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Brien · Oct 27, 2021, 07:14 PM

I’m not sure I like Apple’s ‘connect all the stuff’ push the past few releases. With the latest updates I now get media controls on my ALL my devices when ANY device is playing content, “AirPods nearby” notification spam on mac/i/tvOS, and nags to sync everything else. It’s… irritating.

andi*pandi · Oct 28, 2021, 01:23 PM

Me getting a text:
<ding>iphone
<ding>ipad
<ding>computer 1
<ding>computer 2

compound by rapid texters like a girl scout troop group <ding><DING><ding><DING><ding><DING><ding><DING><d ing><DING><ding><DING><ding><DING><ding><DING><din g><DING><ding><DING><ding><DING><ding><DING><ding> <DING><ding><DING><ding><DING><ding><DING><ding><D ING><ding><DING><ding><DING><ding><DING><ding><DIN G><ding><DING><ding><DING><ding><DING><ding><DING> <ding><DING><ding><DING><ding><DING>

Laminar · Oct 28, 2021, 03:29 PM

Son's gotten kicked out of Dolphin on the Mini when I get a phone call.

subego · Oct 28, 2021, 10:05 PM

Like, Dolphin the emulator?

Laminar · Oct 29, 2021, 09:16 AM

Yeah. Happened to me last night, Mario didn't fare so well.

subego · Oct 29, 2021, 11:38 AM

Guy never catches a break.

Brien · Oct 30, 2021, 12:08 PM

All voice assistants. They ALL suck.

subego · Oct 30, 2021, 01:18 PM

I’ve come to like Siri, but I don’t demand a lot.

Thorzdad · Oct 30, 2021, 01:45 PM

I never use Siri. No use for it. My wife, on the other hand, uses Siri for tons of stuff.

subego · Oct 30, 2021, 02:02 PM

The big use for me is alarms. Setting a time is one of those things where using a voice interface beats the alternatives hands down.

subego · Oct 30, 2021, 09:04 PM

reader50 · Oct 30, 2021, 09:56 PM

I imagine his mpg is on the low side. Also, for the full effect, he needs to add flagpoles to the truck bed.

subego · Oct 30, 2021, 10:57 PM

I’m thinking add oil slicks and fulfill my dream of playing real life Spy Hunter.

Laminar · Nov 2, 2021, 08:40 AM

The asshole is the one staying in the left lane for mile after mile, right?

"Rolling coal" is black smoke and only happens under acceleration. It doesn't look like he's accelerating and that's white smoke, so probably a blown head gasket. Probably trying to nurse it home so he can crush a 24 pack of Busch Light and beat his dog.

subego · Nov 2, 2021, 03:41 PM

Originally Posted by Laminar

The asshole is the one staying in the left lane for mile after mile, right?

I’ve been expecting you.

Should I have not been in the left lane? I drive fast enough it generally doesn’t make sense to leave it. On this stretch of road under normal conditions I do 90 on the straightaways.

Laminar · Nov 2, 2021, 04:16 PM

The video starts with multiple cars passing you on the right. The general rule of thumb is keep right unless you're passing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

subego · Nov 2, 2021, 05:16 PM

I am passing, though. I’m just not getting up on the car in front of me.

Aren’t the cars trying to weave in and out of my safe driving distance being the assholes? Honest question.

ShortcutToMoncton · Nov 2, 2021, 07:53 PM

Originally Posted by subego

I am passing, though. I’m just not getting up on the car in front of me.

Aren’t the cars trying to weave in and out of my safe driving distance being the assholes? Honest question.

You’re supposed to move over to allow faster traffic to pass you in the passing lane. If vehicles are passing on the right and then moving into your lane, there’s generally a problem.

Of course maybe those vehicles aren’t ever in the passing lane to begin with…North American highway training is pretty piss poor, and lots of people refuse to move over to allow faster vehicles to pass them which just makes everything worse. Canada is pretty much the same.

subego · Nov 3, 2021, 12:55 PM

Originally Posted by ShortcutToMoncton

You’re supposed to move over to allow faster traffic to pass you in the passing lane.

There’s some calculus involved, no?

I’ll do that if there’s open road ahead, but not if there are three vehicles in the lane in front of me.

ShortcutToMoncton · Nov 5, 2021, 08:57 AM

Oh yea agree…..just going by the video

subego · Nov 5, 2021, 09:17 AM

That’s what’s in the video. There are three vehicles in the lane ahead of me, who then disappear into impenetrable smoke.

Thorzdad · Nov 5, 2021, 04:35 PM

Sportsbook apps. It’s like every other commercial now is for someone’s new sportsbook app. Shit’s spreading faster than covid.

ghporter · Nov 5, 2021, 05:52 PM

I think there are a lot of people who think gambling online is as safe and reliable as gambling in person. Yeah, right. Sure it is.

Remember when using your phone as a flashlight required a third party app? Most of those third party apps were malware (mostly Russian, at that). That’s what I think about floods of “the latest fad in apps.” Mostly malware…

Laminar · 09:40 PM

Our conservative, Christian, family-values, traditional-definition-of-everything governor signed the bill not too long ago and since then I've been inundated with ads on Spotify.

subego · Nov 10, 2021, 04:18 AM

Holy shit… the hoops I just had to jump through to make a shell script work in Monterey.

subego · Nov 11, 2021, 06:10 PM

Suddenly having 4 duplicates of every contact.

Thanks, iCloud.

subego · Nov 12, 2021, 03:21 AM

Massive Finder copies.

Laminar · Nov 12, 2021, 10:21 AM

Asshole cam:

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CWJ2VkxssRw/

Thorzdad · Nov 19, 2021, 01:42 PM

Effing Gmail freaks the f**k out whenever I occasionally decide to log directly into my account via browser, and starts generating "security warnings" that a (supposedly) new device has logged into my account. It's the same browser I've been using for years. On the same iMac. And, when I click the "That was me" button, I then get deluged with "Welcome to Gmail! Let's get started!" email, as if I'm a new user. And, Gmail not only sends all this to that account, it also sends them to my backup account.

OreoCookie · Nov 20, 2021, 12:37 AM

Don’t get me started on Gmail and the G-suite.
I still cannot fathom how people think Gmail is more reliable than iCloud. My colleagues and I (across continents, literally) have had mail “disappear.” One time there was an urgent matter and my boss was extremely pissed. Why hadn’t I answered her? I told her, I had within 10 minutes and forwarded her my sent mail with time stamp. Talking to colleagues, it seems like everyone had a story like that. (Oh, and these were mails from within the same domain, all handled by Google servers, from known email addresses and the mails were not in the spam folders.) I have never had that happen with iCloud or any other mail service.

And their classroom suite is a flaming mess, too.

ghporter · Nov 20, 2021, 10:19 PM

Cell phone navigation is great when you have even fair cell (with data) coverage. Poor or no coverage? It just won’t work.

If you have 3 bars of cell signal and LTE service, shouldn’t you expect that to be enough to let your phone's GPS work? Nope. Those indicators don’t mean you’re going to get the data you need for the phone’s nav functions to work. Good thing the car’s GPS is a full-on implementation…

Background: The GPS implementation on phones depends on cell system data; it’s called “assisted GPS.” Instead of keeping a lot of GPS specific data up to date on the phone (the “almanac data” that tells a full-on GPS device where the satellites are), cell phones depend on the cell system to give them a sort of ballpark location to start with, and probably some almanac data too.

Computationally, this makes sense - the overhead required to look up where all 30 satellites are and which satellites might be in view is significant. A “GPS cold start” where the unit just starts looking for satellites until it finds one takes way more power than phone designers are willing to dedicate to a single function. Gee, thanks.

Brien · Dec 14, 2021, 08:20 PM

What’s the deal with all of these “year in review” bits? E.g. FB year in review, reddit recap, Apple Replay etc. Do most people actually give a crap about what they did all year? Whoopdedoo?

subego · Dec 14, 2021, 08:36 PM

Nintendo just sent me my year in review.

344 hours on Disgaea. JFC.

ghporter · Dec 15, 2021, 12:46 PM

After the past two years, why would anyone want to “review” that stuff…except to hopefully learn from it and avoid repeating any of it? This year alone I’ve gone through a lot of “stuff,” and I’m not at all nostalgic about most of it.

subego · 06:24 AM

Amazon sending me hard drives… in a bag. No box, just the drive, inside an anti-static bag, inside a bubble wrap bag. At least it was a largish bubble wrap bag, so it could get folded around a few times.

Sorta like a $370 burrito.

Edit: seems to work though.

Laminar · Dec 16, 2021, 11:28 AM

I have every possible sort of Alexa notification turned off, and twice in the past week she's turned on the glowing yellow notification light on all the Alexa devices. I verbally told her to disable all notifications, and she responded by telling me to go in the app and disable notifications, which I've already done.

Similarly, I'm getting a lot of "your year in review" emails from various forums I'm a member of. In every case, I have all email notifications disabled so that I don't get junk from them, but somehow they still think it's okay to email me.

subego · Dec 18, 2021, 02:41 AM

After more than a decade of flawless performance, the most recent update to program I use for multi-room audio, Airfoil, just bricked itself. No Pandora for me.

subego · 08:30 PM

I haven’t had a chance to check it out, but I start a support ticket with the Airfoil people at around midnight, and by 2AM they had sent me a link to a beta build.

The developers, Rogue Amoeba, are really top notch.

Edit: beta works perfectly!

subego · Dec 20, 2021, 04:28 PM

Helped a friend get all her shit together to drive home for the holidays. Went along on an errand or two and she never got the car going faster than 15 miles per hour. Almost made me crawl out of my skin.

Laminar · Dec 20, 2021, 04:30 PM

Are road conditions poor? I was looking at the forecast here and lamenting the complete lack of any real winter weather before Christmas.

subego · Dec 20, 2021, 05:09 PM

It’s 40° and sunny.

I had to do the parallel parking too.

Laminar · Dec 20, 2021, 06:09 PM

One of the first times hanging out with my future wife, we pulled into a downtown area and she parallel parked quickly and on the first try.

Definite turn on.

subego · Dec 21, 2021, 03:14 PM

[Flutters eyelashes]

subego · Dec 28, 2021, 09:00 PM

Was in a minor skid today, and the traction control light started flashing at me. Never happened before.

Don’t flash shit at me when I’m in a skid.

Thorzdad · Dec 29, 2021, 12:03 AM

In my VW, the traction control light flashes when it’s working, such as sliding on wet pavement.

subego · Dec 29, 2021, 07:09 PM

That’s likely what happened here. It was while crossing over snow piles during a lane change.

subego · Jan 1, 2022, 03:50 PM

Python on my new M1 would be less a minor irritant if the shit didn’t break trying to install modules.

subego · Jan 2, 2022, 05:18 PM

More M1 follies: it won’t give me HiDPI settings when connected to my TV. Betterdummy doesn’t work either.

ghporter · Jan 2, 2022, 09:49 PM

We're struggling with our password manager on my wife's M1. Fortunately the manager works on all of her other devices, so it's pretty simple to work around, but...

Also, not so minor irritant: we had a front come through yesterday/last night with lots of wind - high speed and for extended periods. So what that did was blow in a [insert your own inappropriate euphemism for "enormous" here] of mountain juniper pollen. Mountain juniper is also known as "mountain cedar," and it's pretty and cedar-like and all, but its pollen is HORRIBLE.

Here's a tree with its pollen being blown by wind:

And what the pollen looks like magnified:

I'm not usually affected much by this stuff, but it's really kicking my butt today.

subego · Jan 3, 2022, 05:52 PM

Maybe a dumb question, but have you tried Claritin-D?