The computing stuff rant thread

[Ham]

Very nearly a whole morning (approx 0.002% of my remaining life span*) pissed up against a wall working out that one.

*Based on generally accepted actuarial values for a man of my generation.

I don't suppose Microsoft are any better with their decimal placing either, Methuselah

Even assuming 6 hours for the lost morning, that still gives something over 34 years of lurking to come. That doesn't seem excessive to me.

Yes, but you've left out the effect of forgetting to divide by 24. 

[TheLurker]

I still make it 0.002%  -  hours wasted /  (365 * 24 * estimated remaining span)  * 100 - but then I'm the bloke who when asked by the maths teacher what 3 *3 was replied, promptly, 6.  Probably just as well that I don't work in the banking sector eh?

[jsabine]

Yes, but you've left out the effect of forgetting to divide by 24. 

Yes, that would do it ...

[ian]

Oh, and Expedia. Your site never works. Ever.

Now BA have my credit card details. And probably the all blessed hackers of Mother Russia. Who are using it to buy 23-inch dildos and novichok on the DarkNet. That's going to be the credit card statement.

And in addition to not working: the cryptic 'we're sorry, this hasn't worked, why don't you try again later' which is about the most useless error message ever. I tried drinking an entire beer (a Moose Springsteen!) and it still didn't work.

And sites that make you type in all sixteen digits of your credit card number without a break. There's a fucking reason they split the number into blocks of four you numbskulls of online form design.

[Sergeant Pluck]

I think this belongs here, sort of. Courtesy of the Co-Op bank:

Please click on the 'I don't have a username' link below, if you'd like to register for online banking but are already registered for our mobile app or telephone banking.

If you would like to register for online banking but are not registered for our mobile app or telephone banking, please register for online banking here.

[Genosse Brymbo]

 

[CommuteTooFar]

i hate websites that I am happy to give a email address to that then tell me your email address is not valid. Even more annoying when I go to the website in response to a marketing email to the address the website claims does not exist.

[Gattopardo]

Laptop wireless card 'killed' by a windows update.  Ok, the card hasn't been supported since windows 8.  But it worked and now it doesn't.

Spent ages looking in to this and now it just works again 

[Mr Larrington]

Virgin Media, Lt. Col. Larrington (retd.) is paying a not-inconsiderable fee for your "Vivid 200" fibre broadbean wossname which, as the name suggests, is supposed to provide download speeds in the region of 200 Mbps.  If a Speedtest conducted at one o'clock on a Monday morning yields a maximum DL speed of 3 Mbps then your mice are not working hard enough, and if switching shit off and on again does not yield Results then harsh words will be had

[ian]

Microsoft. Honestly, do you have a team dedicated solely to annoying user experiences? I finally got the mothership to update my licence to use – drum roll – Office 2016. I download it and install mostly fine (there was some weird cryptic error when I registered it, but it claimed success after I ignored it). It doesn't offer me an option to remove Office 2011, of course, that would be too easy and as it's a Microsoft product you probably can't just dump it in the trash, though I probably should have. So I followed the instructions to remove it. Which turned out to be so thorough they removed all the Microsoft fonts we know and love (wherefore art thou, Comic Sans?).

Except it didn't, because they're still in Office, but not available elsewhere.

Some noodling and the fonts are part of the application package but not in the system fonts. Uh? Because no one would ever, ever want to use a bloody font outside of Office. Just put them with the other fucking fonts, you font fucking fuck ducks. Installed them manually.

Sheesh.

[pcolbeck]

Bugger, nested virtualization isn't supported inside Virtualbox.

[dave r]

B****r, my computer dropped the normally reliable connection to my Bluetooth speaker a few days ago and refused to connect, I tried to kill the device in the Bluetooth list and rediscover it but the computer couldn't find it, everything else, phone and tablet, is working just fine, and the speaker works with the phone and tablet. I'm told it's because of a bug in Ubuntu.

[Gattopardo]

Laptop didn't work.  Diagnosed the problem of a damaged sata drive to motherboard cable.

Now that doesn't want to work any more just green light and nothing.

So my repairing skills aren't long lasting...bugger.

[ian]

Alexa, my dear, tell me when the next trains are from the jungles of deepest Surrey to the great smoky metropolis?

Sorry, I can't do that, would you like me to read the timetable so you can play guess whether or not the train is running?

OK, Alexa arm my outside security cameras so I can be safe from bears and clowns and stuff attacking my house.

Sorry...

I'm pushing back Judgement Day a few months.

[Mr Larrington]

Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia, I am losing patience. "Update me!" say various iProducts so, rather than download 400 GB three times – once on each PC running iProducts – I select "Download Only".  Then I can, and do, copy the stuff to a network drive and it will appear in the right place on the other boxes as is by legerdemain.

Clicky clicky install install and all goes swimmingly until iTunes.  iTunes tells me it cannot access C:\Program File\iTunes, because privileges.  It has a point, because I can't access it either, and I'm an Admin.  I cancel the install, which takes ages, and check again.  Nope, still can't access it.  Do system restore.  Oh, look!  The security settings on C:\Program Files\iTunes are back to what they should be!

Try update again, one piece at a time, keeping a weather eye on the security settings.  Shortly after beginning the iTunes update, the folder becomes inaccessible.  Yes, FruitCo's update thing is FUBARing the security settings ON THE FOLDER IT'S TRYING TO INSTALL TO!

System restore.  Uninstall iTunes.  Update other FruitCo products.  Install iTunes.  Security settings remain untrammelled.

Perform updates on PC in Great Hall.  It all works.

Stop it, FruitCo!  Just fucking stop it and sort yourselves out!

[woollypigs]

uninstall iThing = life good

That said phone updated it supply of cookies to Oreo's. But decided that a few of the apps I had, I did not need anymore. So I went into play store to install it again to be told that it is installed, yet clicking open the app - nada happens. Looking in the list of apps on system, it ain't there. Uninstall app and reinstall app was the only way to get in

[ian]

Unlimited broadband. I just let all the iThings sort themselves out, they don't need me. Every now-and-again something will ask me to restart or I'll see the progress bar resolutely marching across a screen. I'm gratefully redundant. One way in which modern life doesn't actually suck.

[Kim]

Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia, I am losing patience. "Update me!" say various iProducts so, rather than download 400 GB three times – once on each PC running iProducts – I select "Download Only".  Then I can, and do, copy the stuff to a network drive and it will appear in the right place on the other boxes as is by legerdemain.

Used to be that non-sensitive things got downloaded over unencrypted http from a static URL, and the tame cephalopod in the cupboard could take care of making sure you only had to download big updates once, and make image-laden web pages load blindingly quickly, even over our-favourite-telco's wet string.

While I'm sympathetic to the principle of encrypting everything on the wire to make things difficult for The Man, it does seem like a retrograde step at times.

Clicky clicky install install and all goes swimmingly until iTunes.  iTunes tells me it cannot access C:\Program File\iTunes, because privileges.

iTunes on Windows is surely one of the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation's most effective methods of persuading people to buy a Mac...

[woollypigs]

iTunes on Windows is surely one of the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation's most effective methods of persuading people to buy a Mac...

In my experience with iTunes, I clearly do not want to get a iThing.

[ian]

Weirdly, iTunes (at least on a Mac) isn't so bad these days.

The store is still painfully slow and glitchy to download a purchase though. If I were more paranoid, I'd assume it's a purposeful nudge from purchase-and-download towards Apple Music...

[CommuteTooFar]

When I was obliged to download software from Apple when an update was available I found that sometimes the download was difficult with the graphical tool.  So I used the command line version of the tools.  (I do not remember what is was called then and do not know what it is now).  The download would then come across at expected speed.

[Mr Larrington]

Once iTunes has actually been installed I have no problem with it.  It does what I ask of it, which is provide a home for DJ Random from which he can fire musical tunes, and Sonic Youth, at my ears.  And the download part works, albeit in a slightly annoying way, in that the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia insists the files go where it, not me, want them to live.  Standard "FruitCo knows best" stuff and not as bad as Nvidia, who will happily fill your system disk with 400 GB updates which it knows full well don't support the graphics card in the PC it's downloading to.

[SoreTween]

Every time I visit the village idiot* I have to fettle his windows 10 PC.  It's a loathsome experience every time finding my way through the toytown UI to find the settings I need. And dear dog how is such a new PC so unbearably slow?
Currently trying to get Mrs Tweens Windows 10 laptop to join the whiffy on the new router.   What a loathesome experience.  After fighting through the toytown UI running at glacial speed I told it to forget the network (new router has same SSID but different password) and provided the new credentials.  Naturally, this being windows that didn't work so I tried again.  Twice.  What worked was to forget the whiffy, reboot and then providing the new credentials.  What a steaming turd pile.   

Still, the good thing about these rare excursions into Win10 is they always reinforce my resolve to complete my own transition out of M$ land by the Jan 14 2020.  A mission that is proceeding well.

* A relation - he's an idiot and he lives in a village

[ian]

Normally I celebrate the fact that Time Machine just does its stuff. You plug in a disk, click and button and mostly that's that, things back-up and if disaster strikes, a quick rummage restores what you need.

This said, I'd prefer it's minimalism not to be so minimal that it doesn't bother to tell me that the backup drive has shuffled off its mortal coil and thus has not been unduly bothered about collecting any bytes subsequently jiggled post-November 1.

[Kim]

The trick is to do something stupid on a regular basis, so your restore-from-backups process gets tested...