The computing stuff rant thread

[ian]

For reasons I thought I'd finally move over from Mail to Outlook on my mothership Macbook.

Who at Microsoft thought it was reasonable for Outlook to download a copy of every single email received or sent ever? That's over a fucking decade and umpteen GBs. And there appears to be no setting to select a time period to synchronize. I don't want a local copy of every email ever.

Swears profusely, goes back to Mail.

[Kim]

WTF on the Grauniad website is using so much processor time and melting my lapdog, hmm 

It has a network bandwidth habit too.  On several occasions I've peered suspiciously at my traffic graphs, wondered if something has been pwned and is now part of a botnet, only to discover that barakta has left some forgotten Grauniad tab open in her browser.

[ian]

Safari is always warning about Guardian pages taking up too much everything. Presumably embedded HTML5 crap.

[Feanor]

For reasons I thought I'd finally move over from Mail to Outlook on my mothership Macbook.

Who at Microsoft thought it was reasonable for Outlook to download a copy of every single email received or sent ever? That's over a fucking decade and umpteen GBs. And there appears to be no setting to select a time period to synchronize. I don't want a local copy of every email ever.

Swears profusely, goes back to Mail.

My expectations from an e-mail client are quite different between a Proper Computer and a mobile device.

As a traditional PC user, with a background in POP3, I expect all my mail to locally available on a proper PC.
That makes searching for old stuff much easier.

On a mobile device, with limited storage space, I can see why you would only want the last 50 or so e-mails, and that works well for that form factor device.

Now I'm using IMAP for everything, I like that Thunderbird on my PC has local copies of everything back to the year dot, but my mobile devices have only the recent past.

Different devices, different usage scenarios, different storage capacities.

[ian]

The mothership keeps all messages forever unless you delete them. I'm happy for them to sit on the server, but I don't really need them all on my local drive. I swear in the old days of Outlook, you could specify the period to sync. It's not just the emails, there's hundreds of thousands of attachments.

Maybe I should cmd-A and hit [delete]. It's not like I'm going to answer them.

[Kim]

For reasons I thought I'd finally move over from Mail to Outlook on my mothership Macbook.

Who at Microsoft thought it was reasonable for Outlook to download a copy of every single email received or sent ever? That's over a fucking decade and umpteen GBs. And there appears to be no setting to select a time period to synchronize. I don't want a local copy of every email ever.

Swears profusely, goes back to Mail.

My expectations from an e-mail client are quite different between a Proper Computer and a mobile device.

As a traditional PC user, with a background in POP3, I expect all my mail to locally available on a proper PC.
That makes searching for old stuff much easier.

My compromise is to have the IMAP server on the LAN with the proper PC.  So searching the archive is acceptably fast without allowing thunderbollocks to run amok on the local SSD.  The mobile devices can suck the last 50 messages up the ADSL as needed when away from home.

The real question is why Outlook doesn't allow you to choose which behaviour you would like.

[ian]

It's a bit annoying, I was mostly happy with the default MacOS Mail and Calendar which generally play inexplicably well with whatever Exchange is called these days. Calendar doesn't seem so keen to work with shared stuffs and other bits and pieces of Microsoft exotica. I'd use the online version but it's nice to have something local because I like to do some work on the train and there's one bloody Southern train from our station that has perpetually borked wifi.

[woollypigs]

Oh now win10 don't want to connect to my All in one printer to get the scanner going. Reboot gets it back, but if the pc goes into power saving mode - poof gone. Tried the pull out the USB cable to knock some sense into it, the printer starts to ring and tells me on the little information screen that there is a call coming in, yet it is not connected up to a phone line ... now where is my bat?

Oh now win10 says it have found the printer, after a reboot, and needs to download a driver. I have had this printer for 5 years and you have been connected to this system for 2 years. So how the feck can you just forget the drivers.

man I hate printers

[barakta]

Hearing aids are effectively mini computers.

This hearing aid is SHIT. It doesn't understand "switch programme" and it takes over 1-2 seconds to register at best so I'm having to press the shitty button, wait wait wait, then press again, all while someone (usually Kim) is trying to speak to me.

At least Kim understands me signing one handed insults at the fucking thing (at my head) cos she knows it is shit. At work I have to verbalise "Hang on a minute, trying to change my hearing aid programme, it's a bit slow, no that didn't work, hang on, trying again, no, third time lucky"... 10 seconds later...

*sets fire to modern shitty hearing aids*

[ian]

My mobile phone, having heard me remark that I'd buy a new phone only when the current one died, transmitted this message to Cupertino and they sent the kill code. It now does that thing where it's happily purring away with 30-ish per cent and then *blink*

I presume there's some voltage threshold and below that the phone shuts down regardless of whether there's any charge lingering in the battery.

[Kim]

Debian Multimedia:  You've upgraded libfdk-aac1 in a way that's broken chromium, and not fixed it in the time it took me to discover the problem and work out how to pin the package at the previous version.

Chromium: Refusing to start because you can't find an AAC codec library?  Really?  WTF?

Seriously, if I wanted updates that randomly broke things, I'd run Windows.

[ian]

I'd like to thank Proofpoint for protecting me from being able to reset any or my password. That's how the fucking password reset system works you clodhoppers.

[grams]

I presume there's some voltage threshold and below that the phone shuts down regardless of whether there's any charge lingering in the battery.

Phone battery power use is very spikey, so a knackered battery may sit at a reasonable voltage while idle, but as soon as the CPU kicks in to do anything and draws big watts the voltage plummets enough to kill the phone.

(some iPhones limit CPU speed when they detect a duff battery to try to prevent this, although that wasn't popular with users either)

[ian]

I presume there's some voltage threshold and below that the phone shuts down regardless of whether there's any charge lingering in the battery.

Phone battery power use is very spikey, so a knackered battery may sit at a reasonable voltage while idle, but as soon as the CPU kicks in to do anything and draws big watts the voltage plummets enough to kill the phone.

(some iPhones limit CPU speed when they detect a duff battery to try to prevent this, although that wasn't popular with users either)

It was straining to hold onto a very weak 3G signal.

Anyway, battery health says 'service' which isn't a surprise, it's an old iPhone 6 that's been used continuously since late 2014 – that's a hefty number of charge cycles.

Unless I read the internet wrong, it seems Apple replace the battery for £45, which is less than I'd imagined.

'Performance management' is what Apple call the throttling these days – you can override it in the settings.

[Jaded]

They've reduced the price of replacing the battery. It used to be c£125 I think, then £29. (for limited period)

Mine, which has a new battery about 14 months ago as the previous one had a recall) was at 50% on Saturday, then *boof* all the magic telltale things in the software say the battery is healthy. It cannot cope with a low signal and GPS stuff at the same time. Pah!

[Kim]

I presume there's some voltage threshold and below that the phone shuts down regardless of whether there's any charge lingering in the battery.

Phone battery power use is very spikey, so a knackered battery may sit at a reasonable voltage while idle, but as soon as the CPU kicks in to do anything and draws big watts the voltage plummets enough to kill the phone.

(some iPhones limit CPU speed when they detect a duff battery to try to prevent this, although that wasn't popular with users either)

It was straining to hold onto a very weak 3G signal.

There you go then.  The cellular radio is even more spiky in its current draw than the CPU is likely to be.

[Jaded]

If you are good at fiddly things you can save £20

https://eustore.ifixit.com/en/Parts/iPhone-Parts/iPhone-6s-Plus/iPhone-6s-Plus-Replacement-Battery-Fix-Kit-oxid-1.html?cur=1&lang=1

[ian]

I'm definitively not good at fiddly things. I'd just end up with bits of phone sellotaped together into a facsimile of the original. And five remaining small parts that probably served some important function but now just serve to be mildly puzzling.

Replacing the battery is surely a job for grown-ups (admittedly ones with little fingers, though not that chap, it's bad enough for everyone that he's got his own phone, he's not having mine).

[rafletcher]

Unless I read the internet wrong, it seems Apple replace the battery for £45, which is less than I'd imagined.

You didn't, they do.

[ian]

Cool, that's almost a reasonable price.

Though I might make sad eyes and see if they'll give me a discount on a new phone. That said, I'm happy with an iPhone 6 and I won't have the palaver of moving everything to a new phone (plus I still get completely free data and internet, and EE might finally notice...)

I'm surprised the battery has lasted this long tbh, like any thoroughly modern boy I wander around in the fug of electromagnetic radiation it's expected to constantly pump out.

[rafletcher]

Moving to a new phone takes about 15 minutes now using the Cloud backup/restore. And if it’s the same SIM EE will be none the wiser. That said the 6 is still a good phone.

[ian]

Moving to a new phone takes about 15 minutes now using the Cloud backup/restore. And if it’s the same SIM EE will be none the wiser. That said the 6 is still a good phone.

That almost worked, unfortunately it bleated 'wrong version of iOS' because there's just been an update. There'd be more swearing but it was a simple case of setting up the phone as a new one, downloading the update, than then restoring. That said, it would have been even simpler if it had simply offered to download the update initially. Still, worked well and even remembered which browser tabs I had open.

Yeah, the evil minions of the shiny store got their claws into me, and I wandered out with two new iPhone XRs rather than re-batteried iPhone 6s. They offered a decent trade-in for our current phones, so...

[TheLurker]

... it was a simple case of ...

This is a new definition of "simple" of which I was unaware.  Not only that but it also sounds like a dodgy bit of plot exposition from a particularly cheap and nasty science fiction "epic".  That or a late 1970s episode of Doctor Who.

[ian]

Well, it was a measure of simple, for anyone accustomed to modern hardware. It would have been simpler had it said 'oh, look a new version of iOS, let's download that' instead of giving a mildly cryptic error message. But we've been beaten into submission by technology. Anything that doesn't leave us on our knees, screaming and tearing out chunks of hair, or beating ourselves about the head with a keyboard while keening, is viewed as not actively unpleasant. We have my good friend, Finestre, The Demon of Such Things to thank for that. To think, back in the day, the Grand Council of Hell didn't think she'd have much success with her 'petty little technological torments.' Now which demon has the big house in Dress Down Friday, Hell's best suburb?

[SoreTween]

Who at Microsoft thought it was reasonable for Outlook to download a copy of every single email received or sent ever?

Someone who needs a pay rise IMO.  Having recently been issued a new laptop at work I'm going through the nauseating process yet again of finding someone in IBM support with a) sufficient clue to understands the concept 'internet not always available' and b) sufficient clue to set up Outlook 363 to download a copy of everything.

My expectations from an e-mail client are quite different between a Proper Computer and a mobile device.

As a traditional PC user, with a background in POP3, I expect all my mail to locally available on a proper PC.
That makes searching for old stuff much easier.

On a mobile device, with limited storage space, I can see why you would only want the last 50 or so e-mails, and that works well for that form factor device.

I agree with things varying but I have the reverse expectation.
A desktop just sits there attached to the power and network.
A laptop goes with me to meetings at client offices (fill in this form and wait two weeks for guest access, repeat for each building you visit).  A laptop goes with me on flights.  A laptop goes with me to places the power isn't even on yet and likely never will have internet access nor phone coverage.

The real question is why Outlook doesn't allow you to choose which behaviour you would like.

This.