Really BA?

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Thursday, November 12, 2015.

Really BA?

Not to pick on British Airways but yes, that screenshot is real. It's a marketing email opt out that has not only been pre-populated in favor of spam but has then also been disabled.

Previously.

Add your comment...

Related Posts

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: Really BA? #etc #ba A British Airways marketing opt-out checkbox that is both pre-checked and disabled for your convenience. )

etc, ba

Thank you Feedly

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Friday, May 22, 2020.

Thank you Feedly

It has been brought to my attention that I've been whinging too much recently

So I'd like to take a break from that and say how much I'm enjoying feedly. It's a wonderfully well designed RSS reader. I use the Chrome Extension version and the Android app. It preserves the Google Reader keyboard shortcuts so I can sail through my subscriptions and it brings back social sharing. 

I looked at feedly once before and didn't really get it. I thought it was just one of those algorithmic recommendation news manglers that tries to guess what you want to read. It might do that on the home page but the 'All' view is a perfect replacement for Google Reader. 

I love it. I want to pay for it to make sure it stays around. Thank you feedly. 

Add your comment...

Related Posts

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: Thank you Feedly #etc #feedly #software Feedly is an awesome RSS reader and the ideal replacement for Google Reader for RSS fans. )

Might there actually be grounds to sue BA on the basis of a frequent flyer program that never lets you actually fly anywhere ever?

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Sunday, October 23, 2022.

Comments Restored

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Sunday, November 6, 2022.

I've restored all the comments that vanished after I removed Disqus last weekend. This is after a considerable effort to get everything out of BlogML and into WXR a couple of years ago. At some point I'll just have to give up and decide it's faster to write my own blogging and commenting system but for now Facebook Comments are enabled for all posts.

Add your comment...

Related Posts

(All Etc Posts)

Google Maps Ate My Battery

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Friday, May 22, 2020.

Google Maps Battery Usage

I've been slowly becoming aware that Google Maps is eating up a lot of the power on my phone (an HTC One X with Android 4.1). Yesterday as my battery was near death I saw it was up to 25% of total usage on a day when I hadn't even run the app. Something had to give. I'd already turned off Google Latitude a few months ago so the culprit had to be whatever secret-squirrel location sniffing the phone does behind my back.

Android Location Options

Android has about a million different incomprehensible weasily location options. At least in 4.1, I've seen some evidence that 4.2 is a bit better. The bargain with 'Google's location service' seems to be that if you don't send your data to them they won't send it to you. At least I think so, the description changes when you check or uncheck the option. I've had this off for today and my battery has a lot more juice. It means that Google Now doesn't work, but so far that doesn't seem to be a loss. It might hurt other apps as well, but so far I care more about not having a dead phone at the end of the day.

Add your comment...

Related Posts

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: Google Maps Ate My Battery #etc #google #maps #battery #location Android 4.1 on a HTC One X and how to get more life out of your battery if you can figure out the location settings. )

Disqust

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Sunday, September 5, 2021.

Disqust

I just discovered that Disqus started running adverts on my blog without permission. It's probably been going on for a little while and I should have paid more attention, sorry.

By 'without permission' I mean that I'm sure I clicked though and didn't read a terms of service document that said they could do what the fuck they like to my site. And reading other accounts of this issue I'm sure I filed without reading the email they sent out that mentioned this new 'feature' in passing. So in a legal sense they probably had all the permission they needed. In a moral sense they're switch-and-bait scum of the highest order. 

They should have made this feature opt-in and then sent out an email explaining it in detail. Some sites don't want to run ads. You could have non-commercial Creative Commons content on a site that is suddenly a commercial concern. 

It's a free service and at some point they need to make money, fine. If this had been presented as an option I might have considered it. If they wanted to charge for the service I'd probably have paid for it.

Instead I've disabled Disqus and hastily hacked in Facebook Comments which should be coming online as I write this post. 

A side effect of this is that all the existing comments are currently unavailable. I have an archive and will try to get them resurrected soon.

(Since writing this post I have also ditched Facebook comments and now have a fully home grown solution that I moderate by hand.)

Add your comment...

Related Posts

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: Disqust #etc #disqus #comments #facebook Disqus sneak in ads and so I rip out Discuss in favor of Facebook Comments and eventually my own system. )

Chiroopractoor

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Thursday, November 12, 2015.

Chiroopractoor

Google's use crime of a new compose window is going to become compulsory soon.

I suspect this is because it will soon be revealed that Google is rolling out a chain of high street Chiropractic facilities to treat the crick in everyone's neck from composing email in the bottom right hand corner of one's screen.

Either that or it's a bid for mobile dominance by forcing PC users to work in mobile screen sized portions of their screen until you just give up and use your phone.

Add your comment...

Related Posts

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: Chiroopractoor #etc #google #gmail Why is Google trying to give me back pain with their latest Gmail redesign? )

bye, bye, Miss Deprecated API

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Saturday, May 22, 2021.

bye, bye, Miss Deprecated API

After my horrible experience with Cleat last year I'm finally pulling the plug on my remaining Twitter API projects. Twitter is switching off their v1 API soon and I'm still so sick of it that I'm not even going to upgrade existing products. If you used Follower then I'm sorry. If you liked my Twitter public timeline screensaver then you're odd, but I'm still sorry. I'll still tweet, I'm just staying clear of the API.

(Image is Fail Whale Pale Ale by Brian Cook.)

Add your comment...

Related Posts

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: bye, bye, Miss Deprecated API #etc #twitter I'm done with the Twitter API )

I can't post a single photo

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Thursday, November 12, 2015.

I can't post a single photo

You'd think Facebook or Twitter could scrape together a semi-functional Android client but apparently not.

Twitter has some size limit for photo uploads. In a sane world the client would resize a photo that was too large and just get on with it. Table stakes would be an error message. But no, it pretends everything is just peachy and then fails to upload. To post a photo to Twitter I have to remember to go into the camera settings and ratchet down the megapixels which I remember to do about never. 

Facebook used to work occasionally but now just dumps an ugly immobile progress bar that won't go away until I reboot the phone. 

Google+ probably works fine technically but if a photo is uploaded to a forest and there is nobody there to see it is that still in any sense counted as success?

Add your comment...

Related Posts

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: I can't post a single photo #etc #facebook #twitter Twitter and Facebook both failing to upload photos on Android (probably fixed now but still...) )

Going Chrome

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Saturday, February 12, 2022.

Going Chrome

I came to Chrome OS by a circuitous route. Initially I though a browser in a box was a silly, under-powered toy. But then I needed a meeting machine for work.

To start with I decided to use an old Macbook. It was running OSX 10.5 (Leopard) which is a bit out of date so I thought I'd update it to the latest 10.8 (Mountain Lion) goodness. But this turned out to be impossible to do from my desk. Before I could go to 10.8 I'd have to get physical media for 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and patch it up to the point where it would accept an upgrade. This meant shipping a disc or visiting an Apple Store and getting smarmed at. Unacceptable.

So I decided to ditch OSX and install Windows 8. This was a cheap online purchase and a painless install... but Windows 8 is a disaster on a non-touch device. Everything takes an extra few clicks or a half-mile scroll to the right. 

Live tiles seem like a good idea until you realize that you're not looking at the start screen often enough for them to be of any value. If Microsoft had introduced a permanent ticker at the bottom of the screen or a secondary tile screen on all Windows 8 certified devices life could have been more interesting. 

Removing the start button so you have to go into touch and swipe mode to do anything is a pain. A boot to desktop mode would be great for older devices.

The deal breaker though is the increasingly assertive Windows Update. Twice in meetings it decided to reboot the computer. It used to be you could delay updates for hours but Windows 8 just knows that the latest patch is more important that whatever you happen to be working on and cheerfully pulls the plug. 

Admittedly you can figure out how to find the vestigial, non-Windows 8 config for Windows 8 and go to manual mode. And then figure out how to turn off the nagging for not having the recommended Windows Update setting. But but by this point you realize that you've got a operating system that is about updates first and getting work done second. And Windows 8 Windows Update doesn't even update Windows Store apps so you've got a live tile nagging for updates every five seconds as well. 

On top on the Windows 8 horror the Macbook was old, heavy and had a puny battery. Also, after installing Windows 8 the only software I needed to install was Chrome and the office VPN client. Once this sunk in I ordered the new Samsung Chromebook.  

Setup on the Chromebook is: 1. Login to your Google Account (with support for two-factor authentication), 2. Choose a wallpaper (optional). 

I'm not likely to use a Chromebook as my primary machine any time soon. It is however a meeting powerhouse for email, IMs, calendar and note taking. I replaced Skype with imo.im (which I've used on Android for a while). Full Outlook web access took a bit of head scratching - see this post for details. Google Apps and Hangouts work seamlessly as you'd expect. It's light and the battery lasts all day.

The only niggle so far is that Chrome OS doesn't support the flavor of VPN that my company uses. It would be nice to get to the wiki, but it's not a deal breaker (If you have a Cisco VPN that insists on a group name go vote for this bug). 

Microsoft and Apple should be really rather worried.

Updated 2013-07-17 13:54:

Two quick updates.

Providing a group name to use with Cisco VPN devices was added in Chrome 28. Unfortunately it still doesn't work for me. I've filed issue 261241 on the chromium bug tracker for this - you can star this issue if you have the same problem.

Skype has managed to block Imo.im so that no longer works for Skype on a Chromebook. I'm using IM+ for now, but it's not nearly as good - it doesn't remember passwords and it keeps silently losing connectivity so it's easy to miss chats.

Add your comment...

Read the full Chromebook Adventure

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: Going Chrome #etc #chromebook #google #macos #apple #windows #microsoft Part one in my adventure in switching to a Chromebook, figuring out how to make it work for most of my tasks and then eventually returning to Windows. )