the sentence fragment “Download an older version of Microsoft Outlook?” But clicking Download does nothing.
Appleʼs support web site could use a little support.
I know I pick on Apple a bit because of all of the technical flaws in its products. But thatʼs partly because Apple products are the ones I use most often, so Iʼm apt to run across problems with them most often. Itʼs also because Apple has enough money to make sure the sorts of things I run across donʼt happen.
But I also give credit where credit is due, and Apple should be given a laurel and hardy handshake for putting out a new version of iOS for one of my work phones: An iPhone 5🅂.
This is a phone that came out in September of 2013. Thatʼs more than ten years ago. When this phone was purchased, Pope Francis was still figuring out where the bathrooms were in the Vatican. I wonder if he brought one with him to pass the time.
Itʼs not great that after making a purchase on Libertyʼs web site that instead of sending me to a thank you page, or an order status page, or even the home page, it throws an error.
Strange that the error code is 200, which in HTTP means everything is okie dokie. “200” decodes to “OK.”
But at least itʼs better than Harrods web site. Over there, I probably wouldnʼt be able to even see the error message, as it would be mostly obscured — drowning in a sea of jQuery-era slide-fade nonsense.
Sad to see the New York Times web site stumble. But itʼs probably the nicest server error message Iʼve seen.
But… itʼs the cloud! There can be no errors, because itʼs in the cloud so itʼs all made of magic unicorn fairy dust. Thereʼs even a picture of the cloud right there. Nothing ever goes wrong in the cloud!
I spent most of today planning a method to prevent my companyʼs web sites from going down in certain circumstances.
I feel ya, H.E.B.
More and more, it seems that the promises of technology have fallen flat.
When we started building all of this, we really thought we were changing the world for the better. We had these visions that the work we were doing would usher in the Age of the Expanding Man — when people would be free to explore their humanity in new ways, while machines handled the grubby details invisibly behind the scenes. Steely Dan summed it up in the song International Geophysical Year:
On that train of graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
More leisure for artists everywhere
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
Weʼll be clean when their work is done
Weʼll be eternally free, and eternally young
Clearly, that didnʼt happen.
We wired all the worldʼs computers together thinking that access to infinite knowledge would lift people out of poverty. Mostly, it made the already rich people even richer. Social media was supposed to unite people in peace and understanding. All it did was divide us into angry tribes. We transitioned our movies and music to digital versions thinking that would bring the best the world had to offer to the masses. Instead, most of it was lost; and what remains is controlled by a few giant corporations to be doled out in dribs and drabs, sanitized, censored, and selected by a computer to ensure maximum profit.
Technology canʼt make us eternally free, because technology isnʼt eternal.
People who enjoy old technology continually struggle with degrading discs, leaking capacitors, and the inability to find parts to fix their machines. And while their hassles are readily dismissed as problems of their own choosing — like someone who chooses to drive an antique car — everyone has family photos.
Which, at long last, gets to the point of this screed: The illustration below.
The first image is a photograph of my grandfather. Itʼs over 120 years old, and looks nearly as good today as it did when it was taken.
The second image is what happens when I try to view a photograph I took with a digital camera 25 years ago. The bits have degraded to the point where itʼs not viewable, even on period-appropriate hardware. Few of the files on the disk show up anymore, and those that do are so full of errors, they canʼt be displayed.
The third image is what happens when I try to view a photograph I took with a digital camera just 10 years ago.
The printed photograph is still viewable 110 years longer than the photos from my Sony digital camera. And while there is a never-ending list of ways that the metadata can get stripped out of a digital photograph, the metadata for the printed photo is written on the back, and will be there for as long as the photo exists.
The folly is that we, as a society, have rushed to build a digital world without thinking about what weʼre doing. There is a persistent mantra of "technology is good" and "digital is better." But thatʼs not always true, in ways great and small.
What Iʼm trying to do in my life is to pick and choose which new technologies are worth integrating into my human world. Thereʼs no reason we canʼt live our lives with a reasonable amount of technology, but mixed with what we already have to enhance our lives, not to overpower our lives.
A light switch works every time. Asking Siri to turn on the lights does not. Therefore, Siri is a novelty, not an enhancement. So Iʼll turn on my lamp with my fingers, and look at my photographs on paper, while other people are free to stay locked in endless software updates and Googling solutions to the tech problems they have chosen for themselves.
The whole “unknown error” thing is really getting old. Older than the iPod Shuffle Iʼm trying to sync.
A trillion dollar company that lacks the Q.A. to let you know what went wrong.
MacOS Sonoma has a new feature that groups items in grocery lists by aisle, to make navigating the supermarket more efficient. Itʼs an interesting idea that needs a bit of help.
Based on what it put under “Beverages,” I think my computer is trying to kill me.
One thing I really like about the DuckDuckGo browser is its consistency. For example, the way it consistently screws up drawing its own user interface. Almost every day I get an interface element that is black-on-black, or white-on-white.
I look forward to the day I see pomegranate-on-pomegranate.
In order to continue, Apple says I have to update all of my Apple devices. Apple also says that a bunch of my devices cannot be updated.
Why not just tell me that I cannot continue because some of my devices are outdated? Why the passive aggression?
I still use my 2013 iPhone 5🅂 today, as we begin to round the corner into 2024. Right now it's playing music in the library. It still syncs fine with iTunes Apple Music Music Finder.
I can mostly understand a date picker that opens up beyond the boundaries of its containing window, if itʼs on a web page. But Reminders is a native macOS program that Apple includes with the operating system. It shouldnʼt open a date picker off the edge of the screen.
You cannot be in a hurry to reset an iTunes password. Itʼs simply not an option.
Two-factor authentication is so last Thursday. The new hotness in account security is leveraging temporal annoyance.
When you try to reset an iTunes password, not only do you have to wait an unknown amount of time to complete the process, you have to wait an entire extra day first to find out how long the process will take.
In my case, 24 hours after I got this message, I received an e-mail stating that it would take seven days before I would be allowed to reset my password. So eight days in total in order to regain access to all of my music from iTunes Japan.
It makes sense that scammers arenʼt going to be that patient. Their business model relies on the ability to flip and abuse an account nearly instantly, before the owner even knows something is happening. Eight days isnʼt going to fly on the dark web.
And to be fair, thereʼs no song in my iTunes Japan account that is so urgently needed that I have to listen to it right at this very moment, so I find all of this slow-motion hoop-jumping to be a curiosity. I expect there are other people who consider it an outrage.
But, true to its word, exactly seven days after I received the e-mail from Apple telling me Iʼd have to wait a week to change my password, another e-mail arrived with a link allowing me to do so. It took 192 hours, but at least the process just worked.™
One Finder window says I have 54GB available. Another Finder window says I have 168GB available.
Itʼs no wonder that Finder has been reviled by Macintosh users since the 1980ʼs.
Appleʼs iTunes software has a habit of upgrading the music in a person's computer every once in a while, without telling them.
But if you're the sort of person who occasionally looks through one's file system, you see it in action, because anomalies arise when automation is allowed to make changes to something as arbitrary as music.
In the screenshot above, you can see the directory that stores a copy of the Tori Amos album American Doll Posse.
Of note is the song “Fat Slut,” which has been upgraded to “Fat S__t.”
The music isn't different. Mrs. Amos still shrieks, “Fat Slut!” into the microphone. But Apple has thoughtfully sanitized the song's file name to protect the sensitive circuits in its modern computers that might become offended by the term.
Nobody tell Fat Agnus.
I donʼt know that Iʼve ever allowed a bit of placeholder text leak into production, but we all make mistakes.
Still, youʼd think that Apple Pay would have a regex or something somewhere to prevent this sort of thing.
I only clicked on the link to Wrikeʼs silly onboarding video because it promised it would only be one minute long. It was even in bold, so it must be true.
But like campaign promises and frequent flyer miles, this turned out to be a lie. The video is actually almost four minutes long.
I guess I should have expected this from the same company that only recently stopped sending out alerts with text randomly changing from Pacific Daylight to Pacific Standard time, and bogarts the web browserʼs ⇧⌘N shortcut for its own purposes.
It took me a while, but I finally managed to buy each of the original cartridges released with the Atari 2600 in 1977.
The sticking point was Star Ship. It took almost a year for one to show up on fleaBay for under $50.00. My budget was $5.00. So when one finally appeared, I was all over that Buy It Now button.
To mark the occasion, I put them in a stack on the dining room table, and took photos which I then turned into i-device wallpapers. They look pretty good on my iPhone. I haven't tried them on an iPad yet, but I made them with plenty of space around so that they'll work in both portrait and landscape on an iPad.
You may notice that the screenshot with the cartridges arranged in a helix has squiggles where the time should be. This is because on weekends, I don't want to know what time it is, and iOS doesn't allow one to remove the clock, so changing it to a language I can't read is almost as good.
It's also not possible to remove the date bar, but I can replace it with the weather, which is less awful than seeing the cold, bony hand of time scratching across the top of the screen.
The original wallpaper files I created are here:
So, if I set up an iCloud e-mail address, all of the e-mail that everyone around the world sends without an address will come to me? That doesnʼt sound like fun at all.
I always feel bad when a new company tries to make a big splash on the internet, and then has a hard time of it. I know how it is trying to do ambitious things with a small team and little funding.
In this case, it's a scrappy little startup called “Google,” and its product is called “Google Analytics.” As you can see, the web site is a disaster. Hopefully it gets some money and people to work things out.
It looks like my meth dealer now does electronic billing.
Also, heʼs going to send me a bill tomorrow morning.
Looks like some web developer at State Farm is having a bad day. Maybe I should call him a tow truck.
All of the “in” devices are slowly blinking this season.
Adobe canʼt decide if Acrobat is up to date, or not. I finally had to uninstall the whole suite in order to get it to start making sense of itself.
Somehow, I donʼt think this is right.
The tech industry would benefit from ditching “Move fast and break things” and segueing into “Attention to detail is a sign of quality.”
The companyʼs InfoSec† team insists that itʼs super important that I update my computerʼs operating system as soon as possible.
So, I guess this is what Iʼm doing at work for the next few hours.
† “Information Security”
Do you want to get people to disable emergency alerts on their cell phones? Because this is how you get people to disable emergency alerts on their cell phones.
But at least the police destroyed some innocent guyʼs entire house with a tank making the arrest.
This Microsoft Azure web page promoting Redmondʼs acumen tells me two things:
Ever have one of those days when the I.T. department asks you for the password to one of its own machines?
And you have to tell the I.T. department that the super-duper high security password it assigned to a production machine is Password123?
This weekendʼs project: Teaching myself FORTH on a Udamonic Scamp3 single-board computer.
My first introduction to FORTH was around 1984 with H.E.S.ʼ 64 FORTH, which everyone just called “Sixty-Forth” because itʼs easier to say and made us feel clever. I didnʼt get very far with it because the H.E.S. FORTH came on a cartridge, and I had no means of storing my completed programs. Not even a datasette. By the time I got my first 1541 disk drive, I had moved on to other things.
But I have an affinity for old programming languages, so when I ran across the Scamp on the internet, I ordered one right away. I didnʼt receive it right away, though. It was shipped from Australia via a start-up called Sendle, so the computer I ordered in March arrived at the end of June. Iʼm amazed that it works, considering it was packed in little more than a thin layer of bubble wrap, and mailed in a basic envelope, which had been torn open along the way.
By design, both 64 Forth and FlashForth on the Scamp are FORTH supersets. Programs being only semi-portable between platforms is considered a feature, not a bug, in FORTH. Still, all FORTHs conform to the same programming paradigms and seem to have 95% compatibility with one another. Much like computers in the 1970ʼs, when youʼd buy a generic book of BASIC programs at Brentanoʼs and then it was up to you to customize the code to fit your machine.
Interestingly, the H.E.S. variation of FORTH seems more capable than the FlashForth that the Scamp runs. 64 Forth has over 500 words in its vocabulary, and comes with a split-screen I.D.E. method of interaction. The Scamp superset of FlashForth has just 425 words, and is designed for very bare-bones TTY output. No fancy ANSI windows here.
On the other hand, the Scamp can be powered off and when it's plugged in again you can pick up right where you left off. With any Commodore 64 FORTH, once you restart, you have to rebuild or reload all of the words you have previously defined. So while FlashForth isn't flashy, it's certainly more useful to use for a long-term project.
So what will I do with a 55-year-old programming language in 2023? Iʼm going to learn. Iʼm going to explore. Iʼm going to expand my ways of thinking and understand how things were done in the past so that I can do things better in the future.
Whenever I get a new piece of kit, Iʼm automatically challenged with ”What good is it?” I shouldnʼt have to answer that. Intellectual curiosity should be rewarded and saluted. Not everything is a start-up. Not everything is a business. Not everything has to make money. 50 years ago, nobody would have asked someone who does woodworking in his spare time, “How are you going to monetize that?” The notion would have been ludicrous. And, not surprisingly, the sort of people who donʼt understand intellectual curiosity are also the same group of people who spend their free time laying on a couch binge watching the latest zombiethon on the trendy streaming service of the day.
Hereʼs my latest million-dollar idea.
Combine the power of audio deepfakes with the radio distribution capabilities of the internet to allow radio listeners to pick their own disc jockeys.
It came to me when I was pondering Appleʼs new assistive technology to allow people to respond to messages by typing the response, but delivering it in their own voice. Apple calls it “Personal Voice,” and itʼs coming to iPhones better than the one I have.
By combining Appleʼs Personal voice with the voice-tracking software already in use by radio stations, listeners could get not only the music they want, but also the presenters they prefer.
So instead of having to suffer through the affectations and vocal fry of the latest too-cool-for-school D.J. on Sirius XMU, with the push of a button, you could have Sluggo from First Wave telling you about Björkʼs new tour. Or, instead of the inaudible never-thee-care mumbling of a KCNV/Las Vegas classical announcer, you could have the clarity and diction of David Attenborough explaining the historical significance of Tchaikovskyʼs Dances of the Hay Maidens.
Iʼll leave it up to the radio companies and the announcers unions to decide how semi-synthetic D.J.ʼs get compensated.
I am both impressed and disappointed with macOS.
I set up a new user account so that I could telnet in to a macOS box to perform certain tasks that can only be done via telnet, and with a CLI.
Not surprisingly, in 2023, macOS doesn't come with terminal definitions for a TRS-80 Model 100. It's a 40-year-old machine, so it makes sense that I would have to build my own. Which I did.
But as I was doing so, I noticed that macOS still comes with terminal definitions for far older, and more obscure computers than the one I'm connecting to it with.
Granted, these terminal definitions are just part of the stock set that is packed in with many Unixes. But I still find it surprising that after a half-century, these files continue to proliferate, and still exist, even though the number of people who would use them is basically zero.
Can you figure out how to close this error message dialog box? No, itʼs not by clicking on the red circled × that looks exactly like a close window control. You do it by clicking on the ellipses.
Good job, Microsoft.
Among tech companies, Apple has a reputation for being the tightest with protecting peopleʼs privacy. Apparently, that extends to stick people on road signs.
As a society, have we reached the point yet where web developers can finally stop putting “Results” at the top of search results?
Please?
Today, Apple released a software update for my iPhone 6, which came out in September of 2014. That means this latest software update is for a phone that came out 100 months ago.
I also pulled out my Samsung Galaxy S7 to see if it had a software update. Nope. It stopped getting software updates in January of 2021. That means it only got software updates for 57 months — about half as long as the iPhone.
Sounds like a good reason to avoid Samsung phones.
Me: “Oh, cool, my new work computer has a battery that lasts all day!”
Adobe Creative Cloud: “Hold my beer…”
One of Appleʼs edge servers is called “Croissant.”
The SD card floppy drive emulator I use on my TRS-80 has its activity light facing the wrong direction. So I drilled a hole in the case, and voila!
I wonder how many other tech problems can be solved with power tools.
A mystery error on a bank web site. Thatʼs OK. Itʼs not like people trust banks with their money or anything.
A web siteʼs 404 page is often the most neglected page of the site. Netflix wonʼt even waste CSS on it.
Citibankʼs web site says my browser is not supported. It wants a minimum of Safari 15.2.
Iʼm using 16.3.
Is it too much to expect a bank to know how to count?
Well, hereʼs something you almost never see: an error message from the B&H web site.
B&H takes its web presence very seriously, and is among the planetʼs biggest targets for criminals. But somehow the boffins on 9th Avenue manage to keep the fraudsters at bay, while maintaining a web site that is fast, complex, and fairly easy to use.
This error message didnʼt last long. Only a few seconds. Perhaps today is a good day to buy a lottery ticket.
You want to be mad because Carnivalʼs web site is needlessly complex. But who can be cross with a towel animal?
Yes. The error was doing business with MediaTemple/GoDaddy.
It seems that I can do things.
Today I received an e-mail telling me that my Windows Server training has earned me a major award. Maybe not major. Minor. OK, itʼs a PNG.
Collecting these badges is the way nerds boast to one another these days. Kind of like the way certain birds will collect shiny objects to attract a mate.
According to the company that taught the class, I am now thoroughly stilled in the following:
I may have made up that last one.
Silicon Valley tech companies gotta Silicon Valley. Amirite?
Apple has a new version of its HomePod device available. Much like most of its previous devices, itʼs built for people who live in the greater San Francisco area, where the weather is largely placid, boring and uneventful. In other words — entirely unlike most of the rest of the planet.
The web page about the new HomePod includes this footnote about its temperature and humidity sensors:
Temperature and humidity sensing is optimized for indoor, domestic settings, when ambient temperatures are around 15°C to 30°C and relative humidity is around 30% to 70%.
Well, 15°C is 59 degrees. How often do people let it get down to 59 degrees in their homes? All the time.
There is no shortage of basements in places like Green Bay, Minneapolis, and the entire nation of Canada where people have a basement that has been kitted out as a family room, or a den, or a home office and that remains unheated most of the year. One of Appleʼs scenarios for using the HomePod temperature sensor is that it can be paired with other HomeKit gear to automatically turn on a heater if it gets too cold. Great. Except that if your chosen temperature for activating the heat in your unused basement or attic rec room is below 59°, Apple admits itʼs not going to be reliable.
On the hot side, OK, itʼs unusual to have an indoor temperature above 86°. But Iʼve had it in my house many times when the humidity was low and I lived in the desert. Many days in the spring and fall when Iʼd have the windows wide open enjoying the warm breeze and low humidity, the indoor temperature would get to 86°. If the cat was sleeping, that was fine. Sheʼd eventually wake up and start complaining, and Iʼd have to close the windows and bring the temperature down to 80-ish for her. But thatʼs to be expected, since she wears a fur coat. If I didnʼt have the cat, Iʼd probably have the temperature higher. And Iʼm not alone. Thereʼs a reason millions of people retire to hot places.
The humidity range is oddly narrow, too. Iʼm sure that 30% humidity is bone-crackingly dry in Cupertino. In Nevada, itʼs a bit clammy. When I lived there, the outdoor humidity reported by the National Weather Service was regularly in the single digits. And both of my indoor humidity sensors almost always showed readings well below 30%. Both of them appeared to have the same sensor under the hood, since they both stopped reporting humidity at 10%. These werenʼt expensive high-tech scientific humidity sensors. One I bought at the Apple Store for about $100. The other came from the supermarket, and cost about ten bucks. But it was perfectly happy reporting humidity far lower than what Apple considers reliable for its equipment.
Living in the Bay Area, Apple employees canʼt possible envision indoor humidity above 70%, but guess what — thatʼs a perfectly ordinary occurrence in most of the southern United States, including Florida, New Orleans, and Houston — the fourth-largest city in the nation. According to my HomeKit-connected humidity sensor, the humidity inside my house has been over 80% five times in the last two months.
All of this continues a pattern at Apple of designing products that only work well in the very specific, very ordinary weather conditions of Silicon Valley. Things like iPod headphone cords that get brittle in a Chicago winter, and iPhones that shut themselves off in temperatures that are common for millions of people who live in desert environments.
Apple has the money, the resources, and the people to do better. Why it chooses not to remains unclear.
Google Glass? Apple realityOS? Noobs all around.
Reflection Technology was doing augmented reality 35 years ago.
Iʼve had bad days. But at least Iʼve never been a Microsoft employee that got locked out of Microsoftʼs system while demonstrating how great Microsoftʼs products are to a group of 50 potential customers.
It must be interesting to work for a company big enough to invent its own HTML entities.
It must also be interesting when your boss lets you know that you didnʼt escape them, or parse them, or whatever and theyʼre showing on the public web site.
I presume that &NFi; is supposed to be parsed as <i>, and &NFi_; as </i>.
I almost beat a computer at chess today. Almost.
I've been playing chess against computers for four decades now, and have never beaten one. Not even once. Not even on “novice” levels. If a chess board had pieces more worthless and expendable than pawns, I would be one of those pieces.
But I keep playing. Atari 2600 Video Chess? Kicked my ass. Sargon Ⅱ on a Commodore 64? Took my lunch money and gave me a wedgie. Battle Chess on an IBM XT? Bought me flowers, took me to dinner, brought me home, kissed my hand and then didn't call me the next day.
Tonight I did something I have never done before: I managed to “check” a computer opponent.
The opponent was MicroChess on a KIM Uno, the modern-day incarnation of the old MOS KIM-1 machine.
The KIM did eventually beat me, but for once it wasn't the sort of Gulf War shock-and-awe defeat I'm used to.
I got the KIM because I nurse a fascination with the early days of computing, and because I found out that one can be built for under $20. That's another of my fascinations: Ultra-cheap computers.
The KIM Uno is a good way to get a taste of what it was like to compute in 1976. But it's not a faithful reproduction. It's more like a tribute than a recreation. The KIM software runs on a miniature single board computer, and has been modified in ways that make a lot of concessions to the limitations of the Arduino side of its split personality.
There are a lot of web sites on the internet that talk about the Uno, but it's clear that the people who blog about this machine put the parts together, poked in about six instructions of 6502 assembly, and then moved on to other things. If they had stuck with the KIM Uno, there would be an extensive library of modern software available for it the way there is for other new models of old computers.
One sure sign that nobody has ever used a KIM Uno for anything other than a minor plaything is that nowhere on any of the web pages flogging it do the writers mention battery life. I surmise that none of them used it long enough for that to be a concern.
The Kim Uno's primary problem is that it lack expandability. One of the greatest assets of the original KIM-1 was that it could be expanded in many ways. You could add memory. Add storage devices. Add circuits and relays and printers and terminals and pretty much anything the hobbyist could imagine. The KIM Uno leans on the Arduino's built-in serial port, and that's about its only connectivity. But even that serial port is fixed at a speed and parameters that make it incompatible with a number of era-appropriate terminals.
There is an expansion port of sorts on the KIM Uno, but it isn't documented. There's a single picture on the internet of the KIM Uno driving a small OLED display, but no information about how to do that. And worse, the KIM Uno machine driving the display isn't even running the KIM-1 ROMs. It's being used to emulate a COSMAC ELF.
To summarize: unlike the KIM-1, the only thing the KIM Uno is good for is to play chess. But on the other hand, the KIM-1 cost the equivalent of $1,300 today dollars, while the KIM Uno can be had for less than $12 in parts. But with that reduction in price comes a reduction in possibilities. And the whole reason people got into computers in the 1970ʼs was because at the time, we thought the possibilities of technology were endless.
At first, I thought it was bad when GoDaddy told me I would be unable to chat with someone in its Customer Service department for 2⅔ hours.
The actual wait time ended up being 19 hours.
Iʼll write that again so you donʼt think it was a typo: The actual wait time ended up being 19 hours.
I didnʼt choose GoDaddy for this project, Iʼm just fixing something for someone else. But I now have an idea why everyone Iʼve ever spoken with in the tech world says to avoid GoDaddy at all costs.
Tech people know that search is hard. But itʼs not this hard.
A search for “Cheddar cheese” at H.E.B. shouldnʼt show me mascara.
Legacy of Texas is the online store of the Texas State Historical Association.
Apparently, itʼs all hat and no cattle.
Oh, the hazards of storing HTML in a database. You never know whoʼs going to SELECT it and squirt it on the screen unparsed.
It seems strange to me that when filling in your personal information on the Fortnum and Mason web site that the default telephone country code is +229. Thatʼs Benin, all the way in Africa.
It would make sense for the default country code to be +44, since itʼs a British department store. Or maybe the country codes could be sorted numerically, so itʼs easier to find the one youʼre looking for. Or perhaps use the country code of the customers who generate the most revenue for the store, whatever number that may be.
But I doubt that the people of Benin buy more F&M stuff than any other country.
In the 1983 movie Trading Places, Don Ameche can be seen reading a Wall Street Journal. The back page has an ad for the Apple ][ and Apple /// with the line “The first problem they solve is what to give for Christmas.”
Thatʼs just as true today, 39 years later, as it was then.
There seem to be an awful lot of robots around these days.
Iʼm not sure if itʼs a Houston thing, or a big city thing, or just the state of the world in which we live today. But there are an awful lot of robots around. In the hospitals, in the malls, in supermarkets, and even running around on public sidewalks.
Many of them have cone heads. I wonder what would happen if I started putting Santa hats on them as I pass by.
News anchor on WGN-TV: ”Thank you, Terry Savage.”
The HomePod across my living room: “*bing* Hi there!”
I guess my HomePodʼs name is Terry Savage.
Mr: “Hey, Siri, add pretzels to my groceries list.”
Siri: “Who is speaking?”
Me: “Wayne”
Siri: “Sure. Here's home music picked just for you.”
It's called a “tech stack” because of how easily it falls over.
You know your software is flaky when the command menu includes an option to restart the program when it starts misbehaving.
You know your software is really flaky when you build an entirely different program to fix whatever it is that happens that prevents the main program from restarting itself.
Netflix is one of the largest media companies on the planet. If it canʼt keep its web site from eating itself, what chance do I have?
While I appreciate the Potter Country Store being creative with its web site, I donʼt think a laundry basket is quite the right icon for a virtual shopping cart.
Unless they use laundry baskets to do their shopping in Schulenburg, Texas. You never know. People in Pennsylvania call shopping carts “buggies.”
Upgrading macOS on a headless Mac is an iffy proposition. The last time I did this, I ended up nuking the whole machine and restoring from a backup.
If it works, Iʼll go across the street and buy a lottery ticket.
30 minutes later…
Itʼs O.K., Annie. I have a button to do that.
Hereʼs an odd design choice. In macOS 13/Ventura, the Stocks program allows you to add a stock youʼre viewing to your watch list. To do that, you press the + button. To remove a stock from your watch list you press the ✓ checkmark button.
In my lifetime, a checkmark has always meant something along the lines of “yes” or “confirm” or something else affirmative. Using a check to remove something — an inherently negative action — is counterintuitive to me.
iPadOS 16 may not be quite ready for prime time. At least not the part of it that only shows an icon placeholder graphic when you try to do math with it.
I know that Iʼm not perfect. I know that while I think my web sites work on every device, thereʼs probably a configuration out there on which they fall over. But the University of Houston/Downtown really has no excuse for this.
How is it possible for an organization to put out a public web site in 2022 that doesnʼt work on mobile phones? Itʼs bad enough that this page from UH/D is cut off on the right side, but there is no way to even scroll to the right to see whatʼs missing! And this is on a recent iPhone, not some obscure open source homebrew kit.
I preview every single web page I build for desktop, tablet, and two mobile phones. Every one. Sometimes dozens each week.
The University of Houston/Downtown brags that itʼs the second-largest university in Americaʼs fourth-largest city. Surely, someone on campus must have a smart phone to test with.
Thanks, iOS 16. Can you be a little more vague?
The sign outside this CVS says the pharmacy opens at 7:00am. I showed up at 8:00am, because thatʼs when Apple Maps says the pharmacy opens. Guess which one is right?
Holy shit, itʼs Apple Maps!
I walked into the store at 7:57am, sat in a chair by the pharmacy, and the metal security shutters rolled up at exactly 8:00am. Score one for the massive tech company.
The Marberger Farm Antique Show is permanently closed, according to Apple Maps. Itʼs also open for business, according to Apple Maps.
When something goes wrong and macOS canʼt find the correct icon for an operating system update, it uses a paper plate with “mac OS” written on it.
Now you know.
Another day, another technology that fails to live up to its billing. This is a familiar one: Amazon.com, and its Amazon Music service.
Today I tried to play the album Koop Islands by the band Koop. Except that I canʼt.
Whenever I press the play button on one of the album's songs, Amazon Music plays something other than the song I requested.
I clicked on Koopʼs song Come to Me and it played the song In the Morning by Natural Self.
I clicked on Koopʼs song Koop Island Blues and Amazon Music played the song Ode to Billie Joe by Nicola Conte.
If Amazon canʼt handle something as simple as playing music, maybe I shouldnʼt let it store my credit card information.
Today is Monday, October 17. My iPhone wants to tell me that in several languages, all at once.
If youʼre able to rip a DVD at over 800 frames per second on a laptop, you may have an M2 MacBook Pro.
One of the problems with getting my news from newspapers is that occasionally, I get the news from the weather app.
I guess that by “America,” Duckduckgo thinks I mean “India.”
Some day I hope to live in a world where search engines search for what I ask, and not for what they feel like showing me.
Streaming media is one of the many areas of technology that has failed to live up to its hype.
Streaming services use vague marketing words promising “unlimited” this and “endless” that. But the seldom-acknowledged fact is that if you rely on streaming music services, the music you love could just disappear tomorrow with no notice, or recourse. Thanks for the money, donʼt let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.
Just like how newspapers publish lists of whatʼs going to disappear from Netflix at the end of the month, streaming music also gains and loses music and artists regularly.
The screenshot above is Amazon Music telling me that it no longer has any songs by Comsat Angels. It knows Comsat Angels. It used to have Comsat Angels music. But not today. If you love Comsat Angels and give money to Amazon Music, youʼre out of luck.
Streaming music is the same thing as renting music. You donʼt own it. It can be taken away from you at any time.
Itʼs similar to when Microsoft abandoned its e-book store and millions of people lost the millions of books they thought they owned. A digital librarian sneaked into their homes in the middle of the night, emptied their shelves, and left behind a note reading, “Didnʼt you read page 640 of the EULA? You only rented these books. Sucker.”
This is all fine if all you care about is whatever is trendy over the last 48 hours. But people connect to books, movies, and especially music emotionally. Thatʼs why people create music. And to have those emotions yanked away from you is going to be hard on people once they realize that the things they once loved have disappeared and they didnʼt know it was going to happen.
As for the Comsat Angels, Iʼll hit the local record stores to find what Iʼm looking for. Then Iʼll own it. For real and forever.
I spend too much time pointing out the shortcomings of modern technology. Thereʼs a reason that Tech and Fail are among my most populated blathr tags.
Today, however, Iʼd like to point out what, on the surface, looks like a tech success story. But at a deeper level is the success of a traditional brick-and-mortar retailer to adapt to changes in society in order to — literally — deliver better than a tech company did.
It started a couple of days ago, when I ordered something medical from Amazon.com. In general, I donʼt buy anything that goes on or in a living being from Amazon. Between counterfeits, people selling used items as new, and a constantly-growing list of other reasons, relying on Amazon just isnʼt safe anymore. When your company canʼt even prevent selling bogus copies of books, you have a problem.
In this case, however, I ordered from Amazon because the medical thing I needed was not available from any of the CVS or Walgreens stores that I can reach, and purchasing from Walmart meant waiting two to three weeks for delivery. Walmart used to be safer than Amazon, but has recently decided to trod the same road to unreliability by embracing unknown, unverified, and dubious independent sellers.
What Amazon delivered was clearly not suitable. Instead of being in branded packaging, the item was in a Zip-Loc bag. Legitimate medical items arenʼt packaged in consumer baggies. Legitimate medical items are also not labeled by hand in ball-point pen. And they also donʼt spill their contents during shipping, unless they are seriously mishandled. The box that the item arrived in was in fine shape, and the medical item sufficiently padded.
Exasperated, I went to the CVS web site to see if perhaps the item was back in stock my local store. The CVS web site would not function. So I tried Walgreens. Except, this time instead of specifying a store that I can get to easily by train, I let the Walgreens web site pick one. And it did a splendid job.
The item I needed was in stock at a Walgreens in an area I would never think to travel to. So I put two in my cart, selected “Same day delivery” and went back to reading my New York Times.
Before I could finish the International section, there was a guy dropping a paper bag on my doorstep.
I checked my e-mail and found that the time from when I placed my order online until Walgreens notified me that my order was ready to be delivered was four minutes. Four minutes. It was picked up minutes after that, and delivered to me straight away.
The total time from when I placed the order to when I received my Walgreens order was 22 minutes. For an item that I couldn't get at a drug store near me, and that Amazon sent a counterfeit of.
Yes, I had to pay $3.99 for the delivery. But the item was a dollar cheaper at Walgreens than at Amazon, and I ordered two of them. So the cost difference was $1.99. More importantly — I got what I paid for.
Walgreens is better than Amazon. Man bites dog. The sky is green. Everything the tech bubble has been preaching about the death of brick-and-mortar is wrong.
The header graphic for Microsoft's Azure pricing calculator reads “HELLO.”
Funny how Microsoft has no problem at all automatically opting me in to sharing my personal information with its “partners” within four seconds of me creating an account. But if I try to opt-out, it suddenly canʼt cope.
If a simple toggle of a button can bring Microsoft to its knees, why would I trust it with anything at all? Is this the power, resiliency, and scaleability of the masterful Azure “cloud” its always talking about?
It used to be said that learning is its own reward. Now itʼs all about the stickers.
The company that taught me the fundamentals of managing Microsoft Azure servers has sent me a sticker to confirm that I understand the fundamentals of managing Microsoft Azure servers. Well, not a real sticker. A virtual sticker. So it doesnʼt really stick to anything except this web page.
Iʼm not sure that making education a game is a good idea, especially for adult continuing education, where weʼre all supposed to be adults and taking these classes to improve ourselves. It seems to me that “gamifying” education only adds incentive for people to game the system. Like back in the 1980ʼs when we used to trick the Scan-Tron machines into marking every answer correct using a sewing needle. Good times.
At least I have a series of ones and zeroes that I can show a potential employer so they know that I understand (according to the certificate):
Also, it states that I have been trained in “and Cost Management.” Perhaps someone at New Horizons should take a class in proofreading before publication.
Today the New Horizon online professional education organization sent me an e-mail telling me I could claim my badge. So, here it is.
What does this badge do? Not much. Itʼs supposed to be a verification that I took New Horizonʼs online classes, and document that I have awesome Python skills. Chicks dig documented Python skills like:
Hopefully no employer takes these little PNG files as verification of anything. But considering the way personnel departments are so overworked, understaffed, or even outsourced these days, for my next employer, I present this totally legitimate certification from Mars Academy that I am an accomplished terraformer and hyperspace navigator, grade: “Superawesome.”
“This call is being recorded for quality assurance.”
Really? Me, too. Same reason.
When H.E.B. says the grocery delivery person is 17 minutes away, thatʼs how I know he's standing outside my door unloading his cart. It's always exactly 17 minutes. I get the text message, look for the cat acting up, and can see the shadow of the delivery person outside my door.
Consistency is a good thing. And “consistently wrong” is a type of consistency, right?
Since x-rays are all digital now, it looks like the old x-ray backlight cabinets are being repurposed as message boards.
Houston Methodist Hospital has eighty-brazillion dollars and ninty-brazillion employees. If it canʼt keep its webview from breaking a leg, what am I supposed to do?
Also, someone should fix that grammar. It's probably Epicʼs default, but that doesnʼt make it right.
Dear Apple Maps,
Please stop showing me places that are “permanently closed.” I know the pandemic ruined everything. Youʼre not helping me find whatʼs left.
It's nice that iOS 16 lets people know the phone is too hot when it does things. It used to do things, but not tell you.
When I lived in the desert, just having an iPhone in your pocket or on a table could sometimes cause the phone to turn itself off. If you were lucky, you'd see something very quickly appear on the screen about “Entering thermal shutdown” or some such. A minute later, you were out in the desert without a working phone.
Apple, and most tech companies, build their products for the environment where Apple, and most tech companies, are located — San Francisco. When I talk to tech people who work at these companies, sometimes they simply cannot wrap their brains around weather conditions that are commonplace elsewhere.
Another example is iPhone wired headphones. Theyʼre made with plastic that gets brittle in the cold. Of course, when youʼre bundled up against the cold is when you need your headphones the most. That was how I learned about Bluetooth headphones, and got a set of Sony headphones for use with my SonyEricsson M600c when commuting on the CTA in the middle of the night during Chicago winters. Apple wouldnʼt make its own wireless headphones until over a decade later.
“Max Ice” is my 80ʼs action hero stage name.
Today I decided to make a Sears-accurate label for my Harmony cart.
If you're not a retro video game nerd, some of those words may not make sense. To elucidate:
The Harmony cart comes with a label that doesn't look like an Atari label, or a Sears label, so it kind of ruins the look of the machine. In fact, there's no label on the end at all. That's because that's where you jam the microSD card into the cart so you can play your games.
I found some fonts on the intarwebs and decided to teach myself a bit of Affinity Photo. The result is pretty good. It's far from perfect, mostly because I couldn't find a font that really matches the Sears font. Which makes sense, since Sears was a big enough company to have its own font artists.
Bauhaus appears to be the closest font, and there are hundreds of Bauhaus-inspired fonts available for free download on the internet. Sadly, most of them are corrupt, incomplete, or worse. It seems that the people who run free font web sites just copy files from one another, and don't bother to verify that the font actually works.
For the green text, I found a generic seven-segment-display-inspired font that's almost correct, except for the middle pointy bit of the capital M.
I printed out the label on glossy photo paper, which looks nice, but isn't truly accurate. To be accurate, it would be on matte label stock, sun faded, smeared with peanut butter, and have the corner peeled up a bit.
Since Sears was in the habit of renaming so many games, I decided to change the name of my Harmony cart to "Super Multi-Cart." The name just popped into my head.
Because the microSD card sticks out of the end of the Harmony cart a bit, the label doesn't lay flat. I haven't decided how to address this. My options are:
If you're into this sort of thing, here are the Affinity Photo label files I made, so you can print your own, or improve upon what I've done:
Ordinary human being: “What's the longest day of the year?”
Webdev: “In which font?”
“Insufficient” means “not enough,” it doesnʼt mean wrong. “Incorrect” is closer to what FortiClient is trying to say. This is why tech companies should hire a proofreader for anything that leaves the building, even if only on a contract basis. It makes you look amateur, and in the case of this security app — insecure.
Also, if you use “credential(s),” rather than just counting the number of credentials and using the correct word, thatʼs just lazy.
The call quality was awful. The organizer wasn't prepared, peopleʼs dogs kept barking, and I ran out of coffee. One star.
Oh, you mean how was the connection quality? Why didnʼt you ask that, Microsoft Teams?
“Cache Update” is my 80ʼs action hero stage name.
I guess someone on the iOS 16 team at Apple didnʼt check for NULL before shoving the date data into the string formatter. The lesson is, of course, that while you never trust external data, sometimes you can't trust internal data, either.
Still, Apple is the single largest company on the planet right now. If it canʼt do software, what chance do I have?
SAM76 was one of many computer languages that came out in the 1970ʼs that promised to be the “next big thing,” but failed to gain traction.
It looks a bit like AP/L, with its tight syntax, but was meant for text manipulation like Lisp.
I haven't found a SAM76 interpreter to play with in 2022, so here's an example of what a SAM76 program would look like, from the May-June, 1978 issue of Creative Computing that would take a number from the terminal input, and uses recursion to print out the factorial of that number.
%dt,F,
!%ii,*,1,1,!%mu,*,%F,%su,*,1//////////=
%pt,F,*/=
%F,5,/=120
I'm no SAM76 expert, but I think there's a typo in this listing. I think the !%ii… is actually supposed to be !%is… to retrieve an “input string” from the terminal. But I'm happy to be proven wrong.
As you may have guessed from the ten slashes, this language is all about nesting commands. Amusingly, it doesn't matter how many slashes you close your expressions with, as long as it's enough. So just keep banging that slash key!
SAM76 is a great example of smart people dealing with the scarcity of their time. This is a language that has been optimized for teletypes, punch cards, and paper tape. The % isn't a command prompt, it's a command. (More specifically, a “warning character.”) The “mu” and “pt” and such are shortened, almost tokenized, keywords.
Sadly, there is no SAM76 entry on Wikipedia, and almost no information on the internet about it, so it will soon be erased from the public memory by search engines (*cough*Google*cough*) that choose to only show things currently trending in popular culture. Shakespeare, youʼre next.
The ITV News app does not allow you to reject cookies. Not even optional ones. The only choice you have is to agree to its folksy question “You ok [sic] with our use of cookies?”
But, wait — it gets worse. Even if you accept the cookies, all that happens is the over-friendly “Agreed!” button gets greyed out. You never actually get to proceed to the ITV News app.
As the Brits say, it's “not fit for purpose.”
…Now select “Hyperlink” … No, the other “Hyperlink” … No, the one with the control decoration indicating … No, the other one … No, just mouse over “Hyperlink” … No, the other one …
This is why Iʼm reluctant to help people through their Microsoft woes.
Microsoft Outlook is telling me that there is a problem with Microsoft Word. I guess itʼs well-intentioned, but snitches get stitches.
I guess this is what happens when I rely on the same company that sells me plastic adhesive googlie eyes 👀 👀 👀 to deliver my prescriptions.
There's a big push in large healthcare companies to make things easier for patients. It sounds dumb to have to state that, but there has not always been the institutional will to care for patients on their level. But a lot of studies and computer models have shown that something as simple as repeating instructions to a patient can improve the outcomes of treatment in a percentage of people. With so many people in the world now, even a small change can mean enormous savings in money for hospitals, insurance companies, and the patients, themselves.
Unfortunately, we're still at the beginning of the process of bringing the healthcare institutions down to the level of the people they are supposed to serve. The use of regular language and easy methods is spreading, but remains uneven.
To wit: The image above, which is the first question asked when trying to book an imaging appointment with Houston Methodist Hospital.
This is an online form for patients, not doctors. When a regular person phones Methodist to make an imaging appointment, it suggests you use this form to make the appointment online.
I am not a doctor. How am I supposed to know if I need an “MRI 1.5T Wide Bore with Contrast,” or an “MRI 3T without Contrast,”, or a “Fluoroscopy,” or something else? It turns out the type of appointment I need isn't even listed in the options.
As someone who builds healthcare web sites for a living, I understand the technical reasons why this is the way it is. But I also understand that it doesn't have to be this way.
There are people in healthcare who care quite a lot about making things easier, and therefore better, for patients. That caring and understanding rarely pervades and entire organization. But it has to.
What we see here is, in my semi-expert opinion, a breakdown in the chain of caring. Something got outsourced to an external company that doesn't have to care. Someone didn't get trained in the importance of making things easier for the patients, and let this awful thing see the light of day. Some web developer somewhere doesn't have the authority, confidence, or will to question what's been handed to him to produce. He's just there to push buttons and cash a check.
Every person at every level of a healthcare organization not only had to be told to care, but trained to care. Even, and especially, the directors and C-levels. The upper levels are told about how much money can be saved by making healthcare more accessible to ordinary people. But they aren't trained in what that actually looks like, so they are not able to spot mistakes as they're happening, so they can have the people under them correct the problems before they persist and spread. Allowing people to say “That's the way we've always done it” is evidence of a sclerotic organization.
Similarly, and as alluded to above, with the continual outsourcing of functions, you also end up outsourcing caring. Someone pasting together AJAX snippets from StackOverflow in an SalesForce application on the other side of the planet doesn't care that the web site is useless to 90% of users. They've done their job, and that's all their staffing company cares about. It's important to understand that lack of detail and care makes your healthcare company look bad, and it hurts your bottom line by making your treatments less effective, and making your doctors work more.
Everyone in a healthcare organization has to not only care about the patients, but be trained in this. Not just the hands-on people like doctors and nurses and patient liaisons. Everyone. The people who process forms. The people in accounting. And, yes, the I.T. people. Every single person in a healthcare organization affects patients in some way.
To its credit, of the dozens healthcare organizations I've interacted with in dozens of states, Methodist is among the better and more advanced with regard to how it treats its patients. But the process is incomplete.
Healthcare companies talk a lot about caring. But unless there is an ethos of responsibility to the patient that includes every single person in that organization, it's all just marketing.
I'm not sure where the Amazon.com chatbot picked up the phrase “Thank you for understanding here.” But, inspired by its gratefulness, I think Iʼll understand “over there” next.
With half a trillion dollars to work with, this still happens to Amazon.com. So, what chance do I have?
I was digging the Halloween decorations out of the basement today, when I came across my old PSP gear. Joy!
Sonyʼs PlayStation Portable wasn't the first portable video game system I ever owned. I had the original Atari Lynx back in the 80ʼs. But the PSP brings back warm memories of a time in my life when I was more full of hope, and the world seemed to be filled with endless possibilities
I was in Japan in February of 2005, a couple of months after the PSPʼs launch, but two months before it became available in the rest of the world. My wife and I were riding on a subway in Tokyo when an OL (“office lady” — the female version of “salaryman”) sat down next to where I was standing. She pulled out a PSP and started playing ルミネス (“Lumines” in English). I was absolutely enthralled. I immediately said to Darcie, “Thatʼs what I'm bringing home from Japan.”
We were staying at the Keio Plaza Hotel, so as soon as it opened the next morning, I ran down the street to Yodobashi Camera searching for a PSP.
Yodobashi Camera is like the old Crazy Eddie electronics department store, except taking up a dozen floors of a skyscraper. If it runs on electricity, it's probably at Yodobashi. Anything from a Hello Kitty waffle maker to a household earthquake detector. From a refrigerator to a radiation monitor that you hang around your neck. From a transistor radio to the latest computer gear. If there was a PSP in Tokyo, I was sure I'd find it here.
Except that I didnʼt. Yodobashi was too much for me. Too many levels. Too much stuff. Precisely zero signs printed in English. I was over my head. Finally, I had to ask for help. A young man in an ill-fitting suit and an eager grin decided to take a chance with me.
My Japanese is bad. Real bad. When weʼre in Japan, my wife is in her element. She handles the shopgirls, and drags me around like a wide-eyed toddler. But I was on my own this time.
I tried to communicate very clearly and plainly, “Video games?” Blank stare. I broke out my best non-regional radio voice and enunciated as clearly as I could: “Play-stay-shun Port-a-bull.” Nervous smile.
Finally, I resorted to pantomime. I held my hands out in front of me in loose vertical fists, and pumped my thumbs up and down like I was pressing buttons.
“Aaaaah! Peesp-o!”
With an expression of exuberant relief and a flourish of forearms and pointing palms, he guided me to a half-height white cabinet, bent over, slid back the glass door and popped up with a glossy white box.
“Peesp-o!”
With a hasty bow, he took off like jackrabbit down the warren of Panasonic boom boxes, Sony Cliés, and Sanyo voice recorders. His job was done, and he was happy to be done with me, and out of there.
That's why to this day, my wife and I call our video game machines “Peesps.”
Netflix says today marks one year since I've had Netflix. Which is not true. I've had Netflix for 24 years. But Netflix doesn't have a way to put an account on hold when you go on vacation, or move. Instead, you have to cancel your account, then sign up again when you come back home or arrive in your new place.
Amazingly, and much to its credit, when you sign up again, your Netflix queue is restored, and you're right where you left off. So I guess it's only ½ a fail.
Every time I use Microsoft Windows, I manage to find another way it simply doesn't make sense to me.
In this example, I have instructed Microsoft Outlook to “Save All Attachments” from a particular e-mail message. Instead of saving all of the attachments, it pops up a modal window asking which attachments Iʼd like to save. Well, Iʼd like to save them all. Which is why I clicked on “Save All Attachments” and not “Save some, but I'm not sure which ones I might want, so why don't you stop me in the middle of my work instead of doing what I've instructed you to do.”
There would be no shame in Microsoft adding a “Save Some Attachments…” item to its already ample menu structure.
Looking for a fine collection of photos depicting Mozambique, Italy, Japan, and the Middle East? Just search Adobe Stock for “Atlantic City, New Jersey.”
Best use of these screens I've seen yet.
Fidelity has 4½ trillion dollars ($4,500,000,000,000.00). If it canʼt make a web site work, what chance do I have?
The Costa Coffee machine at Whole Foods is broken. Again. I've been to this particular Whole Foods in Midtown Houston nine times. The coffee machine has only been online and functional once.
It's either bad timing for me, or a bad machine from Costa. Either way, it's bad news for Whole Foods.
Crowdsourcing used to be all the rage in the tech industry. It was a way to get content for your project for free. Use your automation system to ask enough people for content, and some small percentage will happy oblige. The problem with crowdsourcing is quality control.
If you let anyone contribute anything, anyone will contribute anything. I once built a crowdsourced system for people to share photographs of landmarks. A significant percentage of the photos contributed were people standing in front of a camera holding up their resumes, presumably hoping that someone searching for a photo of the Berlin Wall might magically hire them to write code in India.
In the example above, we see the result of two levels of folly. Getty Images allows anyone to upload photographs to its system in order to sell those pictures to other people. That's the crowdsourcing. Then Apple outsourced photography for Apple Maps to a bunch of entities, including Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, and also Getty Images.
The result is a photo of a city in China among the photographs that are supposed to depict the West Texas city of Midland.
Never trust content you don't control.
When your three-billion-dollar companyʼs error messages start with “Whoops!,” it does not inspire confidence in your three-billion-dollar company.
H.E.B. has over 100,000 employees. Someone should get out and push.
I sure hope Iʼve never broken a web site so badly that it starts squirting JSON all over the intarwebs.
Vagueness is not a virtue. I can only imaging that the git commit history for Amazonʼs eero team looks like “Update,” “Update,” “Update,” “Update,” “Update.”
The tech nerd part of me that should think, ”Oh, cool! Hobby Airport has industrial-grade floor cleaning robots!” is outweighed by the human being in me who thinks, “Well, there's one more job that some person with low skills got kicked out of.”
Not everyone in the world has the mental or physical capability to do a mid-level or high-level job. But they still need a job, and deserve the dignity that comes with employment. In the 80ʼs the justification for turning jobs over to robots was that the newly unemployed could be re-trained to fix or run the robots. But in my experience, that's only rarely true.
The more I interact with people of all social strata, the more I realize that mopping floors in an airport is a really good job for some people. One they can be good at, and proud of. That will allow them to provide for themselves, and maybe even another person or two. Iʼm not currently convinced that we should automate the humanity out of society.
Southwest Airlines encourages people to download its app for a “contactless day of travel.” You know what else is contactless? The way it was done up to now.
There's nothing about using an app that is more contactless than using a home-printed ticket, or even the old-style paper tickets. Both are read by a contactless scanner. It's not like the gate agent is going to lick your face because youʼre not using an app.
There are more disadvantages to using an app for your boarding pass than using a piece of paper:
My observation waiting in line behind people using app-based boarding passes is that the paper passes scan more quickly, and more reliably than the phone-based equivalents.
The only reason to use an app-based boarding pass is if you enjoy forking over even more of your personal information to an airline so that it can sell that information to other people.
I am a paying passenger. I am not your recurring revenue stream.
Hacker News is broken. Silicon Valley productivity up 63%.
This e-mail from the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority reads “You unsubscribed.” It also says “You will receive an email update when new information becomes available.”
So, am I unsubscribed, or am I going to receive e-mail updates?
Me: “Man, remember how V.C.R.'s used to blink 12:00 all the time after the power went out? That was awful.”
My KitchenAid microwave oven: “Hold my beer...”
The National Weather Service has a budget of $1.2 billion. If it canʼt keep a web site from drowning, what chance do I have?
People forget how primitive video games were in the early years. For a very long time, the only way to start a game was to press the Restart button on the console. It would be years before anyone dreamed up the idea of starting or restarting a game by pressing a button on the controller thatʼs right there in the playerʼs hand. Itʼs so elementary that people today take for granted that itʼs always been that way.
In the early years of video games, there was no such thing as sitting back and relaxing while playing a game, unless it was something with no end, like the free draw mode in Surround. You had to reach out and touch the console every few minutes when the game ended.
I lost my debit card a month ago. I found it today, wedged under one of the fins in the dryer. That means it not only went through the washing machine, it went through about 30 dryer cycles.
The card still works. The chip is fine, and the mag stripe works OK on newer machines.
Do that with your fancy device with Apple Pay, or whatever Google is calling its wallet this week, and you know what happens? You walk home.
I see people on the internet all the time claiming that plastic cards and cash are things of the past, and no longer needed. Thatʼs only true if you never go anywhere interesting, never eat anywhere unusual, and never do laundry.
Iʼm supposed to have super-duper awesome benefits with United Airlines because I have a Chase credit card. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to see what those benefits are. Naturally, the link on the Chase web site was broken. It just looped though a login screen over and over.
Since Iʼm a paying customer, I moaned about it to Chaseʼs customer service.
I ended up booking my ticket on another airline, and forgot all about it until I got this in the the mail today. I guess someone at Chase figured it would be faster to mail me a book about the benefits than to fix the link.
I guess this ends up being a story about good customer service, because not only do I have the book, but I just checked, and the link is fixed, too.
Me: “Hey, Siri, stop the music.”
Siri: “Sorry, Wayne. I'm unable to stop.”
Really? It's only R.E.M. It's not like you can dance to it.
Scrappy tech startup in 1972:
Two guys in the basement of a college science building, working all night with tubes, relays, and transistors.
Scrappy tech startup in 1982:
Two guys in a garage, working all night wire-wrapping circuits.
Scrappy tech startup in 1992:
Two guys in a college dorm, working all night optimizing cross-platform compiler routines.
Scrappy tech startup in 2002:
Two guys in an anonymous strip mall, trying to cram their big idea through a 56 kilobit ASDL connection.
Scrappy tech startup in 2012:
Two guys in loft over a Thai restaurant in a hip arts district, cobbling together other people's JavaScript modules on local government grant money.
Scrappy tech startup in 2022:
Two guys on the 43rd floor of a bank building, bluffing their way through a PowerPoint in front of a bunch of V.C.'s.
Stackoverflow is broken. Silicon Valley grinds to a halt.
Me (to the HomePod three feet in front of me): “Hey, Siri, is it going to rain today?”
A different HomePod (three rooms away): “-mumble- -mumble- -mumble- -something- -mumble-”
Today, Siri informed me that I use my phone an average of 19 hours and 22 minutes per day. Either Siri is wrong, or I really need to eat more fiber.
I finally got around to fixing up the over-the-air antenna hooked up to my TV. I re-scanned and found 121 channels.
Not all of the channels are great. But that's no different than the DirecTV service I have in my apartment, for which I am obligated to pay $80 a month. Except that the majority of the dross over the air is shopping channels and infomercials, while DirecTV seems to be 90% pornography, sports, and also shopping.
The important thing is that with the over-the-air antenna, I get The! Movies! Network!, and MeTV+. I've also discovered a channel that is mostly British and Australian DIY and lifestyle shows, like Escape to the Country, of which Darcie and have long been fans. Going to have to rev that $20 ATSC DVR into high gear for a while.
Here's a table of what I found, mostly for my own reference, and subject to change with a shift in the wind.
If you're viewing this on a mobile phone, you won't be able to see the table until you hold your phone horizontally. That's because tables look like absolute pants on phones.
| Display channel | Station | ID | Network | Primary language | Content |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2-1 | KPRC-TV/Houston | KPRC-HD | NBC | English | Variety |
| 2-2 | KPRC-TV/Houston | StartTV | StartTV | English | Variety |
| 2-3 | KPRC-TV/Houston | H&I | Heroes and Icons | English | Variety |
| 2-4 | KPRC-TV/Houston | DABL | Dabl | English | Lifestyle |
| 2-5 | KPRC-TV/Houston | GetTV | GetTV | English | Variety |
| 3-1 | KBTX-TV/Bryan | KBTX-DT | CBS | English | Variety |
| 3-2 | KBTX-TV/Bryan | KBTX-CW | The CW | English | Variety |
| 3-3 | KBTX-TV/Bryan | KBTX-™ | Telemundo | Spanish | Variety |
| 3-4 | KBTX-TV/Bryan | Grio | TheGrio | English | Variety |
| 11-4 | KHOU/Houston | Twist | Twist | English | Lifestyle |
| 11-11 | KHOU/Houston | KHOU-HD | CBS | English | Variety |
| 13-1 | KTRK-TV/Houston | KTRK-HD | ABC | English | Variety |
| 13-2 | KTRK-TV/Houston | LOCALish | Localish | English | Lifestyle |
| 13-3 | KTRK-TV/Houston | KTRK-D3 | This TV | English | Variety |
| 13-4 | KTRK-TV/Houston | QVC | QVC | English | Shopping |
| 14-1 | KETH-TV/Houston | TBN HD | Trinity Broadcasting Network | English | Religion |
| 14-2 | KETH-TV/Houston | inspire | TBN Inspire | English | Religion |
| 14-3 | KETH-TV/Houston | SMILE | Smile | English | Religion |
| 14-4 | KETH-TV/Houston | Enlace | Enlace | Spanish | Religion |
| 20-1 | KTXH/Houston | KTXH DT | MyNetworkTV | English | Variety |
| 20-2 | KTXH/Houston | Movies! | Movies! | English | Movies |
| 20-3 | KTXH/Houston | TheGrio | TheGrio | English | Variety |
| 20-4 | KTXH/Houston | BUZZR | Buzzr | English | Game shows |
| 21-1 | KVQT-LD/Houston | Newsmx2 | Newsmax TV | English | Specialty |
| 21-2 | KVQT-LD/Houston | Retro | Retro TV | English | Variety |
| 21-3 | KVQT-LD/Houston | Elohim | Elohim | Spanish | Religion |
| 21-4 | KVQT-LD/Houston | Classic | Classic Reruns TV | English | Variety |
| 21-5 | KVQT-LD/Houston | Cristo | Cristo TV | Spanish | Religion |
| 21-6 | KVQT-LD/Houston | H-land | Heartland | English | Lifestyle |
| 21-7 | KVQT-LD/Houston | Life-V | VidaVision Network | Spanish | Religion |
| 21-8 | KVQT-LD/Houston | INTV | English | ||
| 21-9 | KVQT-LD/Houston | Biz-TV | Biz Television | English | Talk shows |
| 21-10 | KVQT-LD/Houston | NowMTV | NowMedia TV | English and Spanish | Variety |
| 21-11 | KVQT-LD/Houston | ACE | American Classic Entertainment | English | Variety |
| 21-12 | KVQT-LD/Houston | ABTV | ABTV | Vietnamese | Variety |
| 21-13 | KVQT-LD/Houston | MBC | Millennium Broadcasting Channel | English | African |
| 21-14 | KVQT-LD/Houston | LaTele | LaTele | Spanish | Movies |
| 21-15 | KVQT-LD/Houston | KVQT-15 | none | none | none |
| 22-1 | KLTJ/Galveston | KLTJ-DT | Daystar | English | Religion |
| 22-2 | KLTJ/Galveston | KLTJ-ES | Daystar Español | Spanish | Religion |
| 26-1 | KRIV/Houston | KRIV DT | Fox | English | Variety |
| 26-2 | KRIV/Houston | Decades | Decades | English | Variety |
| 26-3 | KRIV/Houston | FOX WX | Fox Weather | English | Weather |
| 27-1 | KQHO-LD/Houston | VietSky | VietSky | Vietnamese | Shopping |
| 27-2 | KQHO-LD/Houston | S.E.T | Saigon Broadcasting Television Network | Vietnamese | Variety |
| 27-3 | KQHO-LD/Houston | Fodd&FU | Food and Fun TV | Vietnamese | Variety |
| 27-4 | KQHO-LD/Houston | VNBC | VNBC | Vietnamese | Shopping |
| 27-5 | KQHO-LD/Houston | Vietmed | Vietmedia | Vietnamese | Variety |
| 27-6 | KQHO-LD/Houston | IVTV | VTV | Vietnamese | Variety |
| 27-7 | KQHO-LD/Houston | Availab | Vietnamese | Variety | |
| 27-8 | KQHO-LD/Houston | theV | Global Mall TV | Vietnamese | Shopping |
| 27-9 | KQHO-LD/Houston | AWM | AWM TV | Vietnamese | Variety |
| 27-10 | KQHO-LD/Houston | Peace and Happiness Television | Vietnamese | Lifestyle | |
| 28-1 | KUGB-CD/Houston | KUGB-CD | Novelisima | Spanish | Variety |
| 28-2 | KUGB-CD/Houston | KUGB-CD | none | English | Infomercials |
| 28-3 | KUGB-CD/Houston | KUGB-CD | Shop LC | English | Shopping |
| 28-4 | KUGB-CD/Houston | KUGB-CD | Magnificent Movies Network | English | Movies |
| 28-5 | KUGB-CD/Houston | KUGB-CD | none | English | Infomercials |
| 28-6 | KUGB-CD/Houston | KUGB-CD | none | English | Infomercials |
| 28-7 | KUGB-CD/Houston | KUGB-CD | Classic Reruns TV | English | Variety |
| 32-1 | KEHO-LD/Houston | KEHO-LD | English | Variety | |
| 32-2 | KEHO-LD/Houston | KEHO-LD | none | none | none |
| 32-3 | KEHO-LD/Houston | KEHO-LD | none | English | Infomercials |
| 32-4 | KEHO-LD/Houston | KEHO-LD | Magnificent Movies Network | English | Movies |
| 32-5 | KEHO-LD/Houston | KEHO-LD | Stadium | English | Sports |
| 32-6 | KEHO-LD/Houston | KEHO-LD | Shop LC | English | Shopping |
| 32-7 | KEHO-LD/Houston | KEHO-LD | English | Variety | |
| 34-1 | KUVM-CD/Houston | KUVM-CD | LATV | Spanish and English | Variety |
| 34-2 | KUVM-CD/Houston | KUVM-CD | English | Variety | |
| 34-3 | KUVM-CD/Houston | KUVM-CD | Magnificent Movies Network | English | Movies |
| 34-4 | KUVM-CD/Houston | KUVM-CD | none | English | Infomercials |
| 34-5 | KUVM-CD/Houston | KUVM-CD | Magnificent Movies Network | English | Movies |
| 34-6 | KUVM-CD/Houston | KUVM-CD | English | Variety | |
| 39-1 | KIAH/Houston | KIAH-DT | The CW | English | Variety |
| 39-5 | KIAH/Houston | CourtTV | Court TV | English | Lifestyle |
| 45-1 | KXLN-DT/Rosenberg | KXLN-DT | Univision | Spanish | Variety |
| 45-2 | KXLN-DT/Rosenberg | Unimas | UniMás | Spanish | Variety |
| 45-3 | KXLN-DT/Rosenberg | Mystery | Ion Mystery | English | Lifestyle |
| 45-4 | KXLN-DT/Rosenberg | NTD | New Tang Dynasty Television | Chinese | Variety |
| 45-5 | KXLN-DT/Rosenberg | DIGI-TV | Digi-TV | English | Variety |
| 46-1 | KBPX-LD/Houston | Nuestra | Nuestra Visión | Spanish | Movies |
| 46-3 | KBPX-LD/Houston | Nudu | Nu DuMont Television | English | Variety |
| 46-4 | KBPX-LD/Houston | Heartla | Heartland | English | Lifestyle |
| 46-5 | KBPX-LD/Houston | GEB | GEB Network | English | Religion |
| 47-1 | KTMD/Galveston | KTMD-HD | Telemundo | Spanish | Variety |
| 47-2 | KTMD/Galveston | EXITOS | TeleXitos | Spanish | Variety |
| 47-3 | KTMD/Galveston | NBCLX | LX | English | Variety |
| 47-4 | KTMD/Galveston | COZI | Cozi TV | English | Variety |
| 47-5 | KTMD/Galveston | OXYGEN | Oxygen | English | Lifestyle |
| 49-1 | KPXB-TV/Conroe | ION | Ion Television | English | Variety |
| 49-2 | KPXB-TV/Conroe | Bounce | Bounce | English | Variety |
| 49-3 | KPXB-TV/Conroe | CourtTV | Court TV | English | Lifestyle |
| 49-4 | KPXB-TV/Conroe | Defy TV | Defy TV | English | Variety |
| 49-5 | KPXB-TV/Conroe | Laff | Laff | English | Comedy |
| 49-6 | KPXB-TV/Conroe | TruReal | TrueReal | English | Variety |
| 49-7 | KPXB-TV/Conroe | NEWSY | Newsy | English | News |
| 49-8 | KPXB-TV/Conroe | HSN | Home Shopping Network | English | Shopping |
| 51-1 | KYAZ/Katy | MeTV | MeTV | English | Variety |
| 51-2 | KYAZ/Katy | MeTV+ | MeTV+ | English | Variety |
| 51-3 | KYAZ/Katy | Azteca | Azteca América | Spanish | Variety |
| 51-4 | KYAZ/Katy | Story | Story Television | English | History |
| 55-1 | KTBU/Conroe | Quest | Quest | English | Variety |
| 55-3 | KTBU/Conroe | Nacion | Nación TV | Spanish | Religion |
| 57-1 | KUBE-TV/Baytown | KUBE-TV | ShopHQ | English | Shopping |
| 57-2 | KUBE-TV/Baytown | none | none | English | placeholder |
| 57-3 | KUBE-TV/Baytown | SBN | SonLife Broadcasting Network | English | Religion |
| 57-4 | KUBE-TV/Baytown | Charge | Charge! | English | Variety |
| 57-5 | KUBE-TV/Baytown | none | English | Infomercials | |
| 57-6 | KUBE-TV/Baytown | Mi Raza TV | Mi Raza TV | Spanish | Infomercials |
| 57-7 | KUBE-TV/Baytown | CRTV | none | English | Infomercials |
| 57-8 | KUBE-TV/Baytown | JTV | Jewelry Television | English | Shopping |
| 57-9 | KUBE-TV/Baytown | UChurch | Spanish | Religion | |
| 57-10 | KUBE-TV/Baytown | AChurch | Three Angels Broadcast Network | Spanish | Religion |
| 57-11 | KUBE-TV/Baytown | VieTV | VieTV | Vietnamese | Variety |
| 61-1 | KZJL/Houston | Estrella TV | Spanish | Variety | |
| 61-2 | KZJL/Houston | KZJL-2 | Estrella News | Spanish | News |
| 61-3 | KZJL/Houston | Estrella Deportes | Spanish | Sports | |
| 61-4 | KZJL/Houston | ShopLC | Shop LC | English | Shopping |
| 61-5 | KZJL/Houston | POSI-TV | Positiv | English | Movies |
| 61-6 | KZJL/Houston | QVC | QVC | English | Shopping |
| 67-1 | KFTH-DT/Alvin | KFTH-DT | UniMás | Spanish | Variety |
| 67-2 | KZJL/Houston | GetTV | getTV | English | Variety |
| 67-3 | KZJL/Houston | GRIT | Grit | English | Westerns |
| 67-4 | KZJL/Houston | HSN | Home Shopping Network | English | Shopping |
| 67-5 | KZJL/Houston | KXLN-HD | Univision | Spanish | Variety |
Today I learned from tech support at Citibank that Safari is not supported for “security reasons.” She recommended that I use the vastly less-secure Google Chrome browser, instead.
Good job, Citibank.
I sure wish I could book a flight on United Airlines. But for three days in two different browsers on two different computers, all I get when I search is this screen, which never changes.
Maybe American Airlines wants my money.
HEB made $31,000,000,000 last year. If it can't make a web site work, what chance do I have?
Sometimes if I canʼt sleep, I like to scroll through Apple Maps and see what can be seen. On this particular night, I found a flock of birds near NASA. They look like egrets or something similar to me.
Scraping web sites to build a list of city names is kinda sorta OK for social media, but itʼs not a great idea when youʼre running an e-commerce site.
I wonder what would happen if I actually ordered something from this Chinese electronics site and had it shipped to “Clutch City.” Is the ZIP Code enough to get it to the right area, and then give some mail sorter along the way a bit of a chuckle?
My headless M1 Mac Mini crashed hard, so I had to hook up a monitor and re-install macOS Monterrey, which after 30 minutes helpfully tells me, “About a minute remaining.”
And by “About a minute” it meant a little under three hours.
Dominoʼs Pizza made four billion dollars in 2020. It should have enough people working on its web site to make sure the CAPTCHA doesn't overflow its container.
It also shouldnʼt use Google's reCAPTCHA service, but thatʼs a different bucket of plastic monkeys.
This is what happens when you try to let Houston Methodist know about an error on its web site.
Thatʼs one way to reduce customer service costs by 100%.
“Max Cool” is my 80ʼs action hero stage name.
And I guess “Door Alarm” is my trusty sidekick.
It seems that my choices are to:
Maybe Iʼll enter my personal financial information later, when Amazon.comʼs system is a little more stable.
I found a pay phone!
Using a pay phone requires three things that are increasingly scarce:
There are still lots of payphones in the world, but theyʼre generally not on the streets where they can be easily noticed. Coins are so scarce that even banks have a hard time getting them. And while it used to be the case that most people knew a dozen or two phone numbers by heart, today they use a gadget to remember for them.
I understand why these things happen, but it seems like there should still be some kind of “infrastructure of last resort” for emergencies, misfortune, and those on the margins of society. New technology is great, but it still breaks too easily for us to rely on it enough in many situations.
The Eighth District police station in New Orleans has an unusual feature. Iʼve seen lots of police stations with gift shops and museums before. But inside the gift shop in this police station is a vending machine that spits out swag.
I slid my credit card through the reader, punched a button, and out popped a New Orleans Police Department ball cap. Very cool.
I think that many people donʼt know that the New Orleans P.D. sells hats, shirts, tote bags, and other branded items. At least it seems like the people who live in the Eighth District donʼt.
Early the next morning, I went to a bodega near Esplanade to get a newspaper. It was raining, so I wore my rain jacket, which is kinda-sorta safety yellow, and my new N.O.P.D. hat. There were some locals sitting around drinking coffee and shooting the breeze. The store was out of newspapers, so I asked if anyone knew where I could get one because none of the stores near my hotel had any.
“Near my hotel” let them know I was a tourist. But until then, they said they thought I was a cop. When I told them I got the hat out of a vending machine at the police station, they were not happy.
I can understand why they were upset. If I can unintentionally make people think Iʼm a police officer, imagine what someone could accomplish if they were actually trying.
Part of the Amazon Music screen says “purchased.” Another part says I canʼt download the music I paid for.
Trying again in 15 minutes didnʼt change anything. Nor did trying again in 30 minutes, or 45. An hour after my purchase I got on the blower with Amazon customer service, and was told to wait 24 hours to download the music I paid for.
Thatʼs OK for me, because I'm patient. I was able to download the music when I tried a couple of days later. But isnʼt the whole point of Amazon Music that people are supposed to have immediate, unlimited access to their music?
Citibank is the third-largest bank in the United States. It has almost two trillion dollars. Itʼs been around for 210 years.
And yet, it still canʼt make a web site that works. So what chance do I have?
Also, with two trillion dollars, youʼd think it could hire people who can write complete sentences.
I think that the word “unexpected” is pretty high on the list of words you donʼt want to hear from your bank. It ranks right up there with “insolvent.”
Fortunately, Citibank is only the third-largest bank in America. Itʼs not like its web site is used for anything important.
If Citibank canʼt keep its web site from going all pear-shaped, what chance do I have?
Itʼs one thing for Facebook to have a hiccup every now and again. Nothing important ever happened on Facebook.
But when the Nevada Department of Taxationʼs web site upchucks on tax day, itʼs cause for concern.
Reason number 4,096 not to absent-mindedly push buttons on your iPhone while itʼs in your pocket.
You know youʼre far away from home, when the seven Home buttons that control your lights and things go away on your iPhone.
It would be less disturbing for there to be a message like “Canʼt connect to your home right now,” rather than just making them disappear.
Three packages for three different people dumped in a corner is actually not the worst Amazon.com delivery experience Iʼve seen lately.
At least these were inside a building, and not just dumped on a sidewalk outside a skyscraper in the middle of Americaʼs fourth-largest city.
Thereʼs a big backup at the floating bridge toll booth, so there are no Amazon.com employees available to take my order right now.
If Amazon.com canʼt keep its web site running, what chance do I have?
The self-service ordering gizmo at Shake Shack canʼt cope with my hot dog order. Which I find a bit ironic, considering that Shake Shack started out as a hot dog stand.
This is what I get for using a computer to replace a personʼs job. Thereʼs a perfectly good human being ten feet away who can take my order if I wait 90 seconds, and my bag will never be out of sync.
Remember when technology was going to make our lives better?
One of my newspapers didnʼt come today. So I tried to let the Houston Chronicle know it has a problem. Naturally, since the conglomerate that ate Houstonʼs paper of record doesnʼt have customer service people on the weekend, I have to fill out a report online. And, naturally, the web site doesnʼt work.
Even if I had to wait on hold for a while to speak to someone about it, a human being could solve the problem immediately. Instead, I have to remember to call the newspaperʼs customer service people during the week to get credit for the missed delivery.
Remember when computers were going to make our lives better?
The tech world in 2021:
Meanwhile,
Nothing is new.
If Apple can't get localization right, what chance to the rest of us have?
When it comes to transit hardware malfunctions, I guess itʼs better that the ticket machine fails than the train.
Although, I think I havenʼt seen a parity error in 30 years.
I think this is Siriʼs passive-aggressive way of telling me Iʼm drunk.
I got a new computer today. Itʼs hard to believe that Iʼve been using my old computer for (math… math… math…) eleven years.
That wee machine has been with me through a dozen homes and another dozen countries, from Turkey to Japan to exotic Canada. Iʼd miss it, if the new one wasnʼt so much better.
If you ever want to know what the inside of an automatic barista machine looks like, just head to Whole Foods in Midtown Houston. Thereʼs a good chance itʼs inner mechanism is open and available for you to examine.
Iʼm not sure how many times Iʼve been to this Whole Foods store — maybe a dozen times — and the coffee machine has never been working.
Every time I go, thereʼs a repairman busy tinkering with it. Which seems like quite a coincidence. Either Costa Coffee has an employee whose job is to repair this one machine full-time, or thereʼs something about me going to Whole Foods that causes the machine to kill itself.
If the single largest technology company on the planet canʼt keep its web site from upchucking, what chance do I have?
If the largest newspaper in America canʼt keep its web site running, what chance do I have?
The New York Times has “lost” this web page. I guess thatʼs not surprising, since it also lost my newspaper today.
I think I have found the worst government web site on the planet: New Jersey Family Care.
Its many technical faults aside, it looks like something a kid whipped up in Geocities in the 1990ʼs, not something dealing with healthcare. And certainly not something that taxpayer dollars paid for.
My apartment building has a Stockwell vending machine in the basement.
Unlike the vending machines of yore, this one is just an open cabinet with a camera that watches what you take off the shelves and uses magic A.I. fairies to send you a bill. That is, if it works. Which it doesnʼt.
I canʼt even get the Stockwell app to acknowledge that the Stockwell machine in my building exists.
I guess Iʼll spend my snack money at the convenience store across the street, instead. Where I can pay by cash, or credit card, or Apple Pay, or even food stamps if I had them. And if something goes wrong, there are intermittently friendly people to help me out, and not some Silicon Valley robot barking, “object has no attribute.”
This is what happens when you move from a state with a COVID notification app to a state that lacks a COVID notification app.
Iʼm not happy that Netflix is borked. But at least the error message is creative.
But if Netflix canʼt keep its system running, what chance do I have?
Every electronic road sign in Nevada: “Keep Vegas open, get your shots now!”
Every electronic road sign in Arizona: “6.8 million doses administered so far. Get yours!”
Every electronic road sign in New Mexico: “Protect your family. Get your free COVID vaccine.”
Every electronic road sign in Texas: “Buckle up for safety!”
It turns out my new oven has a Sabbath mode. It also turns out to do the opposite of what I assumed it would.
I have no idea how much I paid for gas. I think the credit price for Plus is “Burp.”
Not only did DoorDash eat itself, it canʼt even show a legible error message.
Itʼs like the DoubleFail Twins of delivery apps.
When the Apple Card launched, it had the most amazing customer service.
Two years later, itʼs a smoldering pile of garbage.
If I canʼt trust Capital One to run a web site, how can I trust it with my money?
Microsoft Office is so poorly programmed that even Microsoftʼs error reporting daemon crashes.
Citibank is broken today. But thatʼs OK. Itʼs not like 50 million people rely on Citibank for anything important.
Every ten years it seems like the tech world bring in a new batch of people who never bothered to study how things worked in previous decades, and thus end up not only reinventing the wheel, but hyping it up like itʼs the first time anyone ever thought of whatever it is theyʼre all excited about.
Timesharing → Thin clients → Web apps
Hypercard → Web sites
Brittanica → Encarta → Wikipedia
Q-Link → IRC → Second Life → Virtual reality
Rabbitjackʼs Casino → BetMGM
Also not new: Cloud computing. Check out the highlights from this 1979 advertisement for MicroNET:
MicroNET was a way for CompuServe to allow people to use spare capacity on its big iron computers. People could upload their personal projects, conduct business, and even develop software using the might of dozens of machines thousands of times more powerful than what they could afford in their own homes. Maintenance, backups, power supply, networking, and other infrastructure details were abstracted away from the end user so the user could concentrate on the task at hand.
Sound familiar, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and a thousand other virtual machine companies?
If Microsoft canʼt handle internationalization, what chance do the rest of us have?
The New York Times app sure knows how to load ads.
Too bad it doesnʼt know how to load the news that I pay for.
With 200,000 employees, if Bank of America canʼt keep its web site from failing, what chance do I have?
I swiped up to unlock, and instead the screen sort-of half swiped left. The lock icon, the unlock instructions, the wallpaper, and a dark overlay moved left, revealing another copy of the wallpaper underneath. Meanwhile, the time, the music panel, and the quick keys stayed put.
Fortunately, all was solved ten seconds later when the phone shit itself and rebooted.
I got a new Atari cart yesterday. Itʼs BASIC Programming.
While the word “BASIC” in the title is properly capitalized because it is an initialism for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, the title would also work in sentence case as “Basic Programming,” because this is truly basic programming.
Lots of modern-day reviewers on the internet who are more interested in outrage clicks than thoughtful conversation deride this program as a farce or even a toy. I have the unpopular view that BASIC Programming is really quite good, both as a technical achievement and as a cultural change agent. It achieves a number of important goals:
This is all elementary school stuff today. But when this cartridge came out in 1979, it was absolutely revolutionary. For $50, an Atari owner could get a taste of what it was like to actually program a computer. And while computers were starting to occasionally appear in well-to-do homes, they were still staggeringly uncommon, and cost about the same as a new car.
Joysticks and buttons in arcades gave wider society its first opportunity to command an electronic machine to do things. BASIC Programming gave Atari owners the ability to give an electronic machine sequences of commands, and to act on them. Moving a dot around a screen with a joystick had been done long ago through various electromechanical methods. But this was the first chance for ordinary people to actually command a machine to do more than just react to stimulus.
BASIC Programming has a limited feature set, but itʼs still an integrated development environment, not fundamentally different from what computer programmers use today. One significant difference is that BASIC Programming managed to present a fully functional I.D.E. in a minuscule 2K of memory. Thatʼs about one sixth of the words in this article.
By comparison, the current version of Microsoftʼs I.D.E. starts at 274,000 times the size of BASIC Programming, and increases rapidly from there, depending on what language you write in.
Atariʼs BASIC Programming crosses the same ocean as Microsoftʼs VS Code, but does it with a styrofoam pool noodle instead of the Queen Mary.
In addition, BASIC Programming is user-friendly in one specific way that few computers are today. Like me, it had Sister Maria for third grade Arithmetic class, where she preached, “Anything divided by zero is zero.” Try to divide something by zero in Atariʼs basic BASIC, and it politely gives you zero. Unlike modern computer systems that fall on the floor, curl up in a ball, and start quietly sobbing to themselves when asked the same question.
The one popular modern-day gripe I agree with is that the input method is cumbersome. Itʼs a pair of keypads, one plugged into each joystick port, and then locked together. I understand why it was done this way, but that doesnʼt make it easy to use.
Still, the single keypad pair is pulling more than its weight, even for the era. It is used for:
Just looking at the command set, thereʼs a lot of interesting points.
In addition, when you run a program, the systemʼs cursor moves through the program during execution, allowing you to follow along with whatʼs happening. This kind of functionality is an add-on in modern systems.
On a personal note, I love the idea that it has a Halt command. It brings a lot of nostalgic feelings to my tummy. Back when computers were commanded to run and then halt because of their military origins. A time when you couldnʼt start a computer without a key. When computers had mechanical odometers behind a panel so that the IBM service guy from New Paltz could write down for how many hours you used the machine, to let Big Blueʼs billing department know.
Yesterday was a quiet Saturday, so I sat down with BASIC Programming and approached it with my programmerʼs analytical mind, and without the biases of modern-day development. My conclusion is that this is really quite fun.
I started by typing in all six of the programs I could find on the internet. Unlike the days of typing in program from the backs of magazines, these all worked the first time, with moving dots and pinging sounds. Then I started to experiment on my own.
The dialect of BASIC that this cartridge uses is very much of its era. Variable assignment is done with ←, instead of =, just like in 1960ʼs and 1970ʼs computing languages like AP/L. Goto is your friend, not your enemy. And the notion of whitespace for readability goes right out the window. This will be a show-stopper for anyone used to cruising Appleʼs internal codebase.
Iʼm not musical in any way, so naturally I enjoyed stringing along rudimentary bloops and bleeps into nonsensical songs. For an afternoon, I was the e e cummings of synthpop, but I was also doing something: I was creating. This was an a-ha moment, and I felt a rainbow connection to dads of the 1970ʼs, sitting cross-legged in wood-paneled living rooms, scales drifting lazily from their eyes as the future was revealed.
If you appreciate programming elegance, the value of simplicity, or simply dig code golf, this is your course. You are forced to think about what youʼre doing. To make choices, evaluate tradeoffs, and make do with what you have. Itʼs a lot of the brain stimulus that gets some people into programming as a profession in the first place
There are a number of people who enjoy making tiny programs. Some so small that they fit into a PC-DOS boot sector. I think a few of those people might thrive within the constraints of this environment.
The biggest limitation of BASIC Programming is memory. You can only cram a few dozen symbols into the machine. Thatʼs to be expected, since the entire console only has 128 bytes of memory. Thatʼs the reality of 1979. But today, people are able to program Atari cartridges that work with comparatively massive amounts of information. One guy even sells Atari carts that are full-motion videos of popular movies. I suspect one of those clever people could find a way to make a version of this that works around the memory limitation.
The second-biggest problem is the Frankensteinian keyboard. As an input device, it was never intended for long-form content. But the cognitive overhead of shifting modes, double-checking the screen, and the constant hunt-and-peck involved make it hard to concentrate on the program, and not on the controller. Perhaps thatʼs another throwback to 1970ʼs computing, though.
Iʼm old enough to be one of those programmers who wrote their programs out on paper first (graph paper, if you were lucky), then typed it into a shared computer, and hoped that it did what was intended. Maybe if I spent more time thinking about the code beforehand, rather than writing it on-the-fly as is common today, coding in BASIC Programming wouldnʼt be so arduous.
Still, I think that with a bit of time, it would be possible to come up with a harness that links a standard Human Interface Design keyboard with the pair of Atari joystick ports to emulate the keypad. In my mind, it would take some kind of Arduino or Raspberry Pi device with a dozen I/O pins. Voltage might be an issue, but nothing insurmountable to todayʼs hobbiest.
In fact, using this method, one could actually load BASIC Programming programs stored in a host system through the Arduino-powered keypad interface. You could write a program in Microsoft VS Code, or Panicʼs Nova, and when you push to git, or the version management system of your choice, it could also be sent wirelessly to the Arduino, which then relays the keypresses into the Atari 2600.
Now I know what Iʼm going to do when I retire.
And by “0 seconds,” iPadOS means “Several minutes.”
Just when I thought that Linux was the last operating system without built-in advertising, along comes Ubuntu.
If the single largest company on the planet canʼt keep its services from fudging their Huggies, what chance do I have?
I went for a walk today. And like a basset hound with a thyroid condition, I can use all the walkies I can get.
On the way home, my watch pinged me with “It looks like you went outside for a walk. Congratulations!” I pushed the wrong buttons trying to take a screenshot, and the message went away. If a smart watch is a jerk to you in a crosswalk and nobody sees it, can you still rant about it?
Today I learned that delivery apps donʼt care what name you put in them. I think Iʼll be Ford Prefect tomorrow.
iOS Apps are not allowed to use push messaging for advertising. Unless itʼs an Apple app. Then itʼs perfectly fine.
Today I got hazed by my weather app.
What if Apple didnʼt release a new iPhone this year? What harm would be done? Why not skip a year of inconsequential changes, and bring us a bigger change in 2023?
Does the world really need another iPhone? Maybe the iPhone designers deserve a rest.
DirectNIC is using a definition of “24/7” with which I was previously unfamiliar.
Hallmark took my e-mail address “for [my] receipt.” I even took a screenshot just in case it lied. Which it did.
I now get spam from Hallmark at the unique e-mail address I set up for this Hallmark order.
Hallmark cannot be trusted.
Today I learned that Digital Ocean watches your help searches and uses them for unsolicited marketing.
This is both very creepy, and a serious privacy issue.
Siri still shits herself if you ask to change the volume and you have more than one HomePod.
But thank God the latest iOS update has 30 new bearded lady emojis. Carnival sideshows everywhere are weeping with joy.
Hacker News: “This device is so poorly secured, anyone can hack it. This is an outrage!”
Also Hacker news: “This device so secure, I canʼt hack it. This is an outrage!”
Me: “Hey, #Siri, put Hamburger Helper on my groceries list.”
Siri: “Who is speaking?”
Me: “Joe Biden.”
Siri: “OK, Iʼve added it to your groceries list.”
I sure hope the president likes Hamburger Helper.
Tech news from Japan in September, 1986:
But one nearby noodle shop, confronted with competition from its neighbor, may have had the last word when it decided to give itself a “new media” edge. It decided to take advantage of rapidly dropping prices by buying a FAX (facsimile) machine; now I can send in my order for traditional Japanese soba or udon noodles directly from my home FAX machine!
Iʼm getting tired of all the lazy developers talking about how great Electron is.
I guess they donʼt have to use Microsoftʼs Azure Storage Explorer, which crashes on a weekly basis, taking down the entire machine and all of their work because itʼs built in Electron, and is not a real program.
More proof that Apple is trapped in the Silicon Valley bubble:
Me: “Hey, Siri, play 2GB [two-gee-bee] radio.”
Siri: “Now playing two gigabytes eight hundred seventy three...”
Itʼs only the biggest radio station in the largest city on the continent of Australia.
Harrods thinks Iʼm suspicious. I guess Iʼll spend my money over at Liberty, instead.
Not only does Appleʼs Find My app not know where my AirPods are, it doesnʼt even know what to call them.
According to Microsoft Outlook, I replied to this message 72 minutes before I received it.
Itʼs not a Daylight Savings Time issue, or it would be just 60 minutes different.
Also, it would be nice if Microsoft Office would pick one date format and stick with it.
What happens when you try to charge a USB power bank from itself? Letʼs find out.
In spite of all their fancy JavaScript, and invasive telemetry, I donʼt think online stores really have any idea how much money they lose every day by making their shopping process so complicated that the web site breaks.
Simplifying the stack would save development costs, management costs, and increase sales.
But nobody in tech gets promoted for making things less complicated.
Vague error messages cost less, and Walmart passes that savings on to you!
Assuming you can eventually get to the check-out portion of the web site.
In 2006 and 2007, Steve Jobs famously fought the big cell phone companies because he knew in-device ads would ruin the iPhone experience.
With Tim Cook, the most important thing is whatever makes money.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by tech companies fucking with you.
A piece of expensive high-tech equipment didnʼt work right in 2021? Shocking!
The error message makes no sense? Thatʼs impossible!
Oh well, Iʼll just look up error number -6753 in the imaginary manual that didnʼt come with the HomePod, and also doesnʼt exist online, or anywhere else.
Somewhere, a Walmart web developer and his database manager are learning about UTF-8 and utfmb8.
Me: “Hey, Siri, turn on the foyer lamp.”
Siri: “Playing all songs.”
This is what happens when your mapping database doesnʼt have coordinates for a town. It puts the town in Kansas.
In this case, the New York Times map jammed Newton, New Jersey in the middle of Kansas. It probably thinks other towns are there, too.
Never trust any data. Always check for NULL and improbable values.
Today I learned that Appleʼs HomePod canʼt play the music you own, stored on your own Mac, in your own home, even with so-called “Home Sharing” enabled.
After 10 years of “Rip, Mix, Burn” can you imagine someone telling Steve Jobs, “We have this new music gadget, but you canʼt play any of the music you own on it.” Only rental music.
Someone would be fired before he even finished that sentence.
Me: “Hey, Siri, turn it down.”
HomePod: “Sorry. There as a problem adjusting volume.”
This is what we used to call “Not ready for Prime Time.”
Today I learned that not only does my HomePod run Apple TVOS, its firmware has a “Bogus Field Not Actually Ever Used,” and a “Bogus Measure Not Actually Ever Used.”
The use of “bogus” confirms the “Designed in California” label.
Using a MacBook Air as your main machine for almost 10 years really gives you a sense of which letters you type most often.
Sure wish I could order Dairy Queen through DoorDash, like the web site says I can.
But DoorDashʼs web site insists that I pick a size for a box of Buster Bars, which only come in one size.
I wonder how many other sales Dairy Queen has lost because of DoorDash.
It looks like I broke Apple again.
Can someone turn Apple off, then turn it on again?
In 1986, the idea of a television that fit in your hand was so futuristic and dystopian that The Art of Noise used it in the art for an album cover.
Today, we have supercomputers in our pockets and on our wrists that can access video in real-time from any country on the planet.
What happened that itʼs not considered scary anymore?
I tried to watch mass from Saint Patrickʼs Cathedral in New York today. Itʼs on YouTube.
Google put 6½ minutes of ads at the front, plus sixteen commercial breaks inside the 50-minute mass. Thereʼs an illustration of how greedy Google and the rest of Silicon Valley is.
Next time Iʼll listen to it on the radio.
“Search is hard,” the tech bubble constantly says.
Itʼs not this hard.
How does Appleʼs Home app not have a Christmas tree icon?
That seems like a pretty basic thing for a remote-controlled light switch.
Well, hereʼs a new DGPR fail. Not only can I not decline to be tracked by The Onion, I canʼt even accept to be tracked because the Accept button doesnʼt work.
Maybe this is some kind of subtle humor.
Kinda hard to fill out MailChimpʼs usability survey when the survey is unusable on mobile.
Thereʼs no way to submit the answers.
Facebook claims to have the “smartest people in the room” working for it.
If Facebook canʼt keep its web site working, what chance do I have?
After enduring four pop-ups, I click on “Gifts” and get a 404 error. Good job, Diptyque. It looks like the marketing department runs the web site, not IT.
I wonder what kind off things Made In New Mexico sells. I guess Iʼll never know since the products are hidden behind six pop-ups.
So I bought elsewhere.
The election makes me look like a screen junkie.
If Amazon.com canʼt keep Whole Foods running, what chance do I have?
If fleaBay canʼt keep its web site up, what chance do I have?
There is simply no way to opt-out of #spam from fleaBay.
If it canʼt handle something as simple as e-mail subscriptions, why would I trust it with money?
Me: “Hey, Siri put ‘Cut lawn’ on my ‘Outside’ list.”
Siri: “You donʼt have an ‘Outside’ list. Do you want me to create one?”
Me: “Yes.”
Siri: “You donʼt have an ‘Outside’ list. Do you want me to create one?”
Me: “Yes.”
Siri: “You donʼt have an ‘Outside’ list. Do you want me to create one?”
Me: “Yes.”
Iʼm tired of tech bullshit that never works. Iʼm going back to lists on paper. It Just Works™
Me: “Hey, Siri, put ‘toothpaste’ on my ‘Shopping’ list.”
Siri: “Youʼll have to unlock your iPhone first.”
If I was near my iPhone, Iʼd just put toothpaste on the list myself.
It is against Appleʼs App Store rules to use notifications for advertising.
Apparently, Apple has exempted itself from those rules.
How to get people to turn off the emergency alert feature on their phones in two easy steps:
If PayPal canʼt handle running a web site, how can I trust it with my money?
Imagine a world in which using the internet more actually improved a personʼs grammar.
Why do so many Apple programs use five-pixel-tall fonts? Who thinks these are a good idea? Even back in Commodore 64 days, we knew that nobody could read a five pixel font.
You donʼt have to be visually impaired, elderly, or even drunk for these to be completely unreadable on a computer screen.
For all the puffery that comes out of Apple about accessibility and inclusiveness, this has to stop.
Two mistakes on the same iOS Mail screen.
If only Apple had a trillion or so dollars to put into quality control.
Itʼs “downloads from,” not “downloads on.”
Youʼre a trillion-dollar company, not a startup, Apple. You donʼt get a pass on basic grammar.
Looks like someone at Grace Digital applied strip_tags() in a location where marketing wanted to track some people with JavaScript.
You donʼt need JavaScript to keep track of your customers.
If both Chase and Citibankʼs web sites can be borked at the same time, what chance do I have?
If Apple canʼt make its programs work, what chance do I… oh, wait. Itʼs iTunes. This is probably an improvement.
My local library sometimes has little museum exhibits in it. Today I noticed some new artifacts on display, including an Atari 2600 of the sort I played just last week.
The iOS spell checker doesnʼt know the name of the eighth president of the United States.
I happened to be in an Apple Store when an iPhone training session was going on.
The “Genius” told his audience that 1080p means “A thousand pixels per square inch,” and that 4K means “four times as many!”
Ummm… no.
Dear Apple Maps,
This is not State Highway 87.
Nice notification spam, New York Times.
I only have “Breaking News” selected in my notification settings, which the app says is supposed to be “Urgent and important stories.” By definition, the Opinion page is not breaking news.
I hate to buy cat food from Amazon.com, but I donʼt have much of a choice since Chewyʼs web site has been borked for half an hour now.
If Chewy canʼt keep a web site running, what chance do I have?
It turns out that Tide Dry Cleaners canʼt handle the Apple Card via Apple Pay.
The card terminal says “Approved,” but the POS system rejects it immediately after.
The physical card works OK. And other cards work fine via Apple Pay. Itʼs just the Apple Card that is giving it fits.
Today I learned that Albertsons supermarkets wonʼt accept the Apple Card via Apple Pay.
Using other cards via Apple Pay works fine, but Albertsonsʼ POS system throws an error with the Apple Card. “This type of card is not accepted.”
It turns out that the parking payment machines at the Las Vegas airport canʼt handle Apple Cards at all.
Thereʼs no NFC option, and the physical card is rejected with an “Illegible card” error.
The New York Timesʼ 500 page is 404.
Nope, thatʼs not a cell tower. Itʼs totally a tree. In the middle of the desert. 200 miles from the next nearest tree. Totally believable.
Live now: Adobe sends me spam from a product that I pay for!
iRobot is so laser-focused on customer acquisition that its web site gives me two ways to create an account, and zero ways to log in to the account I already have.
When I load photos of Valley of Fire into programs like Lightroom, they automatically crank the color down 15 notches because the programmers at Adobe in Seattle canʼt conceive of a place that isnʼt as humid and grey as where they live.
How much knowledge has been lost thanks to the “information age?”
The entry for “Teletype” in Wikipedia is just 2 paragraphs.
We only gave Citibank $326,000,000,000.00 in taxpayer money for its bailout. Maybe if we all chip in a little more, Citi can fix its web site.
I searched Amazon.com for “easel.”
One of these things is not like the others.
Itʼs backup day, which means a stack of USB drives USB driving.
It reminds me of when I ran a node of ARB BBS with a bunch of Commodore 1541ʼs winking and grunting through the night.
Drove my father nuts.
I just found a USB memory stick in the dryer.
This is why old computers were better. Nobody ever accidentally left a floppy disk in their pants pocket.
I donʼt often have nice things to say about Google, but Iʼd like to thank Big G for playing along today.
I guess I should just be glad that nobody uses the “finger” command anymore.
The nearest cell phone service is seven miles away. But the motel has wifi, which also has to travel the same distance. And every time the wind blows, it goes out.
The more e-mail I get, the less inclined I am to check my e-mail. Funny how that works.
“Random crashes without meaningful explanation” sounds like pretty much every bit of technology these days.
Always get behind the self-driving cars. Computers know which lane is the fastest.
Self-driving cars in Nevada have special license plates that start with “AU.”
I guess if I never take pictures of dogs, my phone has no reference point to work from.
Perhaps it thinks “Dog = ugly cat.”
Today I learned that the program that started Apollo 11's rockets was called burn_baby_burn. Glad to see I'm not the only one banging out mirthful function names.
Iʼm not sure whatʼs happening here. But I am sure itʼs not supposed to happen.
Ever have one of those days when you think, “Wow, my web sites are really fast today!” and then you realize you spent the last hour tinkering on localhost?
Itʼs always nice to be reminded that Googleʼs G Suite for business really isnʼt enterprise-grade.
I received this e-mail from my registrar in Austria. You can tell itʼs not an American company, because itʼs not afraid to say “Christmas.”
Remember when we could balance our finances without a computer?
You know — before technology made everything "easier?"
This is what happens when you try to view the privacy policy and terms of service on the Smashing Pumpkins web store.
The good news is it isnʼt just banks that constantly have borked web sites.
The bad news is that the Nevada Secretary of State is farkled now.
I hope everyone didnʼt go home for the long weekend already.
If the Library of Congress — the federally-funded keeper of all the nationʼs facts and secrets — canʼt keep its web site running, what chance do I have?
“Give us a moment” has been spinning in my browser for three hours.
I guess AT&Tʼs web site is connected through the ever-reliable AT&T network.
Is Synchrony Bank canʼt keep its web site from eating itself, what chance do I have?
For some reason I broke out Darcieʼs original 2007 iPhone. Works fine, except web browsing is a mess. So much smaller, thicker, and heavier than a current phone, but it just feels good to hold. Nice and solid. And it has places to grip it that arenʼt the screen.
Iʼm not a big fan of all-glass phones.
Today I learned that the IT guy who wouldnʼt allow Macs or iPhones on the corporate network at a former employer because “Macs are stupid” is now free to peddle his “Windows rulz!” bullshit full time in the unemployment line because he refused to take Macintosh/Unix networking classes.
My main media drive ate itself away, wiping out 4TB of movies, music, and TV shows. So I spent most of the last week pulling my hair out trying to reconstruct the files and metadata.
Tonight I remembered that I make monthly backups. My brain hates me.
Every time I try to give Uber a chance, I end up taking a Lyft.
I love Apple News on the iPhone, but on macOS, it uses a six-pixel-tall font. And most headlines are just ten pixels tall, with no way to scale them.
Itʼs unusable by anyone past puberty.
I guess if itʼs called “Mojave,” Iʼm kinda obligated to try it out.
New machine at work. 12 cores. No waiting.
This is what happens when youʼre debugging a web site and The Smiths comes on the radio.
Darcie: Have you been using my phone?
Me: Why?
Darcie: All my ads have changed.
Me: I Googled “astronaut diapers.”
My first thought was to blame the webdev for using unvetted user-uploaded photos when no other pictures of the property were available. Then I realized I should blame the people who run the motel for the condition it is in.
He probably just reset all of my passwords to Garfield quotes again.
While I appreciate the vacuum cleaner putting in extra effort while I’m at work, the nearest cliff is like a half a mile away.
Itʼs going to have to find its own ride home.
If anyoneʼs looking for a doctor online and the maps donʼt match up with the addresses… yeah, thatʼs my fault. Render faster, ya pile of crap!
My Facebook feed this morning:
Good job, Facebook. Glad to see the $70 billion spent on “user engagement AI” is working out for you.
This is why four weeks a year it is not a good idea to take your phone to The Strip. I keep mine off at work while these hacker conferences are going on.
Today I learned that macOS has a programmerʼs calculator built-in. And has since 1992. Doh!
It turns out that the IT department wonʼt notice you installing your own Mapnik tile server on localhost if itʼs too busy freaking out about your terminal emulator that transforms an HDMI connection into a bad 3270 display, complete with burn-in, flickering, and horizontal hold issues.
We have achieved XMODEM on the TRS-80. Weekend project complete.
Itʼs been a long time since I transferred a file at 300 baud. I think thatʼs how I got fat as a kid. Nothing to do for 12 minutes but see whatʼs in the fridge.
In April of 1982, I waited an agonizing three weeks for the UPS guy to deliver a 1541 drive that could hold 170K of data.
Tonight, Amazon brought me a drive that holds 25,000 times more data… in 90 minutes… at midnight.
So maybe not everything is more terrible today than it used to be.
I wonder how many times someoneʼs said aloud, “Hey, Siri, *buuuuuuuuuuuurp!*”
When your internet providerʼs web site is borked…
Naturally, the bill payment section works. But only the bill payment section.
Saw this while reading some Google documentation today:
Values equal to or greater than 1 will be ignored, and a value of 0 will completely shut your piehole.
Smartphones are great at being “smart.” Theyʼre not always very good at the whole “phone” part.
The nice lady at the maid café wrote “ウイーナ♡” on the cheki we took of ourselves.
According to Google Translate, that's Japanese for “Weena.” I guess that means one of the following:
I found a thumb drive today.
It was laying on the pavers beneath a park bench outside of the weird little multi-level shoulda-been-a-strip-mall downtown. I suspect at one time this was a pretty hopping little corner of Bellevue. But thereʼs a bunch of empty storefronts in it now, probably from the real estate recession. Hopefully it comes back to life some day.
Iʼm not going to introduce a random USB drive found on a random slice of concrete under a random bench in a random city on a randomly nice day to my computer. At least not my main computer. But I do have my wifeʼs old banger Linux machine that I can re-image from ROM to pave over anything that might crawl out of this drive. The drive is, after all, lime green.
Looking at the files on the drive reveals… code. Not nuclear missile launch codes, but computer code for what looks like a video game. I learned ray tracing in C back in college, so I recognize a good chunk of whatʼs going on; but clearly C has evolved quite a bit since the days when I used to have to reserve time on a machine in the university computer lab in order to compile my homework. What I can figure out is this:
I surmise that Aleks lost this thumb drive late last year, as the newest timestamp is October 9, 2009. Aleks seems to be involved in the gameʼs graphics. His TODO list is brief:
Aleks has been to a number of graphics-related tech conferences around the West Coast, and keeps videos, audio recordings, and slideshows from those conferences on the thumb drive next to his game code for reference.
Iʼm not sure how I would track down Aleks to return this drive to him. I thought about giving it to the police department. When I was a little kid I turned in a wallet I found to the local cops, and they reunited it with the owner, who rewarded me with five bucks (which was pretty lame, since the wallet had a couple of hundred in it). But Bellevue tells me that unless the item has a minimum value of $50, itʼs not interested.
I suppose I could just knock on the doors of the various game companies in town. But there are a lot of game companies in Bellevue, and I donʼt want to turn the drive over to a competitor. So I guess itʼs better to just let this drive remain “lost” forever. The drive was probably a backup of files from his desktop machine, so no harm done. Itʼs not like people build code on a thumb drive.
For the second time in two years, Iʼm in a computer magazine.
Not on the cover this time, and itʼs only for scoring an honorable mention in a contest, not as part of an editorial spread, but itʼs something.
Back in February, I saw a note on the ARB BBS down in South Amboy that Commodore Magazine was having a computer painting contest that actually included art made on a Commodore 64. These days, when people talk about computer graphics, itʼs all about the Amiga. But this contest actually took entries from us 64 people. Itʼs probably the last one that will. I wonder if this is how VIC-20 people felt in 1983.
Since I had luck getting my art published in Run magazine last year, I chose a picture from my files, bought a floppy disk mailer from the Post Office, and sent it out. Yesterday, I got a copy of the magazine in the mail, along with a check for $100. The magazine should be on newsstands in a few weeks. The check will be converted into gas money for the Summer.
Whatʼs nice about it this time around is that the magazine lists what software each artist used to create their picture. Iʼm an Advanced OCP Art Studio user these days, but the picture I submitted is rather old, so itʼs listed correctly as being done in Koala Painter. Iʼve also moved from using a Koala Pad for input to an Atari Trak-Ball. I adore my Pad, but itʼs nice to sit back with my feet up on the desk and a finger on each button while moving the ball around with one thumb. Very comfortable for long painting sessions.
Iʼd gratified to see that so many other C-64 artists also use the same programs I do — Koala Painter and OCP. Thereʼs also a couple of programs listed that I donʼt know: MicroIllustrator, and Artist. And itʼs nice to see people are still creating wonderful things with Doodle!. That was my first painting program, and the only reason I donʼt use it anymore is because I prefer the extra colors available in the low-resolution 160x200 mode, while Doodle! only works in the high-resolution 320x200 mode.
Thatʼs not to say that you canʼt do incredible things with Doodle!; you absolutely can. Jim Sachs works in 320x200x2, and he is the best of the best. But it requires a lot of thought and planning. High resolution mode is best used by analytical minds who can think far ahead of their creative side. When I started out, that appealed to me a lot. Getting a block of colors to line up the way I wanted was like winning a chess match against a VIC-Ⅱ chip. But now the challenge is different. Now itʼs about using color and shadows to overcome the limits of the 4x8x3 color cell.
Itʼs Friday, so my parents should come home tonight, and Iʼll show it to them then. Hopefully they see more in it than the check. I tried to show it to my friends this morning, but none of them seemed to care. Theyʼre very wrapped up in the prom that Iʼm not going to. Susan was a little supportive, but I think she was just being polite. Sheʼs that way. Everyone else dismissed it as playing with a computer toy.
Something I notice is that the subject matter of most of the art is very traditional. This struck me when I saw Anne Coleʼs Bison. I thought to myself, “Iʼve seen this somewhere before.” And then I realized that what Iʼve seen before is a photo of a bison with snow on its face. And Iʼve seen it maybe a hundred times.
These artists — including Ms. Cole, who is using DeluxePaint on an Amiga — have access to the best technology that money can buy. And instead of creating something new with their imaginations, theyʼre re-creating the art of yesteryear. I, too, am guilty of this with my digital painting of the Twin Towers. Itʼs something Iʼve seen a thousand times, and something thatʼs been photographed by other people millions of times. But can it be considered good, if itʼs something that could be done better with a camera, or even a paint brush?
Maybe thatʼs why my friends were unimpressed. Being immersed in technology, Iʼm overcome by the notion of imagined possibilities turned into reality. But the actual reality that my friends saw is that weʼre just a bunch of geeks frittering away with blocky finger paints. Maybe people who are not into computers see the results, not the method, and so are able to judge the results, not the effort.
What I showed them was my proud technological achievement. What they saw was less good than a three-year-old attacking the wainscoting with a pack of blunt Crayolas. It hurts to think of it, but they must be right. It wouldnʼt hurt otherwise. Strip away the artifice of the method, and the art that remains is poor. Nobody cares how hard it was for you to climb the mountain. All they care about is that you planted a flag on the summit.
